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The Ring doesn't ring so well.

A couple of weeks ago, we started to watch "Lord of the Rings", but we had to stop by the time the Fellowship had gotten into the Mines of Moria. This is not a criticism of the movie. We just couldn't stand anymore that, whenever a scene involves people talking while serious background noise is going on, the dialogue is pretty much buried under. And there are many scenes like that in the Trilogy.

Someone suggested that the problem might be solved by our acquiring a more modern DVD player, as ours is a 10-year-old thing. Does that sound like a reasonable explanation to you? If so, is there a DVD player you'd recommend?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

marydell.livejournal.com

It does sound like a reasonable explanation to me. Newer DVD players can do surround sound - if you don't have surround-sound speakers, I think you can get a kit with the player and a speaker set. For SF and action movies it does make quite a difference because the voices feed through one pair of speakers and the sound effects come from a different set.

Even without surround sound speakers, a newer DVD player can probably do a better job of figuring out how to make it sound good. Hm, check and see if you're using the right sound option on the LOTR DVDs--if you don't have surround sound and it's trying to use the dolby 5.1 sound it will be bad.

From:

serge-lj.livejournal.com

Thanks. What brand do you use? Would you recommend against it?

From: (Anonymous)

It's possible that you have the DVD player setup to output surround, but are only monitoring stereo. The result would be that the dialog sent to the center front speaker would be lost, and you'd have a situation much as you describe. You should be able to select "stereo" from a menu somewhere, if this is actually the problem.

Another possibility is that your speakers are wired "out of phase" (actually polarity, but hey). This will cause stuff that's equal in both speakers (like dialog) to cancel instead of reinforce.

The Ring DVDs sounded fine and dialog-friendly on our stereo system with old DVD player, as least as far as I recall from watching them not long after release, so I wouldn't spend any money without investigating further.

--Tim W.