I don’t think missing channels get muted, they just get shared into what’s available. A 5.1 soundtrack played on a 2.1 system is going to share Centre between L and R, and put SL onto L and SR onto R. I have an old surround sound system that can’t decode the new codecs that Disney plus etc use, but the Chromecast knows this so just sends it out a 2 channel boring signal. Dialogue is fine because it just goes to the two speakers equally, rather than be cut out.
If your system is set up to output to 5.1 speakers but you just haven’t plugged in the centre speaker, then that’s a different thing and you would miss stuff, same as if you didn’t plug in the front left speaker.
When I change my reciever to 2.1 I lose all commentary on sports, since those are exclusively center channel. While researching it I found out about this other potential issue, kinda interesting actually.
Some receivers are smarter, some are dumb, so you need to make sure the APP, the TV, the Receiver, and sound bar (if used) all have the same settings, or strange things can happen, like one thinking it’s receiving 5.1, even though it’s not. Or vice versa.
Interesting, fair enough, that makes sense. So your receiver was getting a 5.1 signal, but it really did just ignore half the channels when you set it to output 2.1.
That’s not the problem I think most people here are complaining about though, which is sound mixing / dynamic range / editing making speech too quiet, rather than having the wrong settings.
I think it’s a portion of it, since depending on the mixing and the setting of the amp/reciever it could be muting the wrong frequencies since they disagree. If the audio is quiet I can change my sound field, or the speaker settings, and it can usually fix the audio, while making something else worse.
So I think the problem is people using generic settings and not fine tuning their system, and all the different potential sources with different setting and encodings make it impossible. So it’s either fix it for each source, or find a generic “okay” solution.
I don’t think missing channels get muted, they just get shared into what’s available. A 5.1 soundtrack played on a 2.1 system is going to share Centre between L and R, and put SL onto L and SR onto R. I have an old surround sound system that can’t decode the new codecs that Disney plus etc use, but the Chromecast knows this so just sends it out a 2 channel boring signal. Dialogue is fine because it just goes to the two speakers equally, rather than be cut out. If your system is set up to output to 5.1 speakers but you just haven’t plugged in the centre speaker, then that’s a different thing and you would miss stuff, same as if you didn’t plug in the front left speaker.
When I change my reciever to 2.1 I lose all commentary on sports, since those are exclusively center channel. While researching it I found out about this other potential issue, kinda interesting actually.
Some receivers are smarter, some are dumb, so you need to make sure the APP, the TV, the Receiver, and sound bar (if used) all have the same settings, or strange things can happen, like one thinking it’s receiving 5.1, even though it’s not. Or vice versa.
Interesting, fair enough, that makes sense. So your receiver was getting a 5.1 signal, but it really did just ignore half the channels when you set it to output 2.1.
That’s not the problem I think most people here are complaining about though, which is sound mixing / dynamic range / editing making speech too quiet, rather than having the wrong settings.
I think it’s a portion of it, since depending on the mixing and the setting of the amp/reciever it could be muting the wrong frequencies since they disagree. If the audio is quiet I can change my sound field, or the speaker settings, and it can usually fix the audio, while making something else worse.
So I think the problem is people using generic settings and not fine tuning their system, and all the different potential sources with different setting and encodings make it impossible. So it’s either fix it for each source, or find a generic “okay” solution.