[zoluu99]

I have just bought a new mac mini and have noticed that the sound fades in and out on dvd playback. I have checked the sound on music on youtube and other apps. and the sound is fine. I have 10.6.2 with all the new upgrades. I have one week to take this back to Best Buy with no questions asked. What do you folks think I should do? Is this a known problem?

Thanks for advice
DD

[imitchellg5]

I'd take it into an Apple Store and see what they can do.

[reader50]

Does this happen on all DVDs, or just one?

Also, the DVD player's volume can be controlled from the keyboard by pressing command-up/down arrows. If you hit those by mistake while cueing back and forth (command - right/left arrows) that would run your DVD volume up and down.

[ibook_steve]

What are you connecting your mini to for sound and video and with which interfaces (optical, HDMI, etc.)? Any chance this is a copy protection issue?

Steve

[zoluu99]

I was able to fix the problem by going to the DVD player preferences and clicking on the button for "Disable Dolby dynamic range compression." This feature is supposed to decrease volume on loud passages to protect your speakers. It does too good of a job on some rock DVDs. Makes it sound like poop. Apple warns in their help section that if I disable this feature it could harm my speakers. But at least I can listen to my DVDs! Maybe this feature will improve in upgrades? I have it hooked to a new LG display and some old Yamaha computer speakers. I should upgrade my speakers. I'm going to call Apple's help number and see what they say.

[P]

Dolby digital audio has a higher dynamic range (that is, the difference between the loudest and the quietest sound it can produce) than CDs do, especially since the loudness wars began artificially reducing the dynamic range of CDs even further. This means that if you have the volume high enough to hear the voices in a quiet part, the loud noises becomes VERY loud - and, if you don't have speakers matched with your amp, you might blow out your speakers. To compensate, you can enable their "Late Night" feature, which does NOT reduce the peaks in the slightest - what it does is amplify the most quiet parts, so you don't need to keep the volume quite so high. It's meant for movies, though, so I'm not surprised that enabling it for a music DVD produces bad results

My receiver has two modes for the Late Night feature, Low and High. High sounds terrible, but Low works quite well.