Question about sound levels

[MouseRider]

When it comes to the center channel, as cawgijoe described, there is a situation in Dolby encoded materials called "Dialog Normalization" which sometimes can make matters worse.

Dolby, in the wisdom, decided (they do have their reasons but you can agree or disagree with it) to apply a -4db attenuation to the dialog soundtrack.

Due to that, there will be instances that people say that they can't hear the dialog and turn up the volume then something explodes and the whole neighborhood wakes up.

What you can do here is increase the center channel by 4db, so calibrate to 79db instead of 75db, for those Dolby stuff with dialnorm and you'll nullify it.