Audio quality on "On Demand" Movies only during explosive scenes dull / muted

[canonian]

During exciting explosive scenes with On Demand movies the audio becomes dull and not full of life.  It sounds great during dialog and musical scores however when there is something loud it simply dampens as if some sort of sound equalization is going on to keep the audio track at one volume.  Watching the same movie on Disc the audio is simply stunning and exciting scenes rock the system as it should.  This happens on two different boxes in the house whose receivers are both Yamaha but different models.  Living room is the main DVR Media center and Basement the smaller slave box.  I have tried all three Dynamic Range audio settings, however “none” sounds the best by far during normal dialog / non action scenes.  Everything is going though HDMI from the cable box to the Yamaha receiver, then via HDMI to the TV. Cable box is set to fixed audio, Surround, Dynamic range "none".  Receiver is set to straight audio and is showing a 5.1 surround sound when the movie plays.  Both systems have at least one 15” Sub and with Blu Ray, DVD, Netflix and Amazon the audio is significantly louder with much more depth and range, the kind of earth shaking audio quality with crisp highs and sub terrain lows one would expect from a large mid range surround sound system.

I unplugged the slave box to reset it, still not luck.  TV stations likfe TBS, FX have much more audio punch and are not affected by this audio equalization during exciting / explosive scenes.

Last movies rented were “Deadpool” and “The 5th Wave”

Anyone else having a similar issue or better yet a solution?

[kmf11]

I have the exact same problem with the audio. There almost seems to be an audio limiter applied to loud scenes like you say "canonian". Also for me the sound gets very loud if there is just ambience audio in the scene and no dialogue or music or sfx at all. Doubt it will ever be addressed. I don't rent movies "on demand" anymore because of this very annoying issue.

[CRobGauth]

Never have had that issue myself.

[Whocares21]

It seems like myself and others are still having this issue and Verizon doesn’t care. I’m guessing most users don’t notice, it only seems to be noticed by audiophiles and home theater enthusiasts, so it isn’t a priority for Verizon to fix. Additionally, most teir one support at Verizon probably don’t even know what audio limiting and compression are. They are only going to reset your box for you. Verizon on demand has hands down the worst audio of any streaming service. Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes all sound and work fine - using the same FiOS bandwidth. There is really no excuse for the audio to be this bad when every other service can get it right. 

Live TV, and when the DVR records and plays back live tv content, it sounds fine, so that tells me it’s an issue with the source audio. 

There is a whole thread about it in another forum. 

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/100-digital-recorders-pvrs-general/2319217-verizon-fios-ondemand-audio...

[DennisB43]

Theyre doing this on purpose "forced compressed audio" because if the sound was blu-ray quality or 4k quality then those sales would hurt bluray/4k dvd sales if people only purchased movies through on demand. If this can be proven theyll owe people money

[LawrenceC]

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