Do you mean 3.1 db? The project is a concert DVD. Do the instruction manual covers this?

No, "-31." It's a setting called "Dialog Normalization."

As I understand it, this is/was an attempt by Dolby to make sure that the "average listening level" for different material was the same. Have you ever listened to a program on the AM radio band, and then switch to the FM band, only to discover that you had to turn up the volume quite a bit? It's because the AM folks use a lot of compression, so the average volume level is much higher than with FM.

The Dolby people are trying to do the same thing by letting you set the output level. Unfortunately, the result seems to be that a lot of DVD stuff is much too quiet. Setting the level at -31 means that Dolby will not reduce the output level at all. Setting the level at, say, "-27" means Dolby would reduce the output by 4db (31-27=4).

Where does one make this setting of -31db?

All of this only applies IF you are using ac3 encoding for the DVD soundtrack.
When you go to render as ac3:
Custom>Audio Service Dialog Normalization
Set this to -31dB

Then Preprocessing Line Mode Profile set to None, same for RF Mode Profile.


The correct way to do this from what I've learnt is to open the soundtrack in SoundForge and use that to get the RMS value of the soundtrack and use that as the Dialogue Normalization value.

That seems to give consistency between tracks that had various amount of cimpression to start with. However the output from the DVD players still seems down a lont compared to using PCM audio.

I'm going to get a high end meter to put on the output of the DVD player just to check what is going on.