New 5.1 mix too loud, weirdly balanced?

[Captain Khajiit]

I don't use Vegas, but there's a good thread here on dialog normalization with input from Vegas users.

[thebutcher]

Thanks I'll check that out. (but good God, does that seem complicated! haha)

[geminigod]

For certain yours sounds louder because the original DVD audio was AC3 audio with dialogue normalization settings that you lost when you extracted to wav files. I wrote up a whole guide for this some time back... lol. nevermind. CK beat me to it with his link above.

Unfortunately it is a bit of a confusing topic. Keep in mind that although I advocated pretty strongly in that guide to use the film light dynamic range compression setting, many viewers will probably prefer the tighter range with "film standard." It is a subjective matter of hardware and listening environment as to which setting is preferable.