Cord-Cutting, Or How to Stream your Way to Success

Mr. K

There are a number of things that can be causing it, but in general you want to make sure that your receiver is receiving a "direct" input and outputting it as is. Many many many people use something like a "Cinema" setting on their receiver (because they don't know any better, and assume it is the right thing to be doing), which jacks up certain audio ranges and reduces others to supposedly give you a better "movie" experience. If you have your speakers set up correctly and at least did the basic calibration where you put a microphone in your viewing spot and it generates sounds one speaker at a time and then adjusts volumes to make it so you hear them all at the appropriate levels, you should never have to use a pre-made sound profile. It should be recorded properly and output properly "as is" without any of that extra fluff. I'm not saying that every movie actually is done properly, because they aren't, but in theory that's how it should work. I always laugh when some salesman tries to sell me on the 47 sound profiles that I will never use.

If you've done all of that, and certain movies are still coming out with the dialogue too quiet, you should be able to just jack up the center channel a bit until the voices are loud enough, since that's where almost all dialogue is output.

I just realized that you never actually said what your speaker setup was. Do you have separate speakers, or are you playing sound through the TV? If separate speakers, what I said above should apply. If through the TV, still turn off any post-processing in the receiver, but then manually adjust the center channel to be higher, and it should bump it up when it is all combined together and pushed through the TV speakers.

If none of that works, or doesn't apply to your setup, post more specifics and we'll try to help.

Yeah, no point in spending a lot of money if you just need a switch. And just buy another one in a few years if it happens to go bad (which it probably won't). Netgear makes decent cheap switches, since you have a Netgear already, but the brand really doesn't matter. You already know about the gigabit part, so that's all you really need to pay attention to.