Maybe this is just my phone (and laptop), but volume control is irritating when some tracks are configured so that I need to set the volume to 70-80% and some tracks are so “naturally loud” that the lowest setting (5% ish for my phone) is distractingly loud.
On some of my tracks (especially for the classical music ones), within the same track I need to change the volume from 20% to 80% depending on what part I am listening to if I want to hear everything without killing my ear drums.
I get that it would be difficult to do anything about this for streaming or live audio since the phone doesn’t know in advance what the input will be, but for a pre-recorded mp3 file, couldn’t my phone do some digital signal processing?
Do I just have terrible electronic items and is this an issue anyone else experiences? Ot is this problem just harder to solve than I am expecting?
This is exactly it. Well, this and I’d say the fact that modern digital volume controls evolved from previous analog volume controls where you were literally just adjusting how much the input signal was amplified.
But, back to the “this” - they have similar automatic compression options built in to a lot of AVRs too, often called something to the effect of ‘night mode’ or ‘midnight mode’, but they completely destroy the directors intention … take for example, a ‘scary’ movie with jump scares - the people are supposed to be whispering and somewhat hard to hear, making you strain to hear them, to increase the impact of the loud jump scare - if you compressed that enough (extreme example), you could probably take all the ‘scare’ right out of it. Varying volume within a single track/album/movie/show/etc., is intentional, and more often that not you would not want to compress that.
Track to track and source to source variations are I suppose largely because of a lack of any standards.