High ceilings muffling sound

[wakkoguy]

I recently moved and in our new house the speech for movies and tv shows sounds muffled and sometimes I can’t understand what is being said. Also, the action sequences or music is highly amplified verses speech only scenes. Our setup is a Vizio tv with an rca sound bar. In our former home this wasn’t a problem. However I’m wondering if the problem is due to the 18ft high ceilings we have now. Besides the sound bar not being the highest quality what can I do to help our audio situation?

 

[darkbreeze]

Adding a couple of quality satellites or a better soundbar with more focused direction sound in the vocal ranges might be the best idea, but I'm also wondering if there is a change in distance from where you used to sit in relation to where the soundbar is, and how far away you are now?

So, aside from having higher ceilings, which obviously CAN affect sound, are you further away from the soundbar than in your previous dwelling?

Also, I've asked another member who is pretty experienced with sound hardware to maybe make a few suggestions or offer some observations.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

The size of the room shouldn't make sound that was once clear muffled. Does the soundbar have different sound modes on it? Are you using the same connections as the old house?

 

[darkbreeze]

That's kind of what I was thinking. In fact, a smaller room should make the sound muddier if anything. Large rooms normally amplify, BUT, if the wrong frequencies are being amplified I guess it could tend to blend out the vocals which are usually a fairly narrow band of harmonics.

Sound modes, maybe. I know some of these only use the center channel for vocals, so if the mode in your settings got changed to a mode that is different than what your soundbar supports, could have almost removed the vocals altogether.

Are you using AV reciever to send sound to the soundbar or just straight from the TV?