Within Kodi I use audio Volume Amplification (Audio menu from the OSD when you pause a video) to improve the vocals and speech in movies. -10 limits the volume of big loud explosions and +15 amplification improves the vocals so you can actually hear more easily what is being said. Works really well, but Kodi must be set to process the audio for these options to be available. If the audio is being directly passed through to a receiver without any Kodi decode to PCM then these options will be greyed out and not available.
Since my receiver is not EARC compatible I can’t send lossless PCM 5.1 or 7.1. Bummer. I use the AC3 Transcoder to get around the issue and send surround audio with Volume Amplification applied that way. Works really well when the source is NOT AC3. Kodi forces us to perform direct pass through for AC3! How can we turn direct AC3 pass through off AND continue to do AC3 transcoding?
My audio system does have a night mode which is supposed to do the same sort of thing as Kodi Volume Amplification, but it sounds really terrible to the point of being completely unusable. I have also tired another Kodi option called “Sync Playback to Display” which forces audio sync and therefore Kodi audio decode of source. It gets AC3 to AC3 transcoding working with Volume Amplification but causes new issues with the video which becomes jerky and difficult to watch.
I feel problem free AC3 to AC3 transcoding is only a millimeter away and would be well worth the small effort required to add a simple menu setting option to allow us to engage it. Any help or ideas anyone?