Hi there,
I'm trying to rig up an audio solution for my mother's / stepfather's lounge TV system. My stepfather has bad hearing loss, mum's hearing is great. At the moment, I'm feeding movies into the TV with an HDMI-based media player. There's no sound compression on the media player, but there is on the (overkill) amp I gave 'em.
First, I compress all audio with the amp. For my mother, TV / media-player output goes into the amp's AUX input and out of a decent 2.1 speakers. For my stepfather, I'm routing the OPTICAL output of the TV / media player into the OPTICAL input on the amp via the HDMI ARC function, then sending that to a separate output which goes to the Sennheiser RS 120 wireless headphones; these headphones also have a dedicated volume knob, which is a handy.
They're moving into a much smaller house and are looking for a minimal TV setup. I'd like to ditch the (enormous) amp altogether, but I'm not sure of what to get instead. They both hate the high dynamic range of many movies, e.g. whisper-quiet dialogues with neighbour-alarming shootouts, so a compressor's a must. I'm thinking I might be able to feed a single TV output into something like a Behringer Xenyx Q502USB mixer which has a dedicated (albeit single-knob) compressor and multiple outputs.
Alternatively, I could get a better media player with compression options (RPi 3 w/OSMC or similar?) for about the same money, but this wouldn't compress the TV audio.
I'm wondering if there's some super-simple solution I'm missing or if anyone has any other suggestions?
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regards,
j.