We had the neighbor’s over the other night to watch The White Lotus Season 3 – our friendly weekly neighborhood watch party and the sound quality was embarrassingly bad.
I had the sound all cranked up on my 5.1.4 Atmos system which consists of five surrounds speakers, four overhead speakers and a subwoofer. This system is the bomb when it comes to watching a Blu-Ray or 4K UHD disc like Blade Runner 2049 but sounded like complete crap when trying to stream The White Lotus on Max.
We found we had to crank up the volume and still had trouble making out the dialog. To make things worse, searching around online I found a home theater discussion talking about how great the surround sound mix is on this series. Of course that is with the upcharge to get the 4K streaming version of the service.
Meanwhile other streaming services seem to be able to deliver a higher quality of sound. For example Nosferatu on Peacock managed to have some decent surround sound. Nothing close to the Blu-ray or 4k disc level, but at least some basic surround sound.
Online discussing forums are full of people saying they either get no sound or very low sound from the Max app. The solution for many is to change the sound settings to “STEREO” or in my case to switch to “DIRECT” which removes any local processing of the signal.
Whatever Max is using to stream it’s service, the result seems to confuse soundbars and stereo systems. The result is disappointing low volume, muddy sound.