Thank you very much for the detailed response. Yes, my room acoustics are definitely the biggest unaddressed problem, and it’s likely to stay that way (bad corners, smallish nook in a weird-shaped medium room, large hard reflective parallel surfaces, you name it). The most likely way out of that hole, for me, is to build a new room designed for movie playback from the start – and that’s honestly not very likely.
It’s good to hear that subwoofer calibration seems to be a perennial problem for everyone. It was a little annoying to fix one thing only to discover another, but it was also a learning experience, and now I know a little more about how these things work.
Yes, I do always listen at lower-than-reference, and that’s really the source of lots of problems, from the Fletcher-Munson curve to dialogue intelligibility. My receiver does have a night mode, but it only works for certain types of audio tracks (DTS, I think), and I find it compresses the dynamics a little too much for my tastes (it’s probably designed for listening at much quieter levels, and is only on/off, not adjustable), so I never went too far down that road. I’m not sure about dynamic EQ, so that’s definitely something for me to look into longer term.
So far the 1.5dB boost to the center has been going okay – a little less riding the volume button (not gone though), without any noticeable ill effects. Certainly it depends on the mix, though, and I’m trying to keep the amount of the boost well under 3dB to avoid surprises (centered loud SFX, etc). It will probably take many tests before I’m certain I’m comfortable with it. And if it all goes to hell, I’ll knock it back down to even with the other channels and ride the remote some more.
And thanks for the scene lists. I haven’t had the chance to listen to any of these in 5.1, and I’ll definitely pay attention. I just kinda wanted to iron out all of the major gremlins first before I did that. Although I didn’t come right out and say it, your audio mixes have become the definitive Star Wars audio experience for me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. So thank you very much for that as well.