WMC Audio problem - still stumped

[trainman261]

Hi all,
Maybe I'm just blind and I missed it, who knows... The problem is a problem I've been reading about a lot without finding any solutions - that of WMC not pumping out the volume it could. It only uses about half the volume available (that is, if you look at the volume mixer, the green bar doesn't go above around half), and that regardless of whether it's using its own codec or an external audio codec (it even has this problem with the sample "wildlife" video). When I'm playing music, this isn't a problem - on the other hand, that is processed by the Windows Media Player process, so it makes sense that this would be unaffected. This doesn't seem to be a problem with the specific installation, because when I upgraded to an SSD recently, I did a reinstall of Windows, and the problem remained.
A couple of things I've tried:
- setting Auto Volume in DVD settings and in TV settings
- messing around with the exclusive mode settings on my sound card
- messed around with just about every other setting I could find on my sound card
- messed around with other settings I don't remember about now
One thing I've constantly come across on on Google is to enable volume normalization - which, yes, does boost the volume, but makes everything the same volume level, and then when I play music, it sounds terrible, because there's no contrast between loud and quiet parts anymore. Also, while it's something I might be ready to live with for movies, it still does flatten out the sound levels, which is not something I'm particularly fond of - and I can't be constantly switching it on and off for videos and music. Other programs (e.g. Windows Media Player, Kodi) have no problem fully using the available volume. Obviously they don't always use top volume (for instance in quiet scenes), but in loud scenes, the "green bar" does hit the top every once in a while.
I've looked around for too many hours to count trying to find a solution to this problem.
In case it's relevant, I'm on a ThinkPad X230 tablet, with Realtek HD Audio (when I come home I pretty much just hook the whole thing up to the TV). There is no difference in the problem, whether I use classic mode (one stream for both computer speakers and "headphone jack"), multi-stream mode (two different streams for the two - much preferred because of other things) or whether I plug the speakers I use into the TV, so that the audio goes over HDMI.
Could anyone point me to where someone has a solution to this problem? (Or is this an unsolveable problem? I really hope not...)

[adam1991]

When this happened to me, it turned out to be operator error. I have HDMI going to the TV, and digital audio out to a ZVox system. Turned out I had Output Leveling turned on in the ZVox system. Turned that off, and all was well again.

You talk about Auto Volume and "volume normalization"--those are the same concepts.

Eliminate such audio processing first. Might not be obvious at first.

[trainman261]

Thanks for the help.
I don't have any system in between my computer and the speakers, my speakers are plugged directly into the headphone jack, so it can't be anything there. For that audio output I've also selected "disable all sound effects" (because it was doing some audio levelling if I didn't have that selected). Also, I just checked in WMC, and auto volume is disabled in both the TV and DVD settings.
Another something interesting: I thought I might try making WMC use the ffdshow codec, where I can boost the master volume up to 300% - my thought was I might be able to compensate for it like that - but then it boosts then clips it to 50% of the set volume (that is, if the total volume is set to 100%, including WMC in the mixer, the "green bar" only ever goes to 50%, even when the master volume in ffdshow is set to 300%). Weird.
EDIT: I also tried switching off the setting to turn down the volume by 50% when an incoming call is detected, to no avail.