SerpApi.Org
Fire TV is one of the easiest streaming setups to get running and one of the easiest to leave half-configured. Most people plug it in, get through the initial setup, and never touch the audio settings again. The defaults aren't doing you any favors. Four settings buried in the menus have a bigger effect on how everything sounds than any hardware upgrade would, and none of them are very difficult to do or require going into super secret developer menus.
Your default audio settings are probably making your TV sound worse
Change the audio format to match the speakers you actually use
Your Fire TV's audio format setting, buried in the menus, might be the single most important thing affecting how your TV sounds. It's not well known, and it's not set up as well as it could be. Right out of the box, Fire OS sets itself to "Best Available," but this setting has the Fire TV decoding all the audio itself using Dolby's MS12 software and then sending that decoded signal out to whatever you've got hooked up.
If you've got a newer receiver or a nice Dolby Atmos soundbar with eARC, then you would be fine because it gives you full uncompressed surround sound. However, if you're just using your TV's built-in speakers or a simple stereo setup, this default setting is actually working against you.
Go into your Fire TV's audio settings and change it manually based on what speakers you're actually using. If you're just running off your TV speakers, switch the setting to "PCM." This tells the Fire TV to take whatever multi-channel audio is coming in and flatten it down into a clean stereo signal before it ever reaches your TV. That downmixing process folds the dialogue from the center channel into the left and right speakers properly, so suddenly you can hear people talking again without losing the rest of the mix.
Loud background noise makes it hard to hear people talking
Turn on dialogue boost to make voices clear without raising the volume
Streaming shows these days tend to have really busy, layered sound mixes. A lot of the time, the booming sound effects, big orchestral music, and all that environmental sound design get all the focus instead of just letting you actually hear what people are saying. That is pretty annoying when you're just trying to follow a conversation, and it ends up forcing you to flip subtitles on and off constantly just to keep up with what the characters are saying.
The good news is that Amazon's Fire OS actually has a pretty smart feature built in to deal with exactly this problem. It's usually called Dialogue Enhancer or Dialogue Boost, depending on which Fire TV device or software version you've got. Go to your Fire TV home screen, click the settings gear, go into Display & Sounds, then scroll down to Audio or Advanced Audio, and you'll find the dialogue settings there.
Unlike those basic equalizer presets that just boost the 1 kHz to 3 kHz mid-range a bit, this feature adjusts the audio dynamically to do something smarter. Basically, the system looks at the audio as it's playing, picks out the speech patterns, figures out how loud the dialogue is compared to the music and background noise around it, and then adjusts things accordingly.
When you turn it on, it'll quiet down everything that isn't speech by up to 12 dB, while boosting the actual vocal frequencies by up to 10 dB. The nice part is this just makes the voices clearer; it doesn't crank up your TV's overall volume.
Action scenes will blast your ears, while whispers are too quiet
Use the volume leveler to keep the sound at a steady leveler
I've had to deal with plenty of movies and TV shows that are too free with the sound levels in the audio. There are sometimes huge swings between quiet and loud. The "Volume Leveler" setting on Fire TV is basically there to smooth that out, so whispery dialogue and big, loud action scenes both sit closer to the same volume instead of swinging all over the place.
This is just Dynamic range compression, which is constantly checking how loud or quiet the sound coming out of your Fire TV is. If something gets too quiet, it boosts it back up a bit. If something suddenly gets really loud, like during an explosion, it clamps down on it fast so it doesn't blast you.
Basically, that's why you don't have to keep grabbing the remote to turn things up to hear what people are saying and then scramble to turn it back down the second something loud happens. It also helps with those annoying moments where a commercial comes on way louder than the show, or when you switch apps and suddenly get blasted with sound.
If you want to turn this on with a regular Fire TV Stick, go to the gear icon for settings on the home screen, then go into Display & Sounds, then "Audio," and you'll find Volume Leveler tucked under the Advanced Audio section. One thing worth knowing is if you've got one of the Fire TV Edition TVs, like an Insignia or Toshiba model, it might not be called Volume Leveler at all. It's sometimes called "True Volume" instead, also somewhere in the advanced sound settings.
The picture and the sound don't always line up perfectly
Use the sync tuning tool to fix the delay for good
I hate it when the lips don't match the words, unless the show is dubbed. When that happens, a lot of people jump straight to thinking their fancy new soundbar or TV speakers must be broken, but it's usually not the speaker's fault at all. It's just how the digital signal gets processed over your HDMI cables.
In a lot of home theater setups, the video feed zips straight to your TV screen almost instantly, while the audio has to take a detour through your soundbar or AV receiver to get decoded separately. Formats like Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby Atmos are pretty demanding, and they need a lot of processing, conversion, and spatial tweaking before any sound actually comes out.
All that work takes time, so you end up with a slight delay, and if your TV is also doing its own video processing or motion smoothing on top of that, the two signals can drift even further apart.
The good news is Amazon's Fire OS actually has a built-in tool that's made exactly for fixing this. Go into your settings, then Display & Sounds, then "Audio," and look for the AV sync tuning option. It'll bring up a little bouncing ball along with a beep and a flash that are supposed to line up. What you're checking for is whether the beep happens when the ball hits the center line and flashes. If everything's synced up right, those should match perfectly.
If you notice they're off, you can nudge the sliders until the sound and the visual line up again, and that fixes the delay for good.
This won't mess up your TV
None of these changes need you to do anything other than press a few buttons. The audio format setting alone can make a noticeable difference depending on what speakers you're running. The one honest caveat is that the dialogue and volume leveling features work best on TV speakers or basic stereo setups. If you've got a high-end receiver doing its own processing, you may want to experiment before leaving everything on at once.
