[steven]

Yea dirtyroboto, I'm into sound recording very much. I don't claim to have like super good hearing, but I think I've learned to hear more detail than what is probably comfortable. Compressed audio does often wash out ambient sounds... it also seems to occasionally bring up those ambient sounds to unnatural levels (which is like bringing up the noise floor in a weird kind of way). Either way, there are certain aural cues that people are used to hearing in the natural world that just get obliterated on Japanese TV programs. All that noise and sound just makes it hard for me to even stop and think for a second so I can't stand it. Coincidentally, a lot of Japanese pop music is over compressed in my opinion as well. Sometimes really good songs just get wrecked.

And combining what you and Nyororin said-- the frequency of the TV sound (which because of the speakers is limited) can really get to me too. It's like only having tweeters or something. That mid-upper range only business can be fatiguing. I'm getting a new TV soon and I will definitely connect some speakers to it (and new TV's seem to have a lightpipe output for connecting digitally through lightpipe).

Dirtyroboto, do you happen to live in Japan?