Q I have a high-def TV with HD cable service. I recently bought an iLive 3.1 Channel Home Theater Bar Speaker. It looked simple to set up and has an iPhone dock (the two reasons why I chose the product), and it was inexpensive. But I use an HDMI cable from the cable box to my TV, and it looks as if I would have to give that up and set up everything through the sound bar with old-type RCA cables. This sounds like a step backward.

Would the sound bar setup give me more sound? Recently, I could hardly hear the words in a movie. For example, a movie on OnDemand had rain, and I couldn't hear the dialogue for all the rain.

A This is a question I often receive from readers watching Blu-ray or DVD movies.

You have problems with dynamic range. Unless the volume is the same as the movie theater, the sound effects can drown out the voices. Effects are recorded at louder levels than the dialogue, so when a movie is played at normal volume in a home, many people find it hard to hear the actors.

You might be able to fix the problem without using the sound bar. Check your cable box for a Dynamic Range Control (DRC) setting in the audio menus. This will equalize the sound between the sound effects and the voices. The same setting is found in most DVD and Blu-ray players, too.

The sound bar will give you more sound, although it might not solve the problem unless you play it louder than you play the TV. If you decide to use the sound bar, keep the HDMI connection between the cable box and the TV. Just use two cables, one to the TV and one to the sound bar. Your sound bar has a miniplug jack, which is not likely to be present on your cable box.

To connect the cable box and speaker, get an RCA audio-to-miniplug cable and connect the red and white RCA outputs on your cable box and the plug to the sound bar. The cable box might have a volume control, so be sure to adjust it to about 75 percent while turning the TV volume to zero. This will send a strong signal to the sound bar, which you can fine-tune using the sound bar's volume control.

The best solution (and most expensive, of course) would be to buy an HDMI audio receiver and a good-quality surround-sound-bar speaker. Such a system can be built for about $500 to $600. So if you want to upgrade the sound quality and add surround while eliminating the problem, that is the way to go.

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