[Richard Fairbanks]

You are confusing Dolby's dialog normalization with compression/limiting. The dialnorm parameter tells a Dolby decoder how much overall volume to play back with. It is not any form of compression. I suggest you scour this forum and the Dolby site for information on metadata with the Dolby Digital stream. There have been a number of threads on dialnorm here this past year. There are a lot of metadata parameters that can be messed with and it is confusing at first.

"Better to woodshed now and understand forever, than to muck up and suffer forever."