Emby Theater does not downmix Surround to Stereo when direct playing. This causes horrible audio when playing it back on Stereo only.

[Mkilbride 76]

I thought it was just my rips or something, as I switched to a Laptop recently, and was using Theater VS the Android App on my Tablet.  The audio sounds horrible and overblown, and I have to turn Volume down to like, 8% or else it'll destroy my headhpones / ears.

 

Opening it open in an external MediaPlayer like MPHC, it downmixes the audio to Stereo and I use around 30-40% volume, it sounds excellent. I was shocked.  I could not find an option to find it to downmix stereo when direct playing. Even if I force a transcode, the audio still sounds really weird for some reason. 

 

Also I noticed that Emby Theater in the Microsoft store(which I'm using on my Laptop because it allows you to download an entire folder instead of one episode and also play downloaded files offline, unlike the normal Desktop one), has an entirely different interface than Emby Theater for desktop. It looks just like Emby Server's UI.  There's no option for an External Player even. It's really weird.

[Carlo 4330]

They are two different apps.

When using Theater and plugging in headphones have you checked your windows settings to see the system has switched from speakers to headphone setting?
It may not have done this automatically for you and could cause the issues you notice.

[Luke 37179]

The store app is using the stock windows video player and this handles audio output for us.

The desktop app has a custom player embedded and as a result supports more options.