question about getting English audio track in DVD player settings

[jimdagys]

I have noticed this problem before on certain players when playing certain DVDs. ( I am in China and I am talking about players and DVDs that are sold here.) The problem is, some DVDs when I try to play the English audio track, there is no voice. (There is background music and singing, but no voice. The Chinese audio track, when selected, works fine.) The same DVD played on another player will usually work fine. I thought the DVD player was defective, but many DVDs will work fine on the player. I found another DVD player that had the same problem. This time I was able to solve the problem. (See screenshot). It seems like the default factory setting is Downmix >Off. With this setting, some DVDs will not have the English voice. If you change to Downmix>Stereo, then all the audio tracks work fine. My question is, what is "Downmix" and why when that is turned off does it turn off the English voice on some DVDs?

[mats.hogberg]

Downmixing is when the DVD has 5.1 (6 channels) audio which the player will convert to stereo, ideally using info from all 6 channels.
When you don't downmix, and don't have a 5.1 audio system, obviously (didn't know this!) you get only some audio channels from the 5.1 mix, probably front left & right (I guess it depends on how you've hooked the audio up) and the speech may be in the front center channel only.
This is just an educated guess, but not that unlikely scenario.

/Mats