from the sound designer:
Some of what you are describing is by design. For fanfares and dialog to be heard they have to turn down the music. Otherwise they would be masked. A coin-op mix does this more aggressively than a mix for a home video game. Why? Video games are typically experienced in a quiet environment. Soft sounds can be heard. A stack of sounds in the mix can be teased apart by your ears. Pinball machines are experienced in public spaces where the ambient sound masks any 'soft sounds'. You just don't hear them. So if you are to hear the music when there are no pinball event going on it needs to be loud. Then something happens. You want to hear the fanfare, you have to hear the callout. The music gets attenuated by a significant amount. This is ducking. The music is brought back before the callout is over in a way that is subtle as possible and not distracting.

Pinball machines also make loud mechanical sounds that mask soft and subtle sounds, even in a quiet space and the only machine being played. So the mix is designed to survive the challenging environment which is most common.

Every fanfare and callout in a project like The Hobbit has 'ducking' behavior. It is a compromise for a less than ideal listening environment. For a given sound asset it is possible that the six parameters that define the ducking behavior are in error. There are thousands of sound assets in The Hobbit and I have been known to make mistakes. Recently, I reviewed all the sound assets looking for these mistakes (with the aid of better diagnostics provided by Ted). Some errors were found and some asset definitions were tuned up.

In your example, regular sound effects (spinners and pops) and music are attenuated in favor of the fanfare which is Smaug's death sequence, which should be very loud and you should not have noticed that I lowered the volume of the music. If Smaug's death sequence is not center stage then there is a problem... I will review this.

These changes will be made available in a future update.

The Hobbit is also a most challenging project for sound. The epic music created by Two Steps From Hell is already very dense and full. If a player is to notice the fanfare and callout that go with a scoring event I have to carve out a sonic space for them and this will be a bit rude, but so was the interaction (the ball is wild) that caused it.

I'm glad that you commented on this, it shows that you are listening and that you care.

ddt