Something is terribly wrong with the audio
I am sorry not to be able to be more specific, but basically I have noticed since a few version ago (I think maybe 1 or 2 but I can't be absolutely certain) that when I play music (from a website or normally mp4) in VLC Media Player that there is something terribly wrong, it just sounds different, and is far less enjoyable.
It is almost as though either the voice and the more background music have been merged, or at the instruments are actually sort of on top of the voice in a strange sort of way.
If I want to enjoy it at all I find myself either having to focus and the music or the voice, but the voice is almost lost in the music as the instruments seem to be on top of and to almost override the sound of the voice.
This didn't used to be the case, I also remember the music I listened to (from a CD) having multiple layers, but now they are either in the wrong order or sort of meshed together.
I am really sorry not to be able to be more specific, but I'm really confused as to what the problem is. It's just that I can't hear the music properly any more and as it was intended. And something just really drives me crazy about how the audio works now.
And it's not just my hearing, YouTube still works fine as before, and in fact my little portable Walkman is actually now better than VLC. Which is utterly ridiculous, but I'm actually favouring it now over your product. All the other sound players seem to work in the expected way so I assume that this is a bug or just some strange new change you have made. I tried enabling and playing around a bit with the Compressor and that actually managed to make it sound a little bit better, but still not the same as before.
I have Arch Linux on a Lenovo B590 and VLC Media Player version 2.2.7. GNOME 3.26.3 and Wayland. Kernel version 4.14.3.
Although I do notice it a bit and some of the sound is different, with music that doesn't have vocals it is more bearable to listen to even if it still just doesn't sound quite right.
If there has been a change recently to the audio in this way which was intentional then I would hope that there is at least a way in the settings of reversing this that you would let me know of. But given that no other media player I have come across has this problem (although being slightly worse quality in other ways than VLC) I would consider this likely to be a bug or regression.
But just to make it clear, this is making VLC utterly unusable for me, which is quite sad given that in other senses the audio quality is usually much better than other players and the large support for especially proprietary sound compression algorithms is very useful. So it's really quite sad and annoying especially given that now I need to replace the batteries for my Walkman which just died.
As requested I have added a log of the output from vlc -vvv and me trying to play a disc.