What? Cant hear the voices

It is not your age.....this is a common problem with HT in my experience. Much of what you are watching on a DVD was mastered for movie theatres....i.e. for vastly expensive systems with huge dynamic range.....which is obviously why the sound has more clarity on your Vr4 SR's. (a way better speaker than your TV speakers which probably compress/distort the bass and muddy the mid range clarity as the drivers go outside their linear response region at noormal movie SPL's).

BTW: Mid range compression at proper THX movie theatre levels is extremely common even in many higher quality speakers.

I suggest you just phantom the center channel sound through the Vr4 SR's and turn down the distorted TV sound altogether.

If you want a speaker with a particularly forward and crystal clear mid range then try to audition ATC. (This is not a plug for ATC ....they well are known for their mid range clarity)

Dynamic range is what adds clarity...and you need speakers that can handle what is on a DVD soundtrack.

Again I reiterate...these sound tracks work in the movie cinema...the only reason they don't work in a home HT is due to poor quality speakers....believe me I have personal experience with both B&W and Bose systems that made voices very hard to distinguish (these were sub $2000 price range for entire set of speakers and clearly would not hold a candle to your Vr4's or a higher priced B&W such as the Nautilus)

Audio compression will help minimize the problem, but is this a solution or a band aid?

If you can't hear voice then something is wrong with your speaker quality or you are not properly using the phantom function to send center channel info to your main speakers (as you have no dedicated center channel).

Built in speakers in most TV's are NOTORIOUSLY bad....they are usualy boomy in the bass and suffer from mid range compression (all in order to sell in the two minute demo sales floor test - loud sells - so engineers design a TV that requires you to significantly jack up the volume to hear the voice and that way they sell more TV's than a competitor with an accurate sounding TV that is all too clear at lower levels! BTW this same technique is also used to sell speakers.....jack up the bass and the treble and kill the mids....actually easy to do even a speaker with "flat response" may have these features built in...all they do is narrow the mid range dispersion and use a low cost design that compresses the mid range at higher volumes...in the shop demo you tend to turn up these speakers louder than you would a more balanced design)