One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog.
Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the volume low and turn on subtitles--easy but shitty solution.
Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie. Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
There's an article that's been floating around that notes this phenomenon started after Nolan's movies became the style to emulate, and there are various sound engineers who state they would like to do what you want but they have to produce what the paying entity asks for. Someone should feel free to link it here - I'm mobile at the moment so can't dig it up.
But anyway, I just wanted to jump in and say... all the time on this site we see programmers complaining about management/etc forcing things to happen that you don't want happening. Sound engineers may be in a similar boat here. ;P
I had this issue recently watching Rings of Power, so much so that I have to keep the remote nearby to change every few minutes. Dialogue volume is so low you have to turn it up, then action scenes happen and the house is shaking.
I have also been doing this for years already. I only watch with subtitles -- no subtitles, no movie -- but I still like the dialogue to be audible without explosions bothering my neighbours.
One of the reasons why I bought an Apple TV was the ability to pair it with my airpods. Makes is super convenient to hear everything if you live in an apartment, also some shows take advantage of the spatial audio which is neat if you don't have a proper sound setup.
I still turn on subtitles tho. On that front I've been noticing some subtitles will not match the english dialogue at all. This is noticeable on the Netflix shows Cyberpunk Edgerunners and Aggretsuko. I'm guessing these shows had their scripts written in non-english languages and that was what the translation teams worked with.
I don't remember the exact lines but I do remember them different enough where you can tell the translations were "strict" whereas the dialogue was more "natural" sounding if that makes sense.
> some subtitles will not match the english dialogue at all
I have the same issues when watching shows and movies translated into German. Trying to improve my level of the language, but with both the dubbed soundtrack and the subs turned on almost every line of dialogue differs between the two. I assume it's because the subtitles generally reflect the original script very closely but the dubbed version requires more rewriting to match the sounds to the lips.
I have this in Spanish and it's frustrating. I assumed that at some point it was subtitled by one group and then later maybe dubbed by another company. I know in places like Italy, most foreign things are dubbed, and in other places in latin america most things are subtitled at least and dubbed second which leads me to this theory. But really I have no clue. A quick google search turned up the first result talking about your idea of matching the lips better and also this "Translators/subtitlers are often given scripts which don’t match exactly what was shot. The subtitling team often has no contact with the sound team, so they may have two different translations. "
German is a bit of a special case. I'm not German, just a learner of the language, but I've noticed they often change the perfekt tense into präteritum. I assume this is because it tends to be shorter than the more commonly spoken perfect tense and is, of course, understandable for Germans, but not so great for language learners.
I mostly watch native German content if I can, not dubbed. There might be additional oddities that you run into with the dubbing for the reasons you mention.
There are also separate devices that take an audio feed from the TV/monitor and feed it to (multiple) bluetooth earbuds. Very nice for viewing after the rest of the family has gone to bed.
Good to know! I love this feature a lot and only thought apple did it. Does it also work for game consoles too? Like playing switch on the tv but feeling audio to your earphones?
It's weird to me to hear people talk about this as a feature because I've always just had a computer hooked up to my TV and I can use whatever audio output I want, headphones, Bluetooth, you name it
It does for ps5, but only if you use Airpods Max (with a lightning to 3.5mm cable) or any other headphones that support a 3.5mm jack. It is actually rather convenient, because you plug into into the front middle bottom of the gamepad, so the cable doesn't get in the way of anything. No bluetooth, unfortunately, unless you are using a 3.5mm bluetooth adapter.
Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.
It’s honestly ridiculous how bad the stereo (aka what 99% of viewers will experience) mixes are.
The explosions can be heard by my neighbors yet I can barely hear the dialogue at the same volume.
Find myself basically doing half the mix work myself with the volume control. Too many audiophiles in the production chain focusing on something that barely matters at the expense of most viewers.
Theory: Because distribution companies for movies made having DTS/Dolby Atmos/Whatever mandatory in the theater, sound engineers primarily focus on that because that takes 99% of the time. Because theaters with just optical stereo (yes I'm aware most theaters use digital distribution and projectors now, that just hammers home the point) aren't really a thing any more they don't really bother optimizing it because "nobody will hear that anyway". Then when the film goes to home distribution the distribution company takes the automatic downmix that is the existing stereo track for the optical stereo on a print and use that because they don't want to second guess the sound engineers or the director.
Long theory short: it's the same reason the Beatles mono album versions sound a ton better than the stereo versions, because that was the optimized version because that's what people listened too at the time. Sound engineers aren't being paid to optimize the stereo or even 5.1 versions of the audio, only the theater version in whatever multi-channel standard is popular at the moment, so they don't bother they let the standard downmix stand.
Yeah but this is 2022 are there even movie theaters anymore? The box office sales are deep in the red and many theaters are going bankrupt. Most of What I watch are tv shows
> Yeah but this is 2022 are there even movie theaters anymore?
My uninformed and probably stupid thoughts:
Hollywood was doing some amazing movies in the 90ish (think Seven, The Matrix, Requiem for a Dream etc). It was a mix of new and established players that were allowed to innovate and be creative. Then Hollywood became more risk averse, I assume because sales were unpredictable and production companies wanted guarantees similar to other industries' large investments. So they started recycling ideas, produce sequels and trading IP rights for dudes in specifically colored spandex suits, which came with a guaranteed fanbase that would watch anything with the brand. This eventually became the MCU-type of crap where everything is a 4th wall joke packed with references to current events, leading to a shelf life less than a year and plots became an afterthought. The sales mindset went as far as putting stuff in the movie for the sake of producing a compelling trailer. At the same time TV was taking the Hollywood's lunch money, but for some reason they doubled down on the approach and blamed streaming for their failures.
The issue isn't the format though, or that everyone has Netflix on their microwave display now. There are still great movies today, and if you get a chance to watch one in a good theatre it's a mesmerizing experience. Me and my partner watched The Joker, 1917 and Dune in Alamo Drafthouse (a theater that has zero-tolerance to texting/talking and serves food & drinks). It's an experience that trumps even great TV shows, when done right. It's just sad that it's so rare.
People have been saying cinema is dying since Netflix took off. It's not true and still isn't true. Movies continue to set box office records.
Covid caused a lot of smaller cinemas and chains high in debt to shut. But a lot of them are still going.
Cinemas are pivoting more to the luxury experience rather than just being the place you watch new movies. So they will get bigger screens, better projectors, better audio, etc. It's already started near me.
I mean that works for the theater companies but itv doesn’t really generate more revenue for studios. Their audience is shifting to the home experience
What a travesty it must be to realize your personal behavior has no bearing on the rest of what the public is doing. Movies are doing pretty well still. Lots of people are still going out, but there are still some trailing pandemic effects. Still, it's really not that far off from pre pandemic, especially when there is a big marvel / franchise film
I like both the big screen and the small screen. Sometimes, a 21" 1080p display or an iPhone at home just doesn't compete with a proper cinema experience.
And before someone says "go build yourself a home cinema": this is the UK. There's no such thing as "free space" in most homes.
What is your setup like? I feel like your comment better describes a problem with subwoofers. I've had plenty of enjoyment from bass throughout my life, but I still don't see the need for a sub anywhere near watching TV or movies. Never mind the related issue of highly-resonant perfunctory ones bundled with cheap consumer gear.
Just the other day I was helping a relative who had gotten a soundbar because her TV's speakers broke. She was complaining the sound carried too far to other rooms. I found the equalizer settings and turned down "woofer" which seemed to help, but then I read the manual that it only applied to an external subwoofer so I was left wondering if it was the placebo effect. Turns out there was a wireless subwoofer placed some distance away. I showed her the equalizer settings if she wanted to turn it down even more, and told her she could also just unplug the subwoofer if she wanted. To her, the inclusion of that box was actually an anti-feature.
And for other frequencies, I'd say middle-cost "prosumer" gear generally exacerbates dynamic range problems, being decent at low levels but distorted at higher levels. My Thinkpad speakers sound like crap all the time, and my receiver+speaker setup handles higher volumes without sounding louder due to distortion.
I mean they do, I purposefully select stereo on Netflix, but I get the feeling the sound engineers don't change it and just hammer the 5.1 down in a way that sounds bad.
Maybe when downmixing it to stereo. If you play it on a real 5.1 system (not a soundbar or other "Dolby Atmos" gimmick with less speakers) your dialogues will come out of the dedicated center speaker which will make it easier to follow. (most home cinema receivers even have a 'boost dialogue' function if you want to know what's happening in the latest Nolan film...)
Can you recommend a good explanation of the different types, how they are recorded encoded etc.? From a naive sonar perspective it seems like two mics one on each side of a head sized camera would do fine for encoding all the angle information. But then you would have to register and apply that knowledge to each boom mic input, and synthesize it for every sound effect that wasn't there at recording. Tl;dr Why isnt two channels enough to generate the correct output for N speakers spread around me?
Left/right sound localization is partially a function of "shadow" created by the head. However more important to localization is the pinna, the outer ear.
Sound enters the earhole directly AND reflects off the folds in the pinna.
This causes complex comb filtering. (cancellation) Our brain learns how to correlate sound direction with these complex filterings. It's quite amazing.
Some audio workstations (Logic) have "binaural" processing to try and emulate this effect. It can never be perfect because everyone's ears are shaped a little different.
Right, that is how we do it. But isn't all the phase information present in two channels of audio to know how to map all the signals to an arbitrary number of angles? You'd need to know the spacing of the mics, but that could be a standard.
About the pinna, a fun way to demonstrate this is to have someone close their eyes, then you snap or jangle keys at various locations and have them point. Then tape their ears to their head and repeat. They will be way off in the vertical. We can do left right-ish (with coning error) without the outer ear. But up down is impossible.
The 5.1 vs 2.0 is a bit of a red herring, it used to be a big problem a decade or two ago, but today it is just a small to insignificant contributor to the problem.
The real problem now a days is not technical, it is 100% director's choice. Having deafening "wooooon" organ music, and ear popping explosions is simply in vogue, so all directors want that in their movie, and mix like that on purpose.
And it is not about theatrical mix vs home mix either. The cinema experience also changed with this latest mixing trend, watching a modern movie in the cinema also became uncomfortable with much louder explosions/music/"wooon" than two decades ago. (To the point where I'm considering using ear protection if ever going back to a cinema).
This is 100% a manufactured problem created on purpose by misguided (sound) directors.
The last time I went to a theather was before the pandemic, and frankly, I didn't bother going back exactly because the audio became almost an agression to my senses.
Fwiw, I just wish more systems had built in dynamics controls.
I both sympathize with the problem that people are having (and sometimes have it myself), but I also really enjoy focused movie listening time on a nice Atmos system with subwoofers that has a huge dynamic range. Most people don’t enjoy watching films this way however, or not most of the time
> Also, it is now fashionable for actors to mumble.
Why does it matter that actors are mumbling, though? Don't most lines in Hollywood movies (that aren't already recorded on a soundstage with a boom mic inches from the actor's face) get ADRed these days?
If the actor's intention is to mumble instead of enunciatiting clearly (presumably because of some notion of authenticity), then they will also mumble the studio takes. It's not a problem of sound volume/background noise, which ADR can fix, it's a problem of style over ease of understanding the dialogue. This mirrors the problem of TV series sometimes becoming too dark to easily follow the action on a TV screen in usual conditions (infamously so in the Long Night episode of Game of Thrones).
99.9% of the audience will strain to see what is going on, but let's blame their screen buying acumen (and their viewing practices - even the best screen will not make those scenes easily watchable in a sunny room, which is how most people watch TV) instead of making them actually watchable.
What part of “seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve” makes it seem like this is blaming the people who buy the screens and not the people that make the screens.
Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.
James Stephanie Sterling did a video a long time ago (which I currently cannot find) about "the best game for your HD TV" and concluded (IIRC) that it was Viva Pinata because of the ludicrous colourfulness of the game which really showed off the power of HD TVs. Contrasted with the "intangible sludge" of the Dooms, Quakes, etc.
> Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.
A big part of this is the viewing conditions. The best screen in the world will not make a dark scene watchable in a bright sunny room. And lots of people watch TV in bright sunny rooms.
Also, better screens = more money. A lot of the time, people just bought a cheap screen, and they would still like to know what happens in the series or movies they watch.
I am absolutely for quality interesting dark scenes in cinema, where both the screen and viewing conditions are normalized. But TV is not the same (and HBO and Netflix are TV).
Dark scenes tend to look better on bad TVs because they tend to brighten everything too much with LCD bloom. I feel like it's an opposite problem with OLEDs, they're the one with scenes that are too dark.
Good, sounds like we agree that the problem is the way they’re displayed, not the way they’re mastered.
If you want to watch a dark scene in bright light then you should have a button on your display/remote that adjusts the settings to make that possible. Tons of people have produced brightened versions of those scenes and put them on YouTube, it’s definitely possible. You can always remove dynamic range in post, hard to create it if the source material doesn’t have it though.
You should not need to adjust anything, volume or brightness, in the middle of episodes/movies.
These scenes are poorly edited. I should not have to live-edit them with my remote while watching. I'll do a poor job, and it takes me out of the experience.
These edits don't "take advantage of" dynamic range; they abuse it.
> Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet.
I thought the equipment selected the stereo mix (or did a perfectly compatible mixdown) when playing back a 5.1 mix in a stereo system. Is that not what happens? If it isn't, is it because user error?
Not a sound guy, and have struggled for a while w/ this for my plex setup @ home, so grain of salt.
If there's not a separate track for e.g 2.0, then the mixing down from 5.1 -> 2.0 will not have a human who validates the output. An automatic conversion can't accurately confirm that "this is legible for human ears at the right levels"
The conversion isn't so much as "automatic" or opinionated, but clearly defined in a spec. And it _is_ mathematically correct in terms of sound energy entering the ears. A device may be doing the conversion incorrectly of course.
But there is still an omission, which is the introduction of the centre speaker was (as I understand it) to "pin" dialogue to the screen more effectively. That implies there _is_ some physical phenomenon takes place (eg. phasing/interference) which is not compensated for in the spec.
My own system is set up to deliberately boost the centre channel in the mix and it does help a lot, however I'm interested to know how to define this amount of compensation in terms of an actual physics or acoustics phenomenon.
The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations.
Having dialog in a center speaker means it comes from a different location than the music/fx, so it's easy to hone in on it even if it's a little quieter than the music/fx. Having dialog in the same speakers as music/fx makes it much harder. The specified 5.1 to 2.x mixdown ratios might be good or might be inadequate depending on how correlated the original left track is with the original right track. A ridiculously loud blast only on the 5.1 left means your brain can hear dialog from your 2.1 right unimpeded. A medium volume explosion on the 5.1 left and right (but not center!) leaves you with no 2.1 speaker producing dialog without it being masked by the explosion, especially if the explosion sound is mono-ish.
> The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations.
That's because a human is not 1 microphone. It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2, which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area.
The open source hardware "ReSpeaker" allows to start experimenting how a microphone array works, including why the cocktail party effect doesn't really affect us in most cases.
The notable exception is if there's a signal that is generated perfectly on the plane perpendicular to the 2 ears. Then, humans have a hard time localizing it between front or back (180deg swap). We can still get an angular vector where the sound is. However simply turning your head removes this constraint exception.
(Also bring able to your your head and move your body also shows a visual-acoustic SLAM algorithm going on in your brain.)
1. "That's because a human is not 1 microphone." true
2. "It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2"
3. "which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area"
#3 does not follow from statement #2.
The missing element is that 3D localization is due to the pinna.
I have a 3.1 set-up with the center boosted by the maximum amount allowable. Will eventually upgrade to 5.1 once the kids are old enough to not climb on the rear speakers.
At least Dolby Digital takes the scenario into account, applying dynamic range control on 5.1 downmixing. Be sure to set the DD decoder to RF mode (as opposed to line mode) to adapt the range for stereo.
With DTS there's no such feature that I know of. Depending on the setup, though, I guess one could always tweak the mix coefficients (privileging the center channel, where most of the voices should end up) and apply a DRC effect somewhere on the audio chain. TVs and receivers sometimes have this last bit built in and exposed as "night mode".
I don't think that's true. In fact movie producers are notorious for "phoning in" the 5.1 mixes for the streaming platforms, focusing most of their energy on the theatre mix with Dolby atmos and what not. Usually the 5.1 mix you get on netflix is hurriedly put together as an afterthought.
That would be plausible except I miss much of the dialog in theaters, too.
I am not a 20-something, but I always turn on subtitles. I never could make out most of song lyrics, either, with some exceptions. Most usually, only the chorus.
That's basically the same point though - it's not that special attention is given to specifically 5.1, it's that a) more separate speakers helps in itself; b) it's primarily mixed for such a multi-separate-speaker system.
I have a 5.0 system, and the dynamic range mumble voice + super loud explosion is still very present, even when I artificially boost the center channel. I think voices are actually better on a typical tv speaker 2.0 setup.
The only fix I found was to rip all tracks, apply normalization + compression filters to the audio tracks in Audacity, finally to repackage everything as MKV.
I've noticed some streaming platforms (eg Paramount Plus) occasionally fail to make use of the center speaker entirely when supposedly in 5.1; this makes the dialog nearly inaudible. I only get this issue with some content sources, and forcing the mixer into stereo mode alleviates the problem.
There are almost surely a whole host of bugs just outputting in the format the user has, never mind mixing issues, copyright protection, and similar.
So it’s similar to when a developer great an Electron app that works great on a 24 core machine with 32GB of RAM. It’s not going to be great unless we’re forced to test it on the average dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM?
Wait, is this true? I’ve always thought I was in the minority for “still” having “just” 2.0. I’ve been needing to upgrade my receiver for a while, but mostly putting it off since I can’t find a decent 2.0 one with a good number of inputs. Almost every receiver is (5+2n).1 these days (where n >= 0).
I feel so behind the times in my simple 2.0 system, even though I think it sounds better than almost any other setup I’ve heard — and my speakers are probably 30 years old!
So I really don’t care if I’m behind the times, but would still be nice to find someone produce a first-class 2.0 receiver.
A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer.
A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that.
Most of my extended family is decently well off in the US. Among a dozen or so households, I'm one of I think two with an actual receiver, and I've only got a 5.1 setup. A few have a sound bar on their fancy movie watching setup. Most of my friends rely on the included speakers on their TVs. Its just not a priority for a lot of people, even people with enough income to afford vacation homes and boats and what not.
That pretty much sums it up. I wouldn't even be surprised if the percentage of households with anything over 2.0 has dropped in the past two decades.
Of those people with an external receiver, a significant percentage will deliberately have a stereo setup, often used for listening to music. Good speakers, but no surround sound.
I used to watch movies on an absurdly excessive 3000-watt sound system, equipped with dual 18" subwoofers... but I never bothered to get a surround decoder.
What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup.
Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that!
I know people who have as their primary method of watching movies and TV is on an iPad.
Its not that the tech is stuck so far behind, its a matter of priorities. They just don't care to invest the time/space/effort/money into a fancy sound system. Not even always that they couldn't, just that they don't bother doing so. Sure, many could easily afford a fancy sound system. But they don't care enough to bother figuring out what to buy, figuring out how to connect it all together, going through the whole effort of making sure to use the right remote to get the sound working right, etc. They just want to press play on the one device when they feel like watching a movie, even if its not the best experience possible.
I know a few couples who do own a nice sound system. One partner never bothers to turn on the receiver or use any of the extra devices, they'll just use the built-in apps on the TV and turn the TV speakers up instead of bothering to turn on the fancy sound system already plugged in and otherwise ready to go. Its just not worth it to them to figure it out, so they don't bother using it.
Mine's on my laptop with headphones. I don't even have a TV, let alone a fancy sound system setup (and have no clue what those numbers everyone's throwing around even refer to).
X.Y (e.g. 5.1) means X wide range speakers and Y subwoofers. You also sometimes see it like S/T.Y where S+T = X, and it refers to front/surround speakers.
There are standard values and configurations, such as 2.0 (aka stereo) both at the front, 2.1, 3.1 adds a centre channel mostly for on-screen dialogue positioned close to screen, 5.1 (3/2.1) adds a second stereo pair behind you, 7.1 - adds an extra surround stereo pair between the others, etc.
For real enthusiasts, also X.Y.Z, adding ceiling/bounce speakers for vertical spatial audio.
The real "stuck so far behind" that I don't get is why we use speaker arrays at all -- instead of binaural stereo tech. That virtual haircut demo, apparently from the 90s,[0] sounds incredible on my cheap headphones, yet the technology seems to have gone nowhere since. Is there even spatial audio in VR setups?
If the difficulty is in simulating the head/ears, then existing spatial recordings can at least be converted using a binaural microphone in a surround sound setup, no? Though, I guess with headphones any visceral sensation of bass is still lost, so you'd need to keep the subwoofer or a seat shaker.
I don't much about audio, but wouldn't binaural stereo only work if the two speakers are to the sides of you, like with headphones? Would this work from a TV that's an ambiguous distance in front of you?
As a side note, Windows (and Xbox) support Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos for Headphones, and DTS:X, all of which simulate spatial audio for headphones. It'll simulate a 5.1 (and 7.1?) setup through the headphones. Some games have spatial audio simulation built-in as well, such as Elite Dangerous. I believe UE5 also has a spatial audio engine. Finally, I believe PlayStation emphasized spatial audio for the PS5, but I don't really know the details of that.
I think it only works/is a lot easier with head/earphones? Since you know exactly where the ears are w.r.t. the speakers in that case.
Not that that's really an explanation - if that was the best sound and it was available on Blu-rays and streaming platforms, and legacy 5.1 content upmixed nicely, then yeah why wouldn't I use headphones even at home in front of the television. Less obvious for joint/family viewing I suppose.
Binaural audio starts to really fall apart when you don't have the sound exactly as the microphone setup was. Moving the speakers even a couple of feet away, and then not having them exactly lines up with your ears, it ruins the effect.
Wondered this too. That video along with the millions of ASMR videos on YouTube have very nice binaural stereo sound, but I don't see this being done anywhere else.
And that's perfectly fine, don't get me wrong. If that gets you enjoyment from the media you watch, that's great. You definitely don't need a fancy theater room to be happy.
And honestly if it's a nice laptop and a good pair of headphones you're probably ahead of a lot of people watching on a cheap TV with built in speakers. Once again, not that it truly matters.
I upgraded my receiver and TV recently and it was a pleasant surprise that Apple TV remote now switches the receiver on and off automatically so the setup really requires no tech awareness to use.
I watch movies for the story. 480p and my laptop speakers are enough for that. I enjoyed movies just the same when they were 700mb DivX with 128kps mp3 sound.
Yep, same here. Most of the movies which depend on "immersion" are just horrible. It doesn't matter if the dinosaur in "Jurrasic World Dominion" sounds realistic if I already want to quit the movie after seeing the first 10 minutes.
Speaking as someone with a 5.1 system they haven't set up:
Getting the rear speakers' cables installed into your walls is expensive, and requires you own your home.
Getting a room large enough you can get several guests between the speakers without some of them ending up much closer to the speakers than others is even moreso.
One big downside of 5.1 is that you now have 6 speakers to place all around you. Depending on the room and layout, that can be hard to impossible to do without looking ugly, or even to do at all.
In my case I have a great receiver, but only 2 speakers. To get surround I'll need to put speakers in places that get in the way and run cables in place where I don't want to see them.
It's a pain though, you have to take the time to setup the extra speakers, cable them and etc and have the space to do this, and of course the extra expense.
Yes, it's cheap to some software developer on HN, but if you are on an average income it's harder to justify.
> What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup.
It takes up space that some of us honestly don't have, especially people living in city apartments (like I do).
And I used to have a separate sound system at a past place, some many years ago, I don't think I'd be able to set it up again, it felt like black magic to set it up back then, it will surely feel the same (and more) now.
Well for one I'm not going to run cables everywhere and the other solutions have their faults: wireless satellite lag sound, and still need a power cable; battery operated satellites require constant maintenance.
Yea, unfortunately, my old 5.1 surround system of my bachelor days fails the “wife test.” Currently, to get all the channels the sound mixers give you, you need 6 ugly black boxes with speakers in them spread around your living room and another big black box receiver. And all the speaker wire everywhere. Yuck! Even if you hide the wires in the wall and use ceiling mounted speakers it’s still intrusive and ugly.
I think our auditory system just isn't great. Compressed formats with bitrate of 320kbps is borderline indistinguishable from raw formats in audio, while it will be borderline unbearable in video.
That's a really insightful way of putting it. My first reaction was, 'well, duh...', but then I realized that I'd taken for granted the fact that digital video of (arbitrarily defined) adequate quality must have a much higher information rate than audio of the same. But surely there are animals for which the opposite is true!
I'm with you. After having a nice 5.1 system 20 years ago, and a space set up for it, I now have fallen back to nice 2.0 or 2.1 systems.
Decent amp with a DAC to some quality speakers and a sub and poof: really great audio in a simple system that doesn't require running wires everywhere.
With the advent of cheap, decent, small single-channel amps it's really easy to do something like Apple TV -> HDMI -> TV -> TOSLINK -> Amp -> Speakers and be done with it. (I know I could go Apple TV right to the Amp, but passing it through the TV mitigates image-audio delay.)
It’s a form of product advertising: “You should hear Steve’s 5.1 system, he can hear the movie properly, the sound is so great!”, “He also has a 1:500000 contrast ratio so he can see faces on his screen that we can’t see on our pitch-dark screens. He can actually see the orcs on LOTR!”
And when half the consumers will be done with this upgrade, we’ll invent something new.
It's hard to believe that TVs are still so buggy that they would intentionally play 5.1 in an unusable way on regular TVs.
Of all the ways to deal with the situation, just adding up all the channels equally and dumping them out has to be the stupidest. It's ruined so many people's experiences over the years.
I'm just fed up with modern sound. It never sounds right, and it's just too complicated. I use captions on a lot of shows where there is dialog that is too quiet, etc. I'm pretty sure my sound system is not set up right, but I just don't want to figure it out. I debug software for a living. I just want my entertainment system to be plug and play.
This is the idea of Atmos. They deliver the source with an absurd number of channels. Your local player knows your room and speaker arrangement (from setup tuning ahead of time) and remaps the stupid number of channels into the right playback based on the equipment available. Got 20 speakers all around the room? Cool. Have a 5.1 setup? No problem. Just have the stereo speakers on your TV? Supposedly, no problem.
Whether they actually achieved that depends a lot on your equipment and its tuning.
Yes, on Netflix you can choose. Choosing the stereo mix does offer a significant improvement on hearing dialogue. Regrettably, it has no idea of sensible default or even choice of default, so it always goes to 5.1 even if your setup doesn't have it.
Yes, but audio tracks used to take up valuable space on physical media, so you might indeed sometimes find distinct 5.1 and 2.0 tracks, but usually for the main language only. And of course this duplication is one of the first things pirate releases do away with, in order to reduce the final file size, so you won't find them on most mainstream scene releases either.
Yes that was going to be my suggestion. I rarely have this issue with my own (5.1) system, which I also use a lot more, but often struggle on others' (TV speakers, or external but <5.1).
I'm very much outside of the age range mentioned in the article but +100 for crappy audio mixing.
When my family was going through all the Marvel movies at first I tried to control the volume by making it higher during the dialog and lower during the battles etc but it was an exercise in futility, as I'm only human and there would be some delay in volume change and we would still miss what the guy/gal said or my house would start noticeably shaking from the unexpected explosion happening during a scene where a guy was intensely whispering his rescue plan to his compatriots or whatever. Plus it started feeling like I'm working instead of enjoying the movie. So lower volume and subtitles it is.
I have home theater with 5.2 and 5 speakers, all it does is that when stuff in the movie goes boom my house starts to shake.
> when stuff in the movie goes boom my house starts to shake.
That’s how it’s supposed to sound. Explosions are loud.
This is not a problem with the source material, it’s a problem with the setup of the playback equipment. The source contains all the original data, it’s the playback equipment’s job to render that information in the appropriate way considering the space and circumstances where it’s played.
The ‘problem’ is that the sound is mixed to a cinema-level dynamic range. If you don’t want the full dynamic range you can compress it at playback. They store it at the full range since you can’t exactly un-compress it and the exact amount of compression depends on your setup and situation anyway.
Any half-decent A/V receiver has this capability. If your receiver has Audyssey you may want to look into the “dynamic eq” and “dynamic volume” settings.
Apple TV had to introduce a feature that makes exactly that for you. Apparently this problem is that systematic. Movie makers ruin sound that the streamer device have to correct.
> Movie makers ruin sound that the streamer device have to correct.
It’s not the movie maker’s job to adjust the sound to your particular environment and taste. That is the job of the playback equipment and the person configuring it. The movie should be, and is, stored at the highest fidelity and with as much information as possible. This includes the original intended dynamic range. If your situation or taste calls for a smaller dynamic range you can easily adjust that at playback.
You can hardly expect movies to include hundreds of different soundtracks to cover all possible playback scenarios.
Previously movie makers found the ways good for most of the people, sound effect and discussions being in balance so to enjoy the work, lately they lost their way in many cases (not all) and instead of enjoying the movie the adjustments of volume is required or just turning on the subtitles.
The problem is that dialouges are incomprehensible, inarticulate, while the sound effects and the musics blow your head off in the next second. Lately, not that much previously. Previously this was not a problem, recently they lost their ability to make it well. Many of the movies became not entertaining but agitating this way.
It was never a requirement that everyone will have their own particular personal taste satisfied and that is not something that is missed. More like the ability to be able to follow the story! Which is ruined in more and more cases by bad sound.
When I had a 5.1 setup, I had the center channel volume set higher than the side/rear channels and it made speech understandable while explosions weren't overpowering. Maybe the receiver you have allows the same?
The problem with night mode is that it compresses the dynamic range of the audio which undermines one of the main benefits of having a home theater system. It's a poor compromise for bad audio mixing.
Most home theater systems are in a home where the noise floor is significantly higher than a theater, which the audio mix was targeting. Dynamic range compression is often appropriate and when applied correctly improves the experience in homes.
Things became worse in the past 10 or something years (I am a 40 something btw.).
As the article states we used subtitles in movies to learn language and to understand thick accent. However throughout time while we got better and better in comprehension the use of subtitles remained the same in overall. But very uneven too.
Old movies (not yet seen) and movies for children are never a problem. Also some properly made movies. The atmosphere and sound effects are fine as well as the dialogs.
But it became too much of a trend to make muttery a mushy dialogs where people seemingly unable to articulate. To the level never heard in real life (where muttering may be more common due to the more causal and mood or situation affected nature of conversations, unlike the carefully created and heavily controlled ones in movies). Also it is uneven. Some movies are still fine, but others (perhaps the newest Batman comes to mind, unsure, forgot that movie mostly, being so obscure) are a struggle, not fun at all. Aggrevated by the loud bangs and muttery dialog combo.
A sign that this is a systematic and intentionally manufactured problem, that sound engineers and directors lost their touch completely, is the existence of a feature in the newest Apple TV for equalizing the sound level in a movie. Streaming hardware manufacturers had to come up with solution to correct what sound engineers ruined or unable to get right nowadays.
Older movies are almost never a problem. New movies are in an uncomfortable amount.
I use that feature on Apple TV (normalize audio levels) and it's STILL too dramatic for watching unless you want to wake everyone in the house up. I have a 5.1 setup with the center channel even increased (to try and boost talking) and I still have to play the volume game at times.
SUBTITLES: The film industry makes high art as well as common fare. The high art is what the artists want to make and enjoy but it has a very small market. The common fare is what pays the bills, because it sells like 100x more tickets than high art. High art = caviar, Shakespeare "caviar for the general" whereas common fare is hamburgers, flipping burgers, which is a real business, many more servings of hamburgers than caviar.
Sounds like a parallel topic to the poor sound mixing trouble to me. High art existed before muffled conversations mixed with loud sound effects or music. Also high art can coexist with balanced sound and articulate conversation. Or balanced sound can be used for 'burger' movies for their benefit.
Well back then just making a movie was cool, now you gotta make it better, use all the technology available, leave nothing on the table. They're trying to impress each other, stedda making good movies everybody can enjoy.
You too-frequently convey your ideas through the use of obscure metaphor and convoluted sentence structure. Yet you clearly know how to write plainly, as you just demonstrated in your subsequent replies.
It is odd that you apparently wish to be understood, but more often than not choose opacity instead of clarity. Which is a bit of a shame, because if a person makes the effort to decipher your posts, they often do say something meaningful or insightful.
But others also have insights and useful information, and are much, much easier to understand; given this competition, of course your illucid rambling is skipped and downvoted.
There plenty of films made by very creative film makers that had plenty of artistic freedom, but still have muddy dialogue so I don’t see how any of that is relevant to the particular issue.
The account you replied to replied to a comment of mine on another thread with a weird word salad. It was suggested to me that said account may be a bot...
I’m convinced they’re not a bot. I believe they’re either deliberately engaged in “artistically” expressing themselves, or have mental health issues of the schizophrenic variety.
Yeah pretty much. Am in fact expressing myself in a very "flowery" manner, artistically. I'm elevating the HN comment to an artform. I actually was thought to be schizophrenic by doctors once upon a time. Diagnosed secretly. Then they walked back on the diagnosis. Rescinded. I still get treated for it, because you don't need to stop taking the medication for it if you don't want to. Loophole.
I wouldn't say mental health issues, either. I pay a lot for psychiatry and get my money's worth, have a handle on it, pretty good patient according to many doctors. Often the favorite. Alpha in the psych ward always, alpha in rehab. Hey somebody gets dealt this hand, what if he plays his cards right?
>Perhaps you'll think my comments are unthinkable. My only response to that is that they were legibly written, not by a machine, but by a writer with a soul.
Interesting. Yeah that's cool, am I intelligible or not? Well I can say for certain the malpractice, the lobotomy, didn't help with that. Lost the ability to express clever ideas. Like I can no longer think that way.
The sound mixes today are so far off a pleasant experience that the people who do make them should feel ashamed - How do many actually have a home cinema room with soundproofing and 20 speakers ?
Most people watch movies with a headset / a TV / 2.1 / 5.1 surround system and they may even be limited by other factors like neighbours and you know real life..
And the the voice levels is obnoxiously low and way (negatively) beyond what i would call a good experience.
The slurred dialog is obnoxious and a sign of laziness on everyone's part. The miking, the post processing, the overdubbing (if there's any at all - recent film makers don't seem to know that this is a thing). The actor's speech pattern, where they direct their speech while acting, even how they stand and where. The choice of location and additional preparation of the stage so the speech can be picked up clearly.
It's not your hearing, it's the mix. Source: I'm a mastering engineer with a monitoring setup worth six figures and I use closed captions too.
Speakers in TVs used to be tailored to making speech intelligible. Nowadays it's... well whatever it is, it's not really meant to do anything. Not even the more high-end popular speaker systems are meant to do anything at all, really. They all just kinda sorta make whatever is coming out of them sound flashy and whooshy. That's another reason why movies are even more difficult to understand.
And let's be honest - a lot of it nowadays is just not _worth_ hearing... Staple tv shows form the 70s that fell into obscurity for being extremely pedestrian had better writing than nearly all big-budget movies nowadays. I remember when Pig came out recently, it was the only good movie during a span of maybe 3 months. That's how dire it is nowadays.
Good to know this isn't just my ears or my setup. This was most noticeable to me recently in Dune. So much whispering dialogue, with massive dynamic range and BRAAAM [0]. Using night mode on my receiver and cranking the center channel to +10dB works pretty well for me, though.
That article kind of confuses a few different kinds of sounds. Just because there's a staccato ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9v-UpM9flY ) sound happening doesn't mean it serves the same function. The loud meme they're talking about is a loud horn meant to overwhelm. The sound at 0:40 in the video is clearly a meant to create suspense: it's an earlier trope in movies and other media: scary staccato strings backed by all sorts of random sybilant string sounds that create a nervous atmosphere (like starting at 2:52 here https://youtu.be/_nVkHXTeiOg?list=PL7F72E09D4C28FECD&t=172 ). My favourite use of these is in the Dead Space soundtrack. Note that in the clip I linked you first get the sybilant strings building nervous tension, then some overwhelming loud bangs, but then at 3:50 you get slower sounds which are not meant to overwhelm, just maintain a scary atmosphere. You get both of those uses of sound in one passage.
I recommend people watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) to test that. I was impressed with the sound in general and the fact that I felt no need to turn on subtitles. But in particular there's a least one scene where characters are whispering to each other. I didn't need subtitles or to adjust the audio, every word was perfectly intelligble.
It's also a clear sign that it's not my ears, it's not my setup, it's the sound mix of modern movies.
Dune sounds great on my 2.0 system at home (low mid-range receiver and ~$200 yamaha floorstanders). Sicario too, from the same director, I generally think he does a fantastic job with audio mixes.
Strange that article doesn’t talk about the tripod noise from the ‘05 War of the Worlds.
V1 sound comes from the pulse jet engine that runs with a "batch mode" cycle, ie there's a valve at the front that opens and closes at something like 30 Hz.
The Stuka had the scare sound siren and it had a much higher pitch.
A little off topic but it’s really surprising how so few of the shows and movies these days give off any vibe of sincerity. From the acting to the writing to the CGI, everything seems to be winking at the audience and trying to tell them that they are all actors and its all make believe.
The perfect example is Lord of the Rings vs The Rings of Power. I had no problems believing that Aragorn really lived in Middle Earth. But every single actor in Rings of Power feels like…an actor - just someone playing a part.
Maybe its the overuse of bad CGI, but so few of the worlds feel “lived in”.
A lot of the new 4K TVs by default have some 'video enhancement' processing steps turned on by default which ends up making everything look fake. If you go into the TV settings and turn all of those things off it should make the world look more natural.
this processing can create desync issues where the audio is in front of the video by just a bit. this creates a lip sync issue which makes people feel the audio is dubbed over and can tear you out of suspense of disbelief. but i don't think that's what they mean here. rings is just bad acting - or rather, bad direction that forces bad acting. i have no doubt the actors are capable of much more than what they're being confined to.
I find all of these TV shows have the same pattern that breaks the immersion: too many close up face shots, and the characters look too clean. Watch the original LOTR and see the composition of the shots ("every scene a painting"): it's not just a close up of a face with a bokeh behind it; there is a visual composition and blocking like a scene designed for a play. The characters looking too clean is another issue, and the Wheel of Time series on Amazon has this problem as well. Every character is perfectly manicured, no dirt or grime despite the setting... it breaks the immersion!
I remember... maybe 10 years ago? seeing a big OLED screen playing a very high def version of LOTR. You could see that the props were made of styrofoam.
Of course there is a lot of other stuff going on, but I do think that high fidelity really makes stuff hard. That combined with much more pressure to cut corners in post production (on top of more stuff needing to actually happen in post!) just makes it all fall apart.
Part of the problem when every story has to be the biggest thing ever, and a problem that other industries have hit (games in the PS3/PS4 generation).
With something like that new LOTR show, the budgets are so astronomical but where’s the auteur? It’s a series so presumably directors are not consistent.
Might be an issue that there isn’t a single person pushing the world, aesthetic, vibe and vision making the actors immersed in their roles. In the end getting all dressed up and standing against a green screen probably feels a bit silly without someone selling it to you.
The majority of Netflix series produced in Europe are actually a pleasant surprise in that regard. When to comes to writing and acting as well as production, and yes, sound mixing.
I consider myself a fantasy and sci-fi nerd, binge read the Lord of The Rings, starting with the Hobbit, between Christmas Eve and when the first movie came out. Read the Simarilion. Loved the LotR triology. Like the Hobbit, ehich already strechted the source material a lot, but in a way that could be justified as a lead up to LotR. I did not manage to dare whatching the Amazon series, and propably never will. Thr LotR films, The Expense and the Star Wars series and first two triologies are the last movie ftanchises I still get immersion and suspenson of disbelieve from, I'm not taking any risks eith LotR.
Agreed. But then comes along something like The Expanse with impeccable writing, a gripping, high-octane story, with every episode being pretty much perfect, and great set design, and it falls into obscurity and gets prematurely cancelled because it's not being shoved down people's throats.
I shoupd have been more precise: I didn't read the books before, I knew they would be my Christmas gift. So I started with the Hobbit on, if memory serves well, on Dec. 23rd. Was finished in time for the unpacking of the triology on 24th. And was through, for go one, with all three books before going to see the first movie. I never read as many pages in as little time before or after. And I totally loved it!
Would a soundbar help the situation or make it worse? With two kids 90% of the time I'm watching kids movies but I still turn on the closed captions. Any background noise and it's nearly impossible to hear the dialogue without cranking up the volume to an undesirable level.
I don't know your current setup, but I'd highly recommend external speakers with most modern TVs.
Back in the day with CRTs and projection screens, the TV would be pretty big regardless. They didn't have to worry about bundling in some nice speakers with a TV, because hey the TV is going to be quite large and that cavity can be a nice resonance chamber if done right.
Now, all TVs need to be super thin which can be a nice thing don't get me wrong. But their packaging means their speakers are often very compromised. Sure, they're OK in a pinch, but even a cheap sound bar will often out perform most TV's built in speakers. So unless you're using the TV in a space where you just don't care about the sound quality, you'll get a lot out from having at least a sound bar or some other external speaker setup.
Many devices have a night mode to help keep the range of volumes small. The Sonos one is perfect for my use case. It changed my evening life when I found this.
I wish my Denon AVR had a usable night mode. Instead it has a setting called "dynamic volume" that makes it so all dialog right after an explosion is inaudible...
I have a 3.1 setup and the center channel helps, but it's still really bad with many mixes. If you happen to use an ffmpeg based player, and are targeting a stereo, this audio-filter helps a lot (I stole this from someone somewhere on the internet). I use it for encoding movies for car-trips (where there is both no center channel and a lot of background noise).
If you have one speaker reproducing both speech and other sound, this is what happens:
1. additional sound output means heightened distortion
2. when two sounds come from two places, our brains can separate them due to phase differences and spatial perception, so those two sounds mask each other less than if the same two sounds come out of a single speaker, even if it's perfect, with no distortion etc
3. the speaker is made for broad range reproduction and not voice reproduction, so it'll de-emphasize speech frequencies, which are exactly those frequencies that also make music sound like it's coming out of a cardboard box. ultimately the applied eq (equalizer) curve will create speech that's slightly muddy, like someone talking from behind a blanket.
4. sound bars use tiny transducers which are woefully underpowered compared to the SPL (sound pressure level) they're tasked with producing. This is done by using multi-band compression and limiting. This sometimes creates situations where the limiting might be recovering after a slightly louder sound, and the very next syllable will be muted.
However, having a dedicated speaker for the center channel is none the less way better than not having one at all. If that's all you can try, you can try your luck. But be aware that getting a cheap one will probably not get you where you want to be - you'll have to spend a pretty penny. At that point if you have the space you might want to get a 3.1 bookshelf speaker setup. They don't have to be very large to provide great value-for-space-used.
I've had a few 5.1 systems in the past (energy, Polk audio speakers) but I found while the center channel quality is excellent there's just too much bass. Even at low volumes the bass disturbed others in the home (even after playing with eq, boosting center channel, and enabling night mode on the receiver). Currently I have an LG Gallery TV. I like the ease of just using TV for audio and even after raising the volume it doesn't vibrate the whole house.
It's not from the speakers - it's from your room. Read up on standing modes. Placing the bass producing speaker (usually the subwoofer) in a different spot can help alleviate this tremendously.
Eh, I've seen worse films from him, and worse acclaimed films this past couple years. In fact, 2 of the 6 movies I've watched the past couple years have been with Nicholas Cage, and I'm not even a fan of his.
I don't know if it's just me but cinema has become really shit, unless you're into superhero movies. It's like nothing matters any more to executives and moviegoers of all ages than superheroes. Are we living in Idiocracy?
No, we’re living in a world where piracy and exploded budgets mean every movie needs to be a hit. One flop and the studio is gone. So the studios produce movies that are certain to be not flops, like the endless sequels, and that will draw people to cinemas where there is no piracy, which means impressive spectacles with explosions.
I'm sorry but piracy is not to blame for a 100 million movie budget. I live in a small country and we're able to produce very enjoyable films for far less than 10 million.
Pig is a great example because it essentially could have been a student project. The only thing you really needed was one good main actor, and who's to say a student of art couldn't have done a good job just as well. The location shots, the various scenes are all ultra low budget.
> The sound mixes today are so far off a pleasant experience that the people who do make them should feel ashamed - How do many actually have a home cinema room with soundproofing and 20 speakers ?
Also, digital camera manufacturers should be feel ashamed for cameras providing photos that don't even fit on my monitor. My 24MP Sony camera outputs photo's at 6000x4000 pixel resolution! Who the hell has a monitor that big ? I can only see a small part of the photo at one time.
Oh way, no, that's absolutely crazy. Because maybe some people do have a monitor that high-res, or maybe they want to print it or edit it or.., or... And guess what, there is no need to have the photos be smaller to display them, you can simply use a viewer that scales them to fit on your display. There is absolutely no need to throw away that extra information and you might want it in the future.
Same goes for audio in a movie. If it doesn't fit the dynamic range suitable for your setup, then scale it to whatever you need it to be. You may not have a setup to enjoy that, but others might, and they shouldn't have to deal with sub-par mixes because other people don't know how to configure their playback equipment.
Christopher Nolan is one of the biggest offenders in this regard, often having barely audible dialog drowned out by music or background noise by stylistic choice. I understand the intent is to let it wash over you but I can’t help but struggle to understand and it ends up just making me feel frustrated and taking me out of the film.
watched it in imax the first time and i thought it sounded terrible as well. watching at home with subtitles on the second time around really helped clear up a few things.
it doesn't help that they also have masks on for most of the movie, or they're having to talk over the sound of loud speedboat, or the accents are foreign, either russian or indian
In Switzerland every movie has German and French sub-titles. Sadly you can't turn them off in the theater but it's helpful id you can't understand what the actors are mumbling.
Reminds me my dad said when he first moved abroad before he learned the local language, everyone would read the subtitles and laugh at the joke and then he couldn't hear what they had just laughed at.
I feel the same way, it's strangely mixed. You look at movies that are 30 years old and the music is very quiet or in different bands than speech, very carefully done. You can still hear speech in Jurassic Park or The Matrix. A Marvel Movie? Good luck...
Maybe it's a lost art. I have found that turning off subtitles and forcing myself to get used to their accents does improve my listening comprehension, but it's a much easier choice when you can't otherwise understand it just due to mixing.
I don't know that it helps me focus, if anything I have to focus harder when they're talking so I can hope that their lips will be enough to figure it out. But it does mean that if I'm watching something in a place with roomates I can use a much lower volume and figure out what is going on by combining the text with the low SNR audio I hear.
Listening at a low volume should mean better overall hearing over time too right? My default volume went from like -20dB to -45dB on the same system over the last decade, I think either I'm being polite to roomates or just more careful with my hearing.
The Apple TV has a setting called "reduce loud sounds" which helps with this problem. I'm sure you can find it on other devices too. My Sony TV also has a sound setting for enhanced dialogue which might help as well.
Can't really help with the actors thing, though I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.
> I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.
You can have both though. A great example is Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s never mumbled a line in his life and you can understand everything he says during quiet dialog. You can be true to life, quiet AND understandable.
Jean-Luc Picard is quite intelligible even when he is soft spoken like you said. There's quite a few reasons for this. One is obvious. Patrick Stewart is a shakespearean actor so he learned how to speak in such a way. The other thing is his accent. It's an accent that lends itself well to intelligibility. Pidgin or Mountain talk or bayou certainly do not if you want something credible or authentic, for example. Thirdly, the character Jean-Luc Picard is one who has always carried himself properly and with dignity, so a voice that is loud and properly enunciated matches him perfectly.
I think that you can have both, but you can't always have both. Because it doesn't always make sense to.
> He’s never mumbled a line in his life and you can understand everything he says during quiet dialog. You can be true to life, quiet AND understandable.
Its almost all about projection. You can come across as a "quiet" speaker and still manage to be heard when you're projecting and enunciating properly. Projecting isn't about being loud, its about being heard.
I have a tendency to mumble a lot when I'm not thinking about it. Thinking about projecting my voice brings things across better, and its not really all about being louder.
I do think Stewart's stage training shines through quite a lot. He does dial it back, but his performance is hardly realistic. (I'd also note how important recurring locations are even set up like a stage -- open with a clear unobstructed focus point for action to happen in; the bridge, ten forward and engineering especially notable).
On the other hand, I'm not sure what hyper-realism would contribute to something like Star Trek. The show confidently embraces the fact that it's basically a bunch of fairy tales for nerds. That's what allows it to be as great as it is.
Not everything needs to be The Wire (even though that was great too, if you enabled subtitles).
Wow I don't agree at all (haven't seen the latest series, talking about TNG and the movies).
But, if I hadn't seen maybe two episodes, I might have the same impression.
How often do you see Captain (!) Picard out of uniform? The character of Picard-as-officer is constantly on stage, he's the master and commander of an entire starship!
Second most often, we see him on the Holodeck, where he's playing a captain playing an actor playing a role! Of course he chews the scenery there.
But when we see Jean-Luc, the civilian, something changes. All the Royal Shakespeare is invisible, he's an old man who carries a great burden, and has put it down for just a moment.
Patrick Steward is very, very good at what he does.
I don't deny he has range, but at the same time, it's hard to get way from the fact he is a stage actor playing a character that sounds and acts like a stage actor in almost every scene. He fits the role like a glove, and the role makes a lot of sense in the show (his dignity and gravitas is something that is arguably missing in the reboots and new takes on the show).
I recall an episode where it's all going to hell due to the holodeck, and Picard asks what happened. Geordie, I think, explains they asked the holodeck to create a character that could outsmart Data...at which point Picard lowers his head into his hands and mumbles "Merde!" (pretty clear, despite the mumble).
> The Apple TV has a setting called "reduce loud sounds"
This does help, but at some point Apple increased the compressor’s release time so that it’s far too quiet even 10-15s after the loud transient. I wish they would make it behave more like a brickwall limiter.
I had noticed that it had changed but wasn't sure what exactly the change was. Yes, far too quiet 10-15s after the loud transient is exactly why I ended up having to disable it.
Before that it worked perfectly and better than my Denon receiver :(
I’ve definitely noticed this change but couldn’t pick when exactly it happened. Super annoying because sometimes I start changing the volume then it starts changing the volume…
That option actually works great for resurrecting the speech in a movie, but makes all the music utterly flat and boring. With this option on you might as well throw out your expensive speaker setup and use the built in TV speaker.
If only there was a hotkey to toggle it on and off, instead of hidden 4 levels down the touch-and-swipe menu.
Even better would be for the compressor/limiter to detect whether the source is music, dialogue or explosion and adjust its parameters accordingly. Come on Apple, make it smarter!
I'm one of those people that mumble and/or struggle with speaking in real life, so I'm probably placing that burden more on other people than the other way around.
I just find that stage acting sounds very unnatural. So do news anchors and you will find the same sort of unnatural voice in older classic films. No one talks like that in real life so of course it's something that is going to detach the tv show or movie I'm watching from reality if they speak like that. Does that make it impossible for me to enjoy the classics? No, but they pretty much never pull me into the story in a way that makes me forget for a second that they're actors doing a performance.
When you are sitting at home, with perhaps a friend on your couch, do they constantly say "What?"
Or, if standing with a few people you know outside, is every sentence you speak replied to with a request to repeat yourself?
I bet not. Maybe it happens sometimes, but my point is, being able to understand what someone says, regardless of how they say it, is the key part here.
Yet it sounds as if you believe most people are barely understandable? Including yourself?
And for example, listening to much of the dialog out there, the Picard reference. The guy is in command of the flagship of a fleet, in the military, and would not be in command, in that position, if there was any inability to clearly issue orders, and to communicate fluently.
Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
A CEO? An ex-world class military retiree? Someone working in upper management of the NSA? These people will be heard.
There are indeed roles featuring the "regular person", but if you mumble, if you define your speach style as mumbling, that means you employ the word "mumble" to differentiate you, from how most people speak.
Otherwise you wouldn't be mumbling, you'd just be speakkng.
So that all said, I think your assertion is unfair.
The person I originally responded to was basically calling for actors to homogenize their speech in order to make them easier to understand. I disagree with this notion because I think that both altering how you enunciate things and how you "project" your voice alter them drastically and are not realistic for everyone to speak that way. They are inherently inauthentic, especially if you consider the speech patterns of various English accents and dialects. Certain accents are intrinsically linked to "mumbling." Certain types of voices are inherently not projected.
A great example is this video of Baltimoreans attempting to say "Aaron earned an iron urn." [1] The same person says it how they would naturally and with "proper" enunciation. With "proper" enunciation he was very easy to understand, but it was also not authentic to how he actually speaks.
> Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
Yes, but there's just as many, if not more, that aren't. I'm not saying it's unrealistic for say, a CEO or a news reporter to have adapted a "General American" accent. I don't think it's weird for even most characters to have an accent that is very understandable to most Americans. I just don't think you can or should expect that actors always speak in a certain way just to make it understandable to the most amount of Americans.
I have the same issue but instead of using subtitles I've embraced not knowing what's going on with the show. If it was important that I know for my enjoyment then I'm probably not watching the show anymore. Like if what the actor said was unintelligible I'm going to go with that's part of the plot, a puzzle for me to figure out on the show subreddit or something, but I'm not going to deal with the shitty blinding subtitles some shows display on blinding white over pitch OLED black, it's impossible.
That’s how I watch movies in general. Maybe it’s a symptom of ADHD or lack of interest but I find it hard to remember people’s names and plot reveals that require me to remember to specific locations or details. I just watch movies and enjoy them “generally”.
I hate that feeling. Not knowing if the name they just mentioned is someone important I forgot about or the director is going for a convoluted timeline and they are talking about someone we haven't seen yet.
I have better things to do than watch movies with the risk of not understanding them. It's like saying to read a book "generally." What a waste of time.
But it also depends on the genre. If you're a fan of blockbuster action movies, most dialogue is unimportant anyway. If you enjoy drama or more artsy movies, you probably need to follow what's going on.
I do some of that, because I'm bad with remembering names. If the plot involves talking about someone, I just learned to ignore it and consider non-important.
Just for reference: if you need Subtitles on an OLED, e.g. on Netflix you can set the subtitles to grey (only in the Web app, but is used on all other apps). Had that same problem with the OLED
While we are teaching actors to enunciate can we do the same with musicians? When I listen to music in German, I can almost completely understand it despite speaking German at a kindergarten level. When I listen to music in English, despite being fluent, it is almost impossible to discern the lyrics they are mumbling.
I suspect that a large part of this problem is Autotune. Singers need no training to hit the right pitches anymore, so they receive no training at all for any of the other skills as well.
AFAIK, there's only one audio mix done with theaters in mind, and studios don't do separate mixes for home viewing. It's down to the distributor do make sure that the average home viewer gets a good experience. That's why it boggles my mind that big players like Netflix don't have any dynamic range compression and surround downmixing options in their settings. Also the way most TVs handle surround downmixing is straight up broken. I watch my movies from mkv files on a PC, so for me it's not a problem because there's tons of options available for that in players like mpv, VLC and MPC-HC, but I do feel bad for your average person that has no business knowing about this stuff. They should just have a simple DRC setting available with maybe 3 levels and a clear explanation of what it does.
If you use MPV, you can pass it ffmpeg filters, and ffmpeg has many ways of compressing the dynamic range. See [1] for the set of audio filters. Here are the settings I use [2]. If you can't run your video through ffmpeg, I guess you could run your audio signal through a physical compressor if you use external speakers, but that can get quite involved.
I always thought it's the same problem as modern web design: razor thin fonts, "stylistically" low contrast ratios, hieroglyphic icons that don't show properly low resolution screens, slow loading times... because the designers and developers that made the thing are using maxxed-spec iMacs with 5k IPS color-accurate displays, so they never experience the "real world usage". I imagine the sound engineers have the "maxxed-spec" equivalent mixing studio, and the directors imagine everyone will experience the film in a theater or in a home theater, and not on the built-in Hisense TV speakers from across their living room.
When I was working at a transcription company I had to build my test kit with spare parts from the Bin. The Bin was full of old discard parts, early Celeron and Pentium machines with PS/2 KB/M.
Everything had to compile and run on that machine before I could ship builds to any of our transcriptionists. Our website needed to be able to load on it and so on.
What you say rings true, sound engineers are also mixing audio at 24 bits uncompressed, and while DVDs and Blu-Ray have the ability to play it back, I doubt the streaming services are sending it in full bit depth and also that most people buy hardware capable of decoding it if they did.
I know I'm in the minority here, but let me explain why it's not terrible audio mixes or bad actors.
The overall trend in TV and movies has been towards greater realism in all aspects. Less stage-audience sitcoms, more single-cam. Less "look at this actor" and more "look at this real person".
Actors aren't mumbling, they're speaking how real people speak. Trust me, screen actors have more stage training than ever -- they know how to enunciate but if they do, the director tells them to stop because they seem like they're giving a fake theatrical performance rather than being a slice of real life.
And because more and more people have huge TV's with great contrast, 5.1 surround systems, or are watching with AirPods with spatial audio... TV is becoming more film-like both in range of brightness and loudness. For many people (like myself) this is a godsend. It's like I'm at the cinema every time I watch an hour-long drama. It's amazing.
We could go back to low-contrast everything and overly enunciated actors, the way sitcom TV was, designed for small screens and terrible speakers. But that just feels so... backwards and limited and fake.
HOWEVER, I do firmly believe that modern TV content should be made more accessible, and that it's high time to build adjustable "end-user compression" into all TV's and video players. Let the user apply automatic volume equalization so quiet parts are just as loud as the loud parts when you're watching TV in your living room with lots of activity around. (And with 5.1 signals, you can even always keep dialog louder than sound effects and music.) And brightness equalization so you can see what's happening in the dark scenes of Game of Thrones when you're in a sunlit room.
> Actors aren't mumbling, they're speaking how real people speak. Trust me, screen actors have more stage training than ever -- they know how to enunciate but if they do, the director tells them to stop because they seem like they're giving a fake theatrical performance rather than being a slice of real life.
But if it translates into me not being able to understand them, that’s less realistic, because in a real-world scenario I’d be able to understand them, since our ears are adapted for the real world. A real world slurrer is about as easy to understand as an enunciator through movie speakers — at least, with how the meth-addled mixers do it now.
Bottom line: speech being incomprehensible is not realistic, and is not accomplishing some wonderfully artistic gritty realism.
Edit: To put it a different way: they may be speaking the way real people speak, but once you put it through a speaker, it will translate into something less comprehensible than that speech would be in a real-world scenario, and thus less true to how that situation would be in real life.
To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either. Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you.
My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show.
Decades ago, in an American TV show those characters would have been speaking an understandable American accent with just a few accent "suggestions" to indicate they were "foreign".
Today, it's considered absurd if they speak in anything else but their actual full accent.
It's realism. My mother can't understand it and has to use subtitles. I understand it all perfectly, but I've traveled a lot and learned other languages.
But that's what subtitles are there for. And not all TV/film has to be culturally accessible to everybody, with fake ways of speaking.
>To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either.
Yes, I absolutely would, because, in practice, people speak in a way that others can understand them, or else they have to quickly adapt. (If they’re not comprehensible, there will be a contextual reason why.)
>Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you.
That wasn’t what I was saying. My point was that conveying sound through speakers has inherent differences from a person actually being there, and our ears/auditory processing are optimized for the latter, taking advantage of things that aren’t present with speakers. So playing “the same” speech is going to be inherently less comprehensible, requiring some kind of compensation.
These brilliant sound engineers, as judged by actual audiences, are turning comprensible speech-situations into incomprensible ones, some way or another.
>My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show.
That’s a separate issue, whern there are genuine cultural differences with between the listener and the situation. That’s not what’s happening in Tenet.
> But that's what subtitles are there for.
No, it’s not. Most sound engineers would consider it a failure if someone had to use subtitles for their own dialect, and most cinemaphiles consider the presence of subtitles to be a failure in itself, and everyone agrees that having to read off the screen to follow worsens the experience.
I don't know what to tell you... but in real life people misunderstand each other all the time. And don't adjust.
Listening to dialog in a movie theater is generally crystal clear in terms of audio engineering, coming from dedicated center speakers with very little audio artifacts due to the space. Directional sound waves are directional sound waves, and no there's nothing our ears are optimized for that isn't reproduced by speakers, for dialog coming from a few feet or more away. Muddiness is introduced when downmixed into stereo on crappy TV speakers in living rooms with a lot of sonic reflection from hard surfaces. If you listen with spatial audio AirPods with noise cancellation, for example, you'll get something much clearer akin to a theater experience.
My point is that subtitles help people who have trouble understanding similar dialog in real life, or in bad acoustics. It's an accessibility option.
When I listen to content with my AirPods, I never need subtitles at all. The audio is perfect. When I watch a movie in a friend's living room with kids running around, we absolutely put on subtitles. Because it's a terrible audio environment. So it all works out.
>I don't know what to tell you... but in real life people misunderstand each other all the time. And don't adjust.
Anyone who consistently speaks incomprehensibly and doesn't correct is soon cut off.
Mishearing does happen, but is the exception, and having repeats will take away from the presentation for little narrative benefit. Therefore, when putting it on the big screen, they present the interaction in a way that avoids blowing time to have characters repeat themselves.
So yes, in a sense (that you weren't arguing), you are correct: in real life, there will be more mishearings (and repeats). But IRL, you also don't normally have to carry on after not hearing correctly. To the extent that movies are accomplishing that, it is a departure from realism.
>Listening to dialog in a movie theater is generally crystal clear in terms of audio engineering,
As judged by the repeated complaints of numerous people, to the point that periodicals are covering it, no, it's not, it's really really not. Perhaps you hear things okay but most people don't.
>My point is that subtitles help people who have trouble understanding similar dialog in real life, or in bad acoustics.
But these are people that have no trouble in similar dialog in real life! Hence why this is being covered, and why people are upset. Did you notice the title? "Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions..." You must have missed the subtext that, "20-somethings are not a special class with hearing disabilities". If they can't hear it, you can dismiss it was "lol hard of hearing" or some exceptional case.
>When I watch a movie in a friend's living room with kids running around, we absolutely put on subtitles. Because it's a terrible audio environment.
But people are using subtitles when there aren't distractions, and they didn't need to do this 20 years ago. I just watched Seinfeld on Netflix, and the dialog clarity was thousands of times better than any more recent production. I turned off subtitles, which was unusual for me. How come it wasn't such a "terrible audio environment" back then?
Because sound engineering practices have regressed, and you shouldn't be rationalizing them.
I'm sorry but that is just not true. That kind of naturalistic acting has been the dominant trend in movies since Brando. TV may have been more stage like but definitely not movies.
You're right that it started with Brando and has only come more recently to TV in past decades. But I don't think I said anything to the contrary. I even said "TV is becoming more film-like".
I don't watch a movie to get confused as I may in real life. The director is confused if they don't understand the fundamental rules of cinema - speak clearly and face the camera.
No matter the size of the screen, bad acting is bad.
> the fundamental rules of cinema - speak clearly and face the camera
You're literally describing the fundamental rules of cinema... in the 1940's. Back in the studio system, that was exactly with they did, so clearly they even used a fake "transatlantic accent" with heightened enunciation to do it.
And these rules (minus the accent) are still followed to a large degree in middlebrow TV fare like what you watch on ABC or the CW Network. It's also more present in comedies.
But if you're watching a prestige drama on HBO or Netflix? If you're watching The Wire or Succession? If a drug dealer or cop suddenly starts speaking clearly and facing the camera, all believability is instantly shattered.
Your rules for "bad acting" are outdated by about seven decades. In fact, "method acting" in the 1950's was precisely a reaction to the stilted "speak clearly and face the camera" acting of the 1940's. By your standard, Marlon Brando would be a bad actor, since "speak clearly and face the camera" is the polar opposite of what he did.
> Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
Watch some German shows (notably: Not Netflix’s Dark as that was untypical, I mean actually produced for the German market shows). It’s horrible. Everything sounds super fake. Yes, everything is easy to understand, but I (a German) can’t watch anything because nothing sounds real.
It’s usually claimed this is because German actors do more stage acting, but as Dark (or other German actors in US productions where they don’t sound fake) show, it goes much deeper.
I live in Germany and honestly it just seems to me from speaking to Germans that they have the worst mixture of a lack of sense of quality and also an uncaring-ness/sense of futility about it. I think it is kind of like the "poor service at restaurants" thing. It is a negative point that has become accepted and almost expected by Germans, so there is literally no desire to change it, which would take a lot of effort for very little gain.
Tangentially, it also reminds me of going back to the UK last week to visit a conference. The trains were just so much different to those in Germany, even the crappy "Stansted Express", those here in Germany feel very utilitarian and unfriendly (particularly the Deutsche Bahn "Bombardier Double-deck Coach") while in the UK similarly priced train services are more explicitly friendly and caring in their design.
I do think it is a systematic or cultural "problem", but also it's kind of one of the things I like about Germany. The emphasis is on things that are completely tangible to everyone rather than more removed concerns like aesthetics and friendliness. And, I think this bleeds into the cultural arts too. I have noticed the same thing with a lot of popular German music too. It just lacks the sense of "coolness" that there is in other countries, and feels almost like an cringey imitation of other countries popular music
>Tangentially, it also reminds me of going back to the UK last week to visit a conference. The trains were just so much different to those in Germany, even the crappy "Stansted Express", those here in Germany feel very utilitarian and unfriendly (particularly the Deutsche Bahn "Bombardier Double-deck Coach") while in the UK similarly priced train services are more explicitly friendly and caring in their design.
The friendliest thing a train can do is bloody show up on time, which National Rail seems to have had a problem with lately.
I don't think anyone can reasonably dispute that Germans don't value great customer service much -
but it's ridiculous to claim that the culture that produced Goethe, Schiller and, to a large part, the Romantic era doesn't value aesthetics.
I think that most "popular" (i.e. charts-topping) German music is rather bland, but I feel the same about chart hits from other countries. Meanwhile there is some German music that is really good - though of course whether you'll like what I like will depend on your taste.
Honestly, I disagree with pretty much everything you said. I don’t feel like I get poor service, trains aren’t designed unfriendly, and we certainly shouldn’t strive to make things less functional for some feeling of kindness.
Can’t talk about popular German music, as I don’t listen to that or to other popular music.
Have you spent much times in other countries? I just spent a week in the UK with a German who had culture shock that strangers were actually talking to each other, that waiters called him "sir", and that the trains were so high-tech.
Mainly I find that Germans who disagree with these things have not lived in other countries, and those that do immediately agree.
The fact that you think the friendliness of people in anglo countries is fake is very sad...
EDIT: trust me the banter between two strangers chatting in the UK is not fake. We are not americans. We are simply willing to talk to people we don't know. Germans do not do this. Isolating yourself from strangers is not something to be proud of.
Dynamic range compression is called different things on different platforms, "midnight mode", "reduce loud sounds", on Windows it's "loudness equalization".
> Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie.
And not just sound engineers! So many TV shows these days are filmed in nearly pitch black. If there are any lights on in the room (or it's still bright on a northern summer night and the living room doesn't have blackout curtains), I can't see the action. At first I thought I was just being cranky and old, but then we watched The Neverending Story with my kid and lo and behold, they film in "dark scenes" with torches etc so you can still see the actors well enough to read their lips! I'm sure it would be fine if I was watching it in a proper theater, but it's a frikkin TV show and who even goes to the cinema anymore?
I know Sonos are not loved here, and other companies probably do it too, but Sonos sound bars allow you to enhance speech and also go into night mode. Night mode reduces the dynamic range - louder quiet bits and quieter loud bits.
I like the tv on quietly relative to other people I know, and continually messing with the volume is tedious.
> "The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet [..]"
On YouTube the ads are the explosions. Ads are so loud compared to the regular videos that I often just turn the volume down and the captions on.
Does it reliably and persistently mute all the time?
On iOS specifically I have the problem that sometimes an ad starts to blare from a background tab (sometimes on another tab page) out of the blue. So I try to never leave YouTube open. I cannot imagine that YouTube wants me to keep it shut, but well... there we are.
What makes the whole thing even more ironic is that YouTube refuses to play in the background in any other case, even though it seems to be perfectly possible from a technical point of view.
When I turn the volume down on my phone I know what I get and it'd never let me down.
If I had a device that didn't mute when I told it to, I would consider it faulty and I would return it.
I was talking about watching youtube on my android phone or TV when I wrote the comment. So yes, mute always mutes. I don't know what happens for iOS hostages.
If you know a foreign language, an option that works is to watch the dubbed version. I sometimes do this, especially for action movies: the foreign dubbed version is often easier to understand than the original english, because people doing the dubbing want to be understood.
French version are always so clear (friends and family watch movies on laptop and phones). But I know enough English to notice that the movement of the actor's mouth does not correspond to the sound.
After watching The Boys season 3 I thought I was losing my listening comprehension of English. Glad to hear even native speakers struggle with modern movies. Karl Urban is great, but he just grumbles into his beard.
Whenever I'm watching a modern movie, sticking a compressor on the audio is a must. Open VLC settings, search for "compressor". It's programmer UI, but it does exactly what it says.
What kind of speakers do you have? Let me say that voices become greatly more intelligible with traditional speakers with a full midrange than modern speakers with exaggerated treble and bass.
What may be happening is that your speakers have a scooped profile, and audio mixes often have a scooped profile too. The sound effects and music tend to be bass and treble heavy, so you hear a lot of that.
But the lack of midrange means voices are hard to understand. You need range that to distinguish vowels, etc
I don’t understand how anyone can watch a movie with iPad or iPhone speakers. They are missing the exact part of the spectrum where important info in voices live. It’s just painful for me to pay attention with those speakers.
My parents were doing this, and I got them a simple Bluetooth speaker with midrange, and they immediately noticed the difference. Their faces lit up.
Judging by the comments here, it does seem there is a "double" race to the bottom of more treble and bass -- on the audio mix side and on the speaker side. So it's a compounding effect, which would explain a lot. So the least you can do is get some better speakers.
Or honestly if you have an EQ, you can just experiment with turning up the midrange and the treble/bass down, although with some speakers this will make things sound bad.
----
Also I just skimmed the original article!! Isn't it obvious that the problem is iPad and iPhone speakers ????
I see young people listening to MUSIC on these things and it boggles my mind
They can't understand dialogue out of these crappy tinny speakers, so they turned on closed captioning ?? Makes total sense.
Or are they also using them with ear buds, which shouldn't have the problem? I notice more people NOT using ear buds (annoying people on the train), which makes me think the problem is the speakers
10 years after I bought some pairs of wireless headphones to avoid waking our newborn baby while watching a movie, they still get daily use for exactly this reason. Having the drivers right by our ears with individual volume controls gives us each the best audio, but it is unfortunate we need to resort to it.
Agreed. Background levels higher than dialog are a chronic problem. Actors turned away from the camera, so you don't get any facial cues. Yelled or hurried or mumbled lines, which don't get re-shot because, cost.
Add all that to the usual nodding actors - they don't understand what they're supposed to be feeling so they just nod as they talk. Sorry to call that out, now you will never be able to un-see it again.
And whispering as a substitute for emotion! What the hell? Character is supposed to be feeling intense emotion, so the actor whispers. The director should slap them every time, and re-shoot.
That difference in loudness between voice and effects happens often when the stereo material is derived by a badly mixed down 5+1 material. Having control of the 6 channels levels before mixdown may help to eliminate it, otherwise some sort of compression/limiting is necessary.
Many TVs have the option to set the audio output level to automatic, which doesn't mean the volume can't be changed but that around a given volume the dynamics are less extreme so that faint sounds are amplified and loud ones are attenuated.
I don't think this is a new phenomenon. It annoyed my Dad so much in the 1980s that he build an audio compressor for the TV which quietened the loud parts and amplified the quiet parts.
> Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them
Most of this is a result of surround sound and people not setting it up. There are two main speakers, a center speaker, and various surround speakers depending on the setup.
Dialog is primarily mixed to come out of the center speaker. If you turn the center volume up and the main speakers down you can fix the problem where explosions/music are too loud but dialog is too quiet.
My old AV receiver had a "night mode" (I believe it was called) that did some really great, natural-sounding dynamic range compression. I ended up just keeping it on all the time, for the reasons the parent lists. Alas, the entire unit stopped working several years ago, and I learned it would cost more to repair it than replace it... and I didn't do great research when buying its replacement, so "night mode" is no more.
You accurately diagnose symptoms, but you blame the wrong people. Engineers and actors don't make creative choices, they merely obey directors and producers.
That's actually close to another very important point. Most movies come with a 5.1 mix nowadays, and people watch them on a stereo system. Most players use a very simple formula when converting 5.1 to stereo, something like say Lout = 1/2 Lin + 1/3 SLin, Rout = 1/2 Rin + 1/3 SRin, and leave out the center channel completely. This is also done inside of TVs etc. The center channel gets dropped completely! And sometimes dialogue is only in the center channel - not all of it, but there are some lines every now and then that just only ever come out of the center channel. Those are lost.
This sounds too stupid to actually be true, but it also seems to correspond to my experience. It makes me sad that there's an engineer or produce designer out there, anywhere, who would intentionally pull something like this. It's sadistic. Why ruin your product?
The issue is that most programmers think there's nothing to know about the non-programming-related engineering they're encoding into their programs. So we get crappy audio, we get cars driving into bollards, delivery robots driving over crime scenes, home automation destroying houses, smart locks that can be picked without tools, etc. People severely overestimate their knowledge of what's going on, and underestimate how much complexity there is to the phenomena they're dealing with.
If the information from the C channel is dropped, and the speech information was only in C or for the most part in C, it won't be in L+R, or it will be to some insufficient extent because it'll get obscured by whatever else is happening.
I have a home theater (do they still call it that?) with 5.1, 5 speakers and all that jazz. I tried everything but with many movies (esp. all the superhero stuff) the only option is to lower the volume and turn on the subtitles to be able to follow the dialog. I wish there was an option to make the loud parts less louder and quiet less quiet, but I couldn't't find it (it's an older onkyo).
I'm going to guess that most folks now-a-days go with a single soundbar that acts as the whole sound system, maybe there is still a center channel in the bar? Whether that be for; price, small living space or a partner doesn't want speakers around the world, its a convenient space saver that sits under the TV, sight mostly unseen.
I observed this in The Walking Dead, in the first seasons I could clearly hear the dialogue, but since 4-5 seasons I need subtitles for everything. Zombie noises from 200m away are louder than main characters speaking next to the camera.
>Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie.
Audio component manufacturers have actually responded to this tendency by adding in-line compressors to the audio channels that can be enabled/disabled. Sometimes this is labelled as the "Dynamic Range" feature in AV systems. Essentially it squashes the loudest sounds, which in turn brings up the average volume of the quietest sounds, thus evening the overall volume and allowing for a single volume setting to be used throughout the movie.
I think some of it is surround sound that modern streaming and televisions use without actual surround sound speakers. I've found if a movie/show is in surround sound, changing audio to non-surround sound helps a lot.
We do the same thing, loud noises, quiet dialogues and im constantly adjusting the sound. I've tried the audio settings where you can normalize or do night mode, it just doesn't work well. I have kids trying to sleep. We recently started hooking up a bluetooth speaker that sits between us and on loud scenes we just flip it down into the couch. We both try to work on stuff while watching so subtitles isn't something we can just turn on.
You've got this backwards. Overly compressed dynamics are far more common than "excessive" dynamics. It's definitely not a case of sound engineers needlessly flexing.
Your receiver will have a dynamic compression feature of some sort. Make sure that's maxed and it'll help. But frankly, an action movie isn't supposed to have explosions at the same sound level as dialog.
> ...Whenever I watch movies...turn on subtitles--easy but shitty solution...
Yep, I've been doing this now for several years. I guess i got used to watching (and enjoying!) many films that are not in English, but 99.9% of the time its because of actors mumbling, or some background noise (in the film) not making it easy to discern what was stated.
This is why I sometimes choose the German-dubbed version of a movie, even though I prefer the original one in English. They either mumble that it's hard to understand, or have an accent, or it's just a bad mix there the dialog is disturbed by noises. Dubbing reduces those noises ans removes the mumbling and the accents.
My wife is also very sensitive to loud or harsh sounds and we have to do a similar thing. Sometimes I set up a compressor in VLC, but it's a pain to get the settings right. Really we need something more like a limiter but I don't think VLC has that. It's not very fun to watch a movie on the TV nowadays
> Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie. Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
I am all for a ruthless dialog loudness war, like the loudness war in the 1990s-2010s.
There's a lot of podcasts with egregiously bad audio mixing. Which...c'mon guys it's a podcast. You should get that right. I've wondered if there's a way to use an algorithm to make people's voices a little easier to understand, like slightly exaggerating consonants or something.
Shout out to the ex-Cracked podcasts; a lot of those people -- presumably because of their experience with being part of actual productions -- have sound engineers for their podcasts.
I thought it was my tv having completely broken audio… Or the broadcaster. I noticed that, the volume goes up when commercials kick in, but also explosions, shootings, etc. the volume has to be adjusted every 5 minutes and we are watching 90% of content with captions on since I can remember…
I also suspect the hardware they master for is not the hardware most consumers have. My cheap soundbar isn't going to produce the sounds they want, and im not going to hear dialog. But when I visit a theater, I have no problems hearing the dialog.
> The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her...
Exact same problem at home... it was so bad on Interstellar that after that movie, she never went to a cinema with me again, or watched any movies together at all :(.
There seems to be a wave of naturalistic acting in TV series nowadays. Actors who simply play out the script verbatim as if in pre-premiere. No idea when this started. I'm thinking of the new she-hulk series.
Agreed, mixing at ‘reference level’, which is deafening, isn’t doing anyone any favours. Very few people have a home theatre set at reference level when watching a film or show.
To be fair the consumer audio stack is crap in the average home. I bet a CRT TV would be a big improvement in audio quality compared to most flat screens on the market.
What is the typical end user? Is it you with your TV? Me with mine? My neighbor with their soundbar I can hear through the walls? The guy on the train with his airpods? There is no standard, its all over the place. You might as well engineer so it sounds good when people actually care enough to string together some half decent components than to take a shot in the dark at building around some audio spec that doesn't exist.
Don't forget watching on tiny laptop speakers, cheap earbuds, or little bluetooth speakers. Even older movies are an issue when the sound quality isn't good.
I've never seen an implementation of that that actually did what it claimed, even on a modestly high end Denon receiver it just ends up making all audio sound harsh.
>Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
Hard disagree. I want realism. The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences. Believe it or not this old style speak you see in Older movies was Literally artificial and made for acting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpv_IkO_ZBU
Modern Audiences want realism. They want a certain level of believably that matches with reality. And a dialect artificially designed for "clarity" on radio just doesn't work.
Clarity takes a hit in the name of realism... but who cares? I have closed captions for that. Literally I don't see what's wrong with it.
The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences.
My mind immediately went to that scene in idiocracy - "You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded"
It's pretty clear to me that modern mumbling smarmy sarcasm is the low culture, and the Shakespearian trained actors of the past are high culture.
It's just like with fashion. We may pretend that hoodies and patagonia vests are just as respectable as a 20th century suit, but if we see two photos side by side we deep down know who is better dressed.
Except that's not what I'm talking about. And neither were you. Again did you watch the video?
Both of the actors you refer to talk in a certain British accent. It's not "Shakespearean" in any way; and that specific accent doesn't work outside of any of those contexts of playing high class British people or older "wise" professor types. Patrick and Ian, though both very good actors, have very limited range and their accents do sound comical outside of relevant contexts.
Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the volume low and turn on subtitles--easy but shitty solution.
Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie. Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.