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.
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.