If you make a movie you make it with multiple audio tracks (lines), often there are dozens of lines for cinemas and more for IMAX. If you mix all those lines together, e.g. to 5.1 for home cinema you’ll lose dynamic range. Now if you mix it into 2 lines (stereo) this means you basically have everything (explosion, whispers) on the same two lines for left and right and that’s why you either need at least a front speaker for dialogue (so only effects are muddy but voices are clear) or bear with it.
They do for 5.1, which is a pretty common home setup, even 3.0 or 3.1 works quite okay with it. How many people do actually watch movies with a stereo setup nowadays?
This is why I turn on the audio normalization on my TV. It makes the explosions sound super weird but it’s impossible to watch movies with kids sleeping otherwise. The mixing is so bad.
Watching TV is also shit. When an ad break comes, I have to mute the sound or turn down the volume, regardless of normalization. That should be illegal in my opinion but it’s the status quo.
Ok it can’t just be me. It feels like at a certain point sound levels got messed up. When I watch older stuff it’s fine the new stuff I feel like I am skipping backwards to catch what they said.
What an obnoxious conclusion they have - we need to buy better speakers. I have good speakers. Old things sound great, but new shows sound like crap. This is their problem to fix, not ours.
There are ways around that, for example I watch my Plex server on an Apple TV and there is an option that will reduce loud sounds so I can hear dialogue without being blasted away at other parts
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