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
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.
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.
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?
I personally like high dynamic range. Most receivers, and I’m guessing most smart TVs, have some form of dynamic range compression if you don’t. Bad quality, “realistic” voice recordings are a different issue. Having a center channel speaker also helps a lot.
Most TVs seem to default to playing the surround audio track, which is a terrible idea when you only have stereo speakers, but I guess the TVs do it in case you decide to hook up a multi speaker system mid movie?? Choosing the down mixed stereo audio instead, makes for a much better experience for most people.
This should be illegal. I’m so tired of having to turn the TV up to hear the dialogue and then all the sudden the loudest noise you ever heard in your life. Then you turn it down … But here’s the next dialogue where you have to turn it back up again.
I’ll take it a step further and recommend K-Lite Codec Pack, it lets you set up MPC-HC with that and the option to enable center boost for 5.1 audio on 2.0 setups
I’ll scope it out! I love VLC but I use MPC-HC when I use SVP to smooth animation up to 60FPS. People hate on smoothing but it works soooooo much better with a decent video card than with a 4000USD Samsung TV hahaha. Get yo artifacts outta here
Quick edit: I have a 2.1 setup, I assume that’s fine still?
Yeah, 2.1 doesn’t have center either (it’s the real reason dialogue is quiet and background is loud. 5.1 expects SL-L-C-R-SR and sub (the .1) C plays the “dialogue” track normally.
Subtitles ruin native-language movies. I’ll enable them if I’m watching something in public because I’m not a monster but otherwise I hate them.
Get some decent speakers, FFS. A ‘sound bar’ does not qualify. A good center channel speaker is essential. Don’t even need the rear surrounds with a good front setup.
I have this problem with games, but there’s no rewind on games, and for some reason every game maker has decided that the most critical information you ever get happens when there’s loud sounds going on as some climatic event is happening and you can’t understand a fucking thing they say.
So most of the game I don’t need it, except for what ends up being the most important times I need it and don’t have it, so I have to leave them on in games.
And ya it’s distracting. At best I’m concentrating on not reading them which is distracting itself.
Not just that, they assume you have an IMAX Dolby system installed in your theater sized living room, that everyone obviously has. Bad mixes are inexcusable and sound mixing snobbism is a symptom of the pompous pretentiousness that is the rotten core of Hollywood. Yes, Hollywood, most foreign films with DTS have perfectly good and serviceable mixes that sound nice in both Stereo and Surround…
Classic schooled actors with theater experience are being replaced by young actors using basic conversational speech and volume. More natural but not that easy to understand.
No, there’s definitely an element of not speaking clearly.
Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hardy as examples. Chris Nolan gets shit on for his terrible sound mixing, but him picking actors who mumble is the main issue.
Put on a movie from 1980 vs one from 2020. The voice clarity is night and day.
Atmos won’t save you from shitty sound mixes, I have a pretty nice speaker setup and still have to turn on captions if I want to hear a conversation without my neighbors calling the cops during the next action sequence.
Older TV shows generally have a more even audio mix, because they were mixed for clear dialogue on TV speakers. Nowadays even TV shows have movie theater mixes, despite the fact that no one will ever see these shows in the cinema. I think TV execs just assume way more people have a Dolby Atmos system in their living room than they do in reality. It’s pretty stupid.
I already fucking struggle with understanding English since it’s my second language, and with this new shit sound, it’s now fucking worse. I used to be able to do without subtitles most of the time, but now I can’t watch shit without it.
They are EQ for 5.1 and the voice goes into the center channel. In a proper system the center channel is bigger than the satellites so you get clear dialog, but if you try to output 5.1 into two channels everything is squeezed together
There’s something called dynamic range, which is essentially the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds. With a low dynamic range explosions and whispers are just as loud as each other.
There has been a recent trend for filmmakers to want a high dynamic range. This makes explosions, car crashes, and gunshots feel extra impactful. The problem is that that means other things become more quiet by comparison. Those “other things” include dialogue.
This leads to people not in a movie theatre or with a home audio setup that costs more than my car not being able to hear a goddamned word.
How recent is that trend ? Because I definitely agree that modern movies’ mixing usually sucks ass for a non-theater setup, but I recently watched some 70’s James bond movie and it was actually much worse than what I’m used to. Like, if I setup the TV volume so the gunshots/explosion and the musics didn’t blow up my eardrums, dialogues were basically unintelligible 80% of the time
This. They really need to start including both low dynamic range AND high dynamic range audio options in home/streaming releases of movies, and TV should exclusively be LDR if they can’t simulcast the the different audio signals.
HDR audio sounds amazing and is totally worth it when you have the right audio equipment, so it shouldn’t stop existing entirely, but it’s bullshit that people that don’t have that equipment get an even worse experience than LDR as a result.
They already give you the option of choosing between stereo or 5.1, I don’t see why a low dynamic audio mix would be any different on the technical side.
Then again, a new mix would cost more money.
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