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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 still find the dialog way too quiet in most movies and 5.1 TV shows, even turning the center channel up +6dB.

I could turn it up even more but it's ridiculous that it should need more than that.

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.

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.

3D phase changes occur and create comb filters at you ear and your ear is unique to you.

This is why Kunstkopf(dummy head) recordings were never as successful as anticipated.

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.

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.

I'm reasonably sure I am not going deaf, since I have no problem following audio fiction podcasts with the windows down in my car during my commute.

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?

Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.

Did movies and TV copy video games' Real Is Brown trope?

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).

Try watching handmaid's tale without blackout blinds.

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.

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.

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?

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"

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.

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.

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.)

#3 does not follow from statement #2.

The missing element is that 3D localization is due to the pinna.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1967.005...

It became less of a problem because 5.1 became a lot more common and TVs are smarter about muxing 5.1 into 2.1 than they used to be.

But something changed in the last ten years and having a real 5.1 setup (like I have) isn’t helping anymore.

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 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.

In my case I had a huge problem with eg. the music in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knives_Out being a lot louder then the rest (source blue ray).

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

Why is sound stuck so far behind?

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.

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.

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.

0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

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.

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.

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.

Have you seen Barry Lyndon in a 4K OLED TV? You should.

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.

We all know this isn’t gonna be true. Just another thing to faff about with that will stop working and have to be reset.

Even the effort of finding how to place it around my furniture doesn’t seem worth the effort to hear sound from different directions.

Yes, it's cheap to some software developer on HN, but if you are on an average income it's harder to justify.

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.

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.)

And when half the consumers will be done with this upgrade, we’ll invent something new.

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.

Center channel ends up on back right or something totally ridiculous. There’s an open issue on the bug tracker. It’s wild.

Whether they actually achieved that depends a lot on your equipment and its tuning.

It's fundamentally different from the "static" channel mixes we had before.

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.

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.

(https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/tv/atvba773c3c9/tvos> "Reduce Loud Sounds")

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.

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.

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 have little idea when I cannot be understood, and it helps me to know when I do in fact communicate plainly.

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.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brainspotting/2022...

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?

What if he pulls off checkmates?

>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.

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.

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.

Edit: oh, and I forgot about the ubiquitous 5.1-to-stereo downmixing bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32883588

[0] https://longreads.com/2016/12/08/braaam-inception-hollywood-...

BTW, here's what the timbre of the "BRAM" sound is based on for the most part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886196

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.

Strange that article doesn’t talk about the tripod noise from the ‘05 War of the Worlds.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY099ihULs

https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/09/sound-fear-room40-boss-la...

Listen to the V1 bomb sound in the clip on that page - there's no surprise they're being referred to in following works of fiction.

The Stuka had the scare sound siren and it had a much higher pitch.

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”.

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).

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.

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.

That potentially gives you _decades_ to binge-read the books... how many depends on what do you consider "the first movie". :-)

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.

This basically adds more bass and treble as you lower the volume, due to the way the ear works - the Fletcher Munson curve.

This still won't help with the terrible excess dynamic range that current movies insist on doing though.

You'll still have to adjust the volume all the time, but it will make things sound much better at lower volumes.

    aformat=channel_layouts=stereo, compand=0 0:1 1:-90/-900 -70/-70 -30/-9 0/-3:6:0:0:0

Speech reproduction gets muddled by distortion and by masking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking ).

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.

...was terrible, I wanted more screentime with that adorable pig...sorry Nic, you're in the shadow of a real star...

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?

It’s actually difficult to even do now the community is so small.

I have decided it is the sequel to Color Out of Space, which was, by far, the best alpaca-themed rendition of an HP Lovecraft story at the time.

Also, the audio mix didn't really get in the way of that one for me.

(It probably still is the best, but I'd love to be corrected.)

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.

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

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.

"But he said it with such an air of gravity..."

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.

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.

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.

I think that you can have both, but you can't always have both. Because it doesn't always make sense to.

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.

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).

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.

omg that's embarrassing, but I guess it's true

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.

Before that it worked perfectly and better than my Denon receiver :(

If only there was a hotkey to toggle it on and off, instead of hidden 4 levels down the touch-and-swipe menu.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oj7a-p4psRA

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.

> It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss with all these marbles in my mouth.

(German band, lots of English language covers with "wait THAT'S why they're saying?!?" moments.)

[1]: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#acompressor [2]: https://github.com/ruuda/dotfiles/blob/fff8d1d905767e85b57d7...

   ffmpeg-normalize -v --progress -c:a aac -b:a 768k -ar 48000 -t -14 *mkv

https://github.com/slhck/ffmpeg-normalize

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No matter the size of the screen, bad acting is bad.

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.

This is a matter of taste. Does anyone really expect to enjoy every movie?

I love subtitles, but I accept that not everyone is comfortable using them.

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.

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

The friendliest thing a train can do is bloody show up on time, which National Rail seems to have had a problem with lately.

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.

Can’t talk about popular German music, as I don’t listen to that or to other popular music.

Mainly I find that Germans who disagree with these things have not lived in other countries, and those that do immediately agree.

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.

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 like the tv on quietly relative to other people I know, and continually messing with the volume is tedious.

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.

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.

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.

It reduces variation in volume, so you can hear the quiet parts without having your ears blown out by explosions or gunfire

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

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.

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.

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 avoid stuff without captions. Sorry, your shite is almost certainly mixed horribly.

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.

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.

I am all for a ruthless dialog loudness war, like the loudness war in the 1990s-2010s.

The difference is that adverts are very heavily compressed so the quiet bits are much much louder making the whole thing seem loud.

However, the only thing I found for Android was:

ViPER4Android FX For Android 12 & 13 (rooted only?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOeNGy-xhxs

https://www.xda-developers.com/viper4android-v2-7-new-ui-pro...

My computer audio driver has one also.

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 :(.

Turns out I’m also half deaf in one ear.

Anyway I’d recommend both a centre channel with adjustable volume and a hearing test.

A pretty common complaint is that developers only test things on their latest generation i9, with unlimited ram, and 8k displays.

Guy could barely speak english, but listen to the background audio when he screams that. Great example

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.

My mind immediately went to that scene in idiocracy - "You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded"

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.

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.

I think you're trolling.