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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The '05 tripod noises are meant to sound like V1 bomb scare-sounds, which is originally made to sound like mythical Horns of Jericho:

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.

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.

Huh, that’s neat. You can definitely see the influence of that sound then following on into Inception which seemed to really popularise it.

It's always been around. In fact it's been very popular in games like the Modern Warfare series, which have major popular appeal.

Those were definitely not a big deal (compared to now) and were a very different game back in ‘05

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 think OP was talking about frame interpolation aka "soap opera effect", which is both horrible and enabled-by-default on most large TVs nowadays.

Prior HN discussion on the 'soap opera effect' I'm referring to >> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10613575

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.

Agreed. Who knew that corporate structures are not conducive to creative expression?

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.

> between Christmas Eve and when the first movie came out

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

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 believe what you'd call night mode is called "Dynamic EQ" on the Denons.

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.

Unhelpful but probably accurate.

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).

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

It might to some extent, but it's not the perfect way to go.

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.

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.

FWIW, adding a Center channel to my former 2.0 seems to have really helped me hear dialogue.

A Bose sound bar with an “enhanced dialogue” mode helped me greatly.

> Pig

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

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.

No one pirates anymore. That’s such a tiny tiny minority in a post Netflix world.

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

How will the studios ever deal with that given last years excuse, that piracy actually increases sales!

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.

I really want to see it.

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.)

Underrated tweet. I agree fully.

> 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.