It’s honestly ridiculous how bad the stereo (aka what 99% of viewers will experience) mixes are.

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.

Theory: Because distribution companies for movies made having DTS/Dolby Atmos/Whatever mandatory in the theater, sound engineers primarily focus on that because that takes 99% of the time. Because theaters with just optical stereo (yes I'm aware most theaters use digital distribution and projectors now, that just hammers home the point) aren't really a thing any more they don't really bother optimizing it because "nobody will hear that anyway". Then when the film goes to home distribution the distribution company takes the automatic downmix that is the existing stereo track for the optical stereo on a print and use that because they don't want to second guess the sound engineers or the director.

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.

Yeah but this is 2022 are there even movie theaters anymore? The box office sales are deep in the red and many theaters are going bankrupt. Most of What I watch are tv shows

> Yeah but this is 2022 are there even movie theaters anymore?

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.

People have been saying cinema is dying since Netflix took off. It's not true and still isn't true. Movies continue to set box office records.

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.

I mean that works for the theater companies but itv doesn’t really generate more revenue for studios. Their audience is shifting to the home experience

What a travesty it must be to realize your personal behavior has no bearing on the rest of what the public is doing. Movies are doing pretty well still. Lots of people are still going out, but there are still some trailing pandemic effects. Still, it's really not that far off from pre pandemic, especially when there is a big marvel / franchise film

I like both the big screen and the small screen. Sometimes, a 21" 1080p display or an iPhone at home just doesn't compete with a proper cinema experience.

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.

Why is it similarly bad in TV and movies they always knew would be direct to streaming?

What is your setup like? I feel like your comment better describes a problem with subwoofers. I've had plenty of enjoyment from bass throughout my life, but I still don't see the need for a sub anywhere near watching TV or movies. Never mind the related issue of highly-resonant perfunctory ones bundled with cheap consumer gear.

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.

Begs the question: why not ship 2 mixes? Not like audio is a significant chunk of the data of a modern blu-ray movie.

I mean they do, I purposefully select stereo on Netflix, but I get the feeling the sound engineers don't change it and just hammer the 5.1 down in a way that sounds bad.

It's the same on the 5.1 mix.

Maybe when downmixing it to stereo. If you play it on a real 5.1 system (not a soundbar or other "Dolby Atmos" gimmick with less speakers) your dialogues will come out of the dedicated center speaker which will make it easier to follow. (most home cinema receivers even have a 'boost dialogue' function if you want to know what's happening in the latest Nolan film...)

I have a good calibrated 5.1 setup.

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.

Can you recommend a good explanation of the different types, how they are recorded encoded etc.? From a naive sonar perspective it seems like two mics one on each side of a head sized camera would do fine for encoding all the angle information. But then you would have to register and apply that knowledge to each boom mic input, and synthesize it for every sound effect that wasn't there at recording. Tl;dr Why isnt two channels enough to generate the correct output for N speakers spread around me?

Left/right sound localization is partially a function of "shadow" created by the head. However more important to localization is the pinna, the outer ear. Sound enters the earhole directly AND reflects off the folds in the pinna. This causes complex comb filtering. (cancellation) Our brain learns how to correlate sound direction with these complex filterings. It's quite amazing.

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.

Right, that is how we do it. But isn't all the phase information present in two channels of audio to know how to map all the signals to an arbitrary number of angles? You'd need to know the spacing of the mics, but that could be a standard.

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.

No. The phase differences for FULL localization are not in the incident sound. (There are phase and amplitude differences for left/right only)

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 5.1 vs 2.0 is a bit of a red herring, it used to be a big problem a decade or two ago, but today it is just a small to insignificant contributor to the problem.

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’ve been using ear protection in my ears at the movies for decades. They’re just too loud.

yeah, I rec etymotic high fidelity earplugs for the least distorted sound

That would probably be a step up from the wadded tissue I usually resort to. Not that I go to the movies much any more.

The last time I went to a theather was before the pandemic, and frankly, I didn't bother going back exactly because the audio became almost an agression to my senses.

Fwiw, I just wish more systems had built in dynamics controls.

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

Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet.

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.

> Also, it is now fashionable for actors to mumble.

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?

If the actor's intention is to mumble instead of enunciatiting clearly (presumably because of some notion of authenticity), then they will also mumble the studio takes. It's not a problem of sound volume/background noise, which ADR can fix, it's a problem of style over ease of understanding the dialogue. This mirrors the problem of TV series sometimes becoming too dark to easily follow the action on a TV screen in usual conditions (infamously so in the Long Night episode of Game of Thrones).

The mandolorian is so dark my iPad has issues with not enough dynamic range. I think they shoot that way too cover bad cg

Those scenes look amazing on good TVs. Making bad screens show them well seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve.

99.9% of the audience will strain to see what is going on, but let's blame their screen buying acumen (and their viewing practices - even the best screen will not make those scenes easily watchable in a sunny room, which is how most people watch TV) instead of making them actually watchable.

What part of “seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve” makes it seem like this is blaming the people who buy the screens and not the people that make the screens.

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

Art is worse though. From intangible sludge https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d... to modern DPs and directors not being able to film a dark scene competently https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1564633641828884483

James Stephanie Sterling did a video a long time ago (which I currently cannot find) about "the best game for your HD TV" and concluded (IIRC) that it was Viva Pinata because of the ludicrous colourfulness of the game which really showed off the power of HD TVs. Contrasted with the "intangible sludge" of the Dooms, Quakes, etc.

Now I have the urge to play that and Guacamele will n myy brand new OLED :)

> colors, what happened to them?

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

Color is going away from too many things. Also cars... and for some reason, Taco Bells.

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

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).

The screens and sound setups are fine. The movies are bad products here.

Dark scenes tend to look better on bad TVs because they tend to brighten everything too much with LCD bloom. I feel like it's an opposite problem with OLEDs, they're the one with scenes that are too dark.

On good TVs under perfect lighting conditions only.

Try watching handmaid's tale without blackout blinds.

Good, sounds like we agree that the problem is the way they’re displayed, not the way they’re mastered.

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.

You should not need to adjust anything, volume or brightness, in the middle of episodes/movies.

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.

By "good TV" do you mean one that is stuck in demo mode with blown out saturation and gamma?

Of course not, that would look awful.

You're 100% correct and also brave for saying it out loud on the internet. Prepare for gnashing of teeth from people with subpar picture quality.

> Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet.

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?

Not a sound guy, and have struggled for a while w/ this for my plex setup @ home, so grain of salt.

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"

The conversion isn't so much as "automatic" or opinionated, but clearly defined in a spec. And it _is_ mathematically correct in terms of sound energy entering the ears. A device may be doing the conversion incorrectly of course.

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.

The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations.

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.

> The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations.

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.)

1. "That's because a human is not 1 microphone." true 2. "It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2" 3. "which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area"

#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...

I have a 3.1 set-up with the center boosted by the maximum amount allowable. Will eventually upgrade to 5.1 once the kids are old enough to not climb on the rear speakers.

You will find that even with a 5.1 setup, you will still want to boost the center a lot.

Even listening on a good, calibrated 5.1 setup, the center dialog is way too quiet.

That used to be the problem.

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.

At least Dolby Digital takes the scenario into account, applying dynamic range control on 5.1 downmixing. Be sure to set the DD decoder to RF mode (as opposed to line mode) to adapt the range for stereo.

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 don't think that's true. In fact movie producers are notorious for "phoning in" the 5.1 mixes for the streaming platforms, focusing most of their energy on the theatre mix with Dolby atmos and what not. Usually the 5.1 mix you get on netflix is hurriedly put together as an afterthought.

That would be plausible except I miss much of the dialog in theaters, too.

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.

That's basically the same point though - it's not that special attention is given to specifically 5.1, it's that a) more separate speakers helps in itself; b) it's primarily mixed for such a multi-separate-speaker system.

I have a 5.0 system, and the dynamic range mumble voice + super loud explosion is still very present, even when I artificially boost the center channel. I think voices are actually better on a typical tv speaker 2.0 setup.

I agree.

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.

I'd buy more videos if they'd hire you to make alternate audio tracks.

I've noticed some streaming platforms (eg Paramount Plus) occasionally fail to make use of the center speaker entirely when supposedly in 5.1; this makes the dialog nearly inaudible. I only get this issue with some content sources, and forcing the mixer into stereo mode alleviates the problem.

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.

So it’s similar to when a developer great an Electron app that works great on a 24 core machine with 32GB of RAM. It’s not going to be great unless we’re forced to test it on the average dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM?

Even on a good calibrated 5.1 setup the dialog is still way too quiet, so in your analogy the Electron app is still crappy on the best PC.

> most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most

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 massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer.

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.

That pretty much sums it up. I wouldn't even be surprised if the percentage of households with anything over 2.0 has dropped in the past two decades.

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.

I used to watch movies on an absurdly excessive 3000-watt sound system, equipped with dual 18" subwoofers... but I never bothered to get a surround decoder.

What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup.

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?

> 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.

Mine's on my laptop with headphones. I don't even have a TV, let alone a fancy sound system setup (and have no clue what those numbers everyone's throwing around even refer to).

X.Y (e.g. 5.1) means X wide range speakers and Y subwoofers. You also sometimes see it like S/T.Y where S+T = X, and it refers to front/surround speakers.

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.

For real enthusiasts, also X.Y.Z, adding ceiling/bounce speakers for vertical spatial audio.

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

I don't much about audio, but wouldn't binaural stereo only work if the two speakers are to the sides of you, like with headphones? Would this work from a TV that's an ambiguous distance in front of you?

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.

I think it only works/is a lot easier with head/earphones? Since you know exactly where the ears are w.r.t. the speakers in that case.

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.

Binaural audio starts to really fall apart when you don't have the sound exactly as the microphone setup was. Moving the speakers even a couple of feet away, and then not having them exactly lines up with your ears, it ruins the effect.

Wondered this too. That video along with the millions of ASMR videos on YouTube have very nice binaural stereo sound, but I don't see this being done anywhere else.

And that's perfectly fine, don't get me wrong. If that gets you enjoyment from the media you watch, that's great. You definitely don't need a fancy theater room to be happy.

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.

I upgraded my receiver and TV recently and it was a pleasant surprise that Apple TV remote now switches the receiver on and off automatically so the setup really requires no tech awareness to use.

I watch movies for the story. 480p and my laptop speakers are enough for that. I enjoyed movies just the same when they were 700mb DivX with 128kps mp3 sound.

It’s an audiovisual art, it’s way more than just the story.

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

Yep, same here. Most of the movies which depend on "immersion" are just horrible. It doesn't matter if the dinosaur in "Jurrasic World Dominion" sounds realistic if I already want to quit the movie after seeing the first 10 minutes.

Speaking as someone with a 5.1 system they haven't set up:

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.

One big downside of 5.1 is that you now have 6 speakers to place all around you. Depending on the room and layout, that can be hard to impossible to do without looking ugly, or even to do at all.

> and easy to setup.

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.

In my case I have a great receiver, but only 2 speakers. To get surround I'll need to put speakers in places that get in the way and run cables in place where I don't want to see them.

It's a pain though, you have to take the time to setup the extra speakers, cable them and etc and have the space to do this, and of course the extra expense.

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

> What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup.

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.

Well for one I'm not going to run cables everywhere and the other solutions have their faults: wireless satellite lag sound, and still need a power cable; battery operated satellites require constant maintenance.

Yea, unfortunately, my old 5.1 surround system of my bachelor days fails the “wife test.” Currently, to get all the channels the sound mixers give you, you need 6 ugly black boxes with speakers in them spread around your living room and another big black box receiver. And all the speaker wire everywhere. Yuck! Even if you hide the wires in the wall and use ceiling mounted speakers it’s still intrusive and ugly.

I think our auditory system just isn't great. Compressed formats with bitrate of 320kbps is borderline indistinguishable from raw formats in audio, while it will be borderline unbearable in video.

That's a really insightful way of putting it. My first reaction was, 'well, duh...', but then I realized that I'd taken for granted the fact that digital video of (arbitrarily defined) adequate quality must have a much higher information rate than audio of the same. But surely there are animals for which the opposite is true!

And among those with a 5.1 setup, most have the speakers placed haphazardly around the room and not at all as required for a correct rendering.

I'm with you. After having a nice 5.1 system 20 years ago, and a space set up for it, I now have fallen back to nice 2.0 or 2.1 systems.

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.)

I would like to believe that, except that the dialog is almost always too quiet in a movie theater.

Yeah, I enjoyed watching Dune at home more than in the theater because I could turn on the captioning.

Exactly, I saw Tenet at the cinema I really couldn't understand the dialog.

It’s a form of product advertising: “You should hear Steve’s 5.1 system, he can hear the movie properly, the sound is so great!”, “He also has a 1:500000 contrast ratio so he can see faces on his screen that we can’t see on our pitch-dark screens. He can actually see the orcs on LOTR!”

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

It's hard to believe that TVs are still so buggy that they would intentionally play 5.1 in an unusable way on regular TVs.

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.

There’s been a bug for years in the Apple TV VLC app where it plays the audio channels on the wrong speakers.

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

I'm just fed up with modern sound. It never sounds right, and it's just too complicated. I use captions on a lot of shows where there is dialog that is too quiet, etc. I'm pretty sure my sound system is not set up right, but I just don't want to figure it out. I debug software for a living. I just want my entertainment system to be plug and play.

Would it not be possible to have multiple audio mixes available and play the one that is appropriate for your setup?

This is the idea of Atmos. They deliver the source with an absurd number of channels. Your local player knows your room and speaker arrangement (from setup tuning ahead of time) and remaps the stupid number of channels into the right playback based on the equipment available. Got 20 speakers all around the room? Cool. Have a 5.1 setup? No problem. Just have the stereo speakers on your TV? Supposedly, no problem.

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

Atmos doesn't have channels - it has played tracks with their 3d location encoded to the receiver can convert it into the correct channel setup.

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

Yes, on Netflix you can choose. Choosing the stereo mix does offer a significant improvement on hearing dialogue. Regrettably, it has no idea of sensible default or even choice of default, so it always goes to 5.1 even if your setup doesn't have it.

Yes, but audio tracks used to take up valuable space on physical media, so you might indeed sometimes find distinct 5.1 and 2.0 tracks, but usually for the main language only. And of course this duplication is one of the first things pirate releases do away with, in order to reduce the final file size, so you won't find them on most mainstream scene releases either.

Yes that was going to be my suggestion. I rarely have this issue with my own (5.1) system, which I also use a lot more, but often struggle on others' (TV speakers, or external but <5.1).

I have a good 5.1 setup at home, and the dynamic range is still way too large so I'm forever adjusting the volume.