> 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.