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I always have this problem on yt. At least I can complain in comments
Exactly why I use subtitles. Seem to recall Interstellar was horrible like this.
It was great in cinema. It’s terrible at home.
Frankly annoying as hell that shows and movies can basically only be enjoyed in a cinema or with headphones.
Where’s the audio equivalent of HDR?
It’s funny because I understood what you meant, but I think it’s the exact opposite of HDR. You want to reduce the range with a compressor.
There’s HDR for displays, which increases the dynamic range, but there’s also HDR for photos, where the dynamic range is compressed. So maybe they meant the latter? Very not confusing naming…
What about the HDR on my HDR TV that just makes all colors darker when enabling HDR?
And some home cinema receivers do offer this option. Often labeled something like “night listening mode”.
I’ve found upgrading my front center speaker has greatly improved dialogue. I had my speakers from a home cinema kit and the center front was a puny crappy speaker.
192kHZ/24bit audio vs 44.1kHZ/16bit
It’s called dynamic compression, often labeled as night mode. Makes quiet stuff louder and loud stuff more quiet. My AVR has it as a feature and probably most TVs as well.
Yes. And stop fucking mumbling. And use a proper lighting for fuck sake, I don’t care if it is middle of the night in a forest, I want to be able to see what’s going on.
I prefer for actors to mumble then their character is supposed to mumble, and just use subtitles. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten too used to subtitles from all the anime I watch but I always enable it for anything on YouTube or any other video content I consume.
Agree on the lightning part though, at least for action scenes, bad lighting is often used to cover for bad CGI. For narration scenes of the place is actually dark, I don’t really mind for me to basically only see silhouettes, it’s appropriate.
And please stabilise the camera. I’m not in this car chase, I’m trying to watch it without getting a migraine.
Shakey cam to cover up a limited budget for a car chase, instead of getting creative … so if the rapid cuts and wobble wasn’t there you’d see that they only had one street and couldn’t exceed 30mph
I swear there was a phase where shakey-cam had just become the in-thing.
I remember watching a TV series or a movie or something where shooting had clearly wrapped before shakey-cam was popularised. And it looked like they had just added it in post. It was unnatural movement (so, not like someone was holding the camera), and there was too much of it. I had to skip a lot of the shakey-cam scenesMe when I feed the false memories of strangers and myself onlineI swear I’ve made that exact same complaint about a show or movie! I like when I can see whats going on when I’m watching something
Good luck getting actors and directors to understand hyperealistic and method acting are not ideal on every instance.
Subtitles on, dumbass.
Some of us can’t use subtitles. I want to actually watch the cinematography and the actors. If text is on-screen I can’t not read it
Well since you’re obviously into film, you should invest in a proper Dolby Atmos/DTS:X surround setup to give you options. You can either turn up the center channel, put it in “dialog” mode, or enable dynamic range compression (night mode).
Regardless, tou’re not getting the full experience if you don’t have a surround sound setup. Ideally you should buy a receiver and hand pick your component speakers, but even a sound bar is better than TV speakers, so long as it’s from a well-known brand and has up firing drivers in both the front and rear. If the third number in the number of speakers is 4 or higher (ex 5.1.4), then you’re good to go.
This applies to everybody reading this, not just lagoon8622. All your dialog problems are being caused by your TV speakers.
I shouldn’t have to invest hundreds of dollars into a whole separate sound system just because the sound designers of a movie can’t properly balance to audio for stereo sound, the single most common audio set up in the entire world.
It would be nice if TVs came with a proper sound system, but since they don’t, you should factor audio into the cost of your home entertainment system. That’s like going to a restaurant and ordering food without a drink.
Blind people don’t exist.
If subtitles are on I may as well be deaf because I’m no longer watching with those damn words getting in the way. That’s what books are for.
This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.
If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they’re shouting, that’s not adding realism, they’re doing bad acting.
If the sound engineers can’t get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that’s not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they’re bad at mixing.
If the director can’t keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that’s not artistic choice, they’ve made a bad film.
Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don’t want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.
If you don’t want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it’s not the director’s problem, it’s the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it’s just that streaming platforms and TVs don’t always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a “night mode” in your TV settings though, that’s an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).
So the excuse you are making is that the performer on stage does not need to speak clearly and loudly, because the people in the first few rows can hear them fine.
Good tip on night mode though.
There is millions of people who “don’t want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup”. It is the director’s problem, optimise for the masses, not people who can afford to setup a cinema system in their home
Where do you draw the line? If you use a soundbar, someone else is complaining because they use their built-in speakers. But if you optimize for that, someone else is using their laptop speaker on the train.
What really pisses me off with this “argument” is that the audio information is all right there, which you would know if you bothered to read the second half of my comment before getting all pissy.
5.1 audio (and the standards that superseded it in cinemas) all have multiple audio channels with one dedicated to voice. If you have a shit sound system, the sound system should be downmixing in a way that preserves dialogue better. Again, the information is all right there as there is no stereo track in most movies, your player is building it on-the-fly based on the 5.1 track. It’s not the director’s fault that Netflix or Hulu is doing an awful job at accounting for the fact that most of their users are listening on a sound setup that can barely reproduce intelligible speech.
I draw the line at “people watch stuff on TV and cannot hear any dialogue”.
I don’t need to have a doctorate on audio / put in thousands of dollars into a hobby I don’t want to hear dialogue in a movie without rupturing my eardrums by an action scene.
If everything is there, let’s optimize for people like me, and let people like you mess around with the settings for your home cinema.
people watch stuff on TV and cannot hear any dialogue
did you read anything I said or do you just want to complain?
have a doctorate on audio / put in thousands of dollars into a hobby
Good news then, a more-than-decent 5.1 setup can be had for ~500 €. A decent soundbar for a few hundred.
and let people like you mess around with the settings for your home cinema
I can’t if the audio source is fucked up because directors have been forced by studios to release with low dynamic range.
My whole point is that your audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> downmixer -> your shitty 2.0 channels speakers and my audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> receiver -> my 5.1 setup.
You’re asking the master to change to fit your needs. I’m asking the media players to fix their fucking downmixers because that’s where the problem lies. Leave the studio mastering alone god damn it.
Broooo, did you just say 500 as if that was cheap? Damn. That’s what a whole ass tv costs.
Expecting for sound volumes to be somewhat balanced in a tv or generic player is not too much to ask, I don’t care if a surround 5.1 or 9.1 system would have it sound right, because stuff shouldn’t be fine-tuned for specialised gear, stuff should be fine-tuned for general usage and specialised gear should have in-house tweaks to make it work well.
You got it backwards and you sound pretty elitist. I get what you mean with general usage audio programs not fine tuning properly, but you are asking 90% of the population or programs to tweaks their systems so that they work for things fine tuned for 5% of the population/systems. You do see how that sounds pretentious, right? That’s how it reads at least.
I, too, am sick of everything being dumbed down for the people least invested in something. It’s what a whole ass tv costs because the tv is only half of the system. (Really It’s about a third, the last piece is the room you’re watching stuff in and the furniture it contains. Physical layout matters.)
I see that, but that is not what I am saying.
This is just not how things work on a technical level. The default is how cinemas work because that’s the experience movies are made for; literally every other way to consume movie audio is “general usage audio programs fine tuning” and that’s what needs fixing. That’s my entire thesis. By calling me elitist you’re just inventing things I’m not saying to get mad over.
Yes 500 € is a lot of money. But I will say I bought a good audio setup years before I even had a TV (some parts second hand so it did not actually cost me that much, and a 3.0 setup gets you 80 % of the way there). It’s a markedly better experience to watch a movie on a shitty PC monitor with good audio than on a 55" OLED with built-in speakers, and I will die on that hill. And anecdotally I’ve heard actual filmmakers say as much.
I don’t care about any of that. You care about all of that. You go buy that shit for $500 and let me watch my show with dialogue that I can hear. There is more normal people than the likes of you, so solve the issues for the common Joe, not for a dude that spent way too much time in a subreddit about audio for movies.
So you’re advocating that the whole industry cater to the lowest common denominator instead of simply having people who don’t want to waste money on audio setup just activate certain settings?
You do realise the masses are mostly using tinny TV speakers and cheap wireless earphones to watch movies, don’t you? Catering to them means compressing the audio to their small dynamic range, so now any sound system that is better than a TV speaker will sound just as shit.
No, they’re advocating for sensible defaults. Just because you’re an enthusiast doesn’t you’re the market. Being supported is great, but believing you deserve to be sppecially catered to at the expense of the maajority is real smug bullshit.
Again, they already provided options for people who don’t have a high end sound system, what part of this do you not understand? They are not catering to the high end users only. Mixing sounds for the lowest common denominator means you’re completely alienating higher end users, but the vice versa is not true.
We have movies with multiple audio streams. So you can choose English, or French, or crew commentary.
Why not have a mix for “standard home TV setup” and a mix for “5.1 ultimate surround sound system” and keep both groups of people happy?
It’s called Dolby 2.0 and a lot of Blu-ray movies actually do have a track (though not all). Though it’s been my experience that the native 2.0 usually sounds worse than the 2.0 that I compress down from the 5.1 or 7.1 when I make a backup of my movies. I am unsure as to why this is. I’m guessing it’s cause, as OP stated, the studio sound mixers just don’t give a shit to make a 2 speaker system sound good.
Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.
Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.
The problem is that there are “default” weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don’t care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you’re using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie’s problem.
WHY are you getting down voted despite giving clear suggestions on how to get around this problem for people without a 5.1 surround sound setup?
people don’t like spending money, and it’s the entire problem. Visuals people will shell out money for a great TV, but then complain that the audio is terrible. Really people need to invest in both. If you are watching a movie on an expensive TV but didn’t do anything for audio, well then of course it won’t sound good. TVs aren’t designed to have good audio. They give you a speaker to be able to listen to something, but it’s a small cheap one or two in the back.
Fact is that for movies it’s a video and audio, and people should be thinking about both. People don’t need to go spend another 500 bucks on a 5.1 system, but even a cheapo sound bar for 150 is going to sound better - because they made it for audio. It’s an audio device. I have zero surprise that people can’t hear things well from a device that is meant to display visuals first.
I had a 5.0 setup before I even bought my first TV. I was just using my PC monitor until then.
It’s counter-intuitive but decent sound comes first. I’d much rather watch Interstellar in 360p with 5.1 audio than in 4K OLED HDR with built-in speakers.
But when you say that people get mad because they spent a grand on a TV that sounds like shit and they feel they have to defend their choices.
Agreed. In computer terms it’s similar to using integrated graphics when you bought everything else to be a gaming computer. I mean, the integrated graphics will work, but it feels like you’re missing a curcial component there. Or buying a computer with a spinning hard disk as it’s main drive now. You have to go into the purchase thinking of the whole usage in mind, not just what’s on the screen.
I guess it’s a hot take, but dynamic range is a very useful tool, not limited to movies but also music and almost any audio that isn’t just “talking heads”.
I do want explosions to be significantly louder than whispers.
Not everything is a podcast / video essay that needs to be mixed to minimal dynamic range.
Right?! A track like Spanish Sahara by Foals that uses the full dynamic range is such a pleasure to listen to. Then there’s In the Air Tonight which IIRC has a digital release with super compressed dynamic range. The whole point of that song is that it slowly builds up to a genre-defining drop, so it had better stand out!
But people want to listen to movies on their built-in TV speakers with children crying in the background, and they don’t want to understand how or why things are the way they are, they just want to complain that the world doesn’t revolve around them.
I spent $400 on headphones to address this and despite having had enough issues with build quality to not recommend Bowers & Wilkins specifically, they sound damn good.
Even if I had the money and desire for a setup like that, I would not want a high audio range in media because I hate loud noises and am very sensitive.
In my opinion the big explosion can be a little bit louder than the footsteps but there doesn’t have to be a huge difference. I’ll sacrifice some realism for my eardrums.
And why can’t all dialogs be about the same volume either?
Does night mode fix mumbly american actors who are unintelligible at any volume?
It should reduce the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound in a movie, but if an actor doesn’t speak clearly in the first place, I don’t think it helps much.
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at - many new / recent movies have such poor election that it’s hard to tell what they’re saying.
Well, you gotta try it first to know if it helps or not. A lot of the time, it really is just the problem of the movie having an audio dynamic range that is too much for the sound system to handle. In those cases, it really helps when you compress that range to better fit your speaker’s capability.
For the sound engineers, your not wrong, but they don’t have the power you think they do. Asking for another take is an annoyance but accepted by the camera team and visuals, but audio is often overlooked, and you can’t just keep mixing a bad take. But, directors are on a time crunch and so a sound guy saying “actually I know that take was perfect but we can’t hear anything” is usually ignored.
This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.
I’ve noticed that some of the best enuciators are people that have a lisp and have obviously either taken speech classes or have self taught themselves how to overcome their lisp with better enuciation.
I present to you the master orator and renowned pugilist philosopher Mike Tyson.
For anyone who might find this useful:
Kodi is great for normalising volume and I try to use Kodi for Plex and YouTube on the TV:
Try adjusting the Volume to about -20 dB and the Volume Amplification to +30 dB. The latter will compress the audio as it increases volume to avoid peaks, and will effectively “flatten” the volume contour a bit. Adjust the values to your taste.
The other thing that has really helped is having a good Bluetooth speaker. If the kids are playing and being noisy in the room while I’m trying to watch TV, then sound is much clearer if the speaker is right next to me rather than trying to turn up the volume to drown out other noises.
Have no shame in using subtitle, because american movie is either horribly sound balanced or spoken in unintelligible accent.
I feel like the problem is the TV. I used to have this issue constantly but ever since I started watching things with headphones on it never happened
My TV has a “Night” mode that caps the volume at a certain level, so you can make the dialogue audible without having action be way louder. And also a “Volume Levelling” setting that has a similar effect, by trying to make all the sounds roughly the same volume rather than only quieting the ones that were louder to begin with.
It’s the TV. No one should expect TV speakers to be worth anything. Even getting one of the cheapest sound bars or even computer speakers will make a noticable difference
I’ve got some decent stereo speakers connected to my TV. Music sounds great, but it does not fix this issue at all.
A soundbar might actually be better cause it has no base I assume.A sub would help, it would divert some of the responsibility away from your driver’s there. It could then focus a bit more on dialogue, and you could probably tweak the EQ to be more friendly towards the mids. That being said, play with the EQ in general, you might be able to squeeze a bit more out of your current ones
Play around with your settings, you might be able to fix it.
Nobody should expect a product to function reasonably out of the box. That would be insane, right?
It does function reasonably. It plays audio. That is all it needs to do. If you want high quality sound, but a device that specializes in sound.
My ass plays sound too, but nobody want to pay to hear it.
They may as well just sell them without speakers at all. I don’t need specifixally high quality sound, just not-garbage sound.
Are you willing to pay through the nose?
Getting decent audio out of a TV with basically no bezel is a hard engineering problem. Read: expensive.
There are some crazy schemes that have been tried, like embedding a piezioelectric layer on top of the display, but the reality is no one wants to pay a grand or two for that when they could just plug in a soundbar. What TV makers should really do is bundle soundbars with the TV in a combo pack, which I think they already (sometimes) do.
Getting decent audio out of a TV with basically no bezel
That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? They’re trying to make TVs into an art piece instead of a functional appliance.
We were ok with fatass CRT sets when that’s all that was available. When LCD became standard, most people were happy about that. Now that bezel-less TVs are a thing, apparently we can no longer go back to anything but a 65" iPad.
If you want your TV to have an audio system on par with the 4k OLED display it’s going to cost twice as much and weigh three hundred pounds. And be gargantuan. Speakers need space to move air and resonate.
I don’t need high-powered, audiophile-grade surround speakers. Just maybe something a little better than a landline phone. There’s a pretty wide spectrum, and TVs come with shit tier audio. They don’t have to, but they do.
That’s what they sell sound bars for. They even have brackets to hand the sound bar from your tv or wall mount. Putting that in every tv adds a hundred bucks for hardware not everyone will use.
“One size fits all” sucks, it’s better to offer a modular system that people can adapt to their needs and situation. It requires a tiny bit of extra effort but plenty of retailers will do the thinking for you too if you pay them.
It doesn’t need to be one size fits all though. Currently one size fits few, when a few extra bucks could make it one size fits most.
I blame Dolby 5.1… switch to Dolby 2.1… people encoding online video should do this before ripping video or us and audio leveler on the resulting files and save everyone else the hassle.
Or just get a 5.1 setup. Speakers are cheaper than ever.
Edit: Well. They were. Before an orange man decided to destroy the economy.
I looked into this. I’m not paying 300 euros for a decent speaker set if I can get the same results by not having 5.1 surround sound selected.
Hey totally fair, whatever works. I built out the surround system because, after experiencing someone’s home theater when I was a kid, I’d always wanted to. 😁
The solution is obviously to learn german. Then you can watch with our excellent and easily intelligible dubs.
But you better enjoy our voice actors, we have about 3!
For me Star Trek is one of the worst offenders of this.
Which series? All of them? Serious question.
Right now TNG. I’m re-watching it with my fiancé. The sound of the ship whooshing past is deafening.
It’s been a minute since I’ve seen the rest of the shows. So I don’t remember how good their mixing is.
Lol, I was actually thinking of using TNG as a positive example! Patrick Stewart is trained in Shakespearean drama and enunciates as such. Very pleasant to listen to.
Spacing a tired-ass joke over several shittily drawn panels does not magically make it funny again
But it’s funny because it’s true.
It is why I enable “Loudness Equalization” on every audio device in Windows.
It makes soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer.
Can’t stand it otherwise either.
You can get an audio compressor extension on most browsers too. It functions by reducing volume above a threshold and increasing overall output to compensate.
On the flip side, if a poor audio mixer overly does this to make their track sound louder, services such as YouTube penalize the volume of the entire audio track.
Human ears are more sensitive to certain sounds, so boosting certain frequencies can make something sound louder without necessarily increasing the overall amplitude of the sound waves (air pressure).
This is why I’ve cancelled all movie subscriptions.
![Volume [Mr Lovenstein]](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/579/944/976/646/219/original/e93a9a49d1ddc0df.png){kind=link}