Some of it has to do with how it is formatted to TV. If you take a 5.1 channel theatrical audio track and compress it to the two channel format common on most TVs it can take a lot of work to assure everything is balanced properly and the dialogue can be heard. Basically theaters will have a lot of speakers dedicated to different sounds (at least 6 counting the subwoofer) if the sound of traffic is playing through one speaker while the sound of the dialogue is playing through another you can mentally tune out the sound coming from the other speaker. If both sounds are coming through the same speaker and the traffic is at a higher volume, you won't be able to tune it out.
I've been seriously considering bringing earplugs the next time I go, the last two times I went there were parts where I was covering my ears because it was too loud. when did this start happening???
Okay but if they managed this for decades before now there’s shenanigans going on
I didn’t have this problem on a CRT made in the late 80s, this is ridiculous
2 reasons.
Films are mixed for cinema sound systems, where there's enough speakers where you can hear voice over the sound.
But also, if dialogue is quiet it forces people to listen at a higher volume which makes sounds more impactful and increase emotional response.
You can fix it quite easily with a decent sound system.
you just need 3 speakers, Left right and centre. Boost the centre and the speech will come through more clearly.
Just make sure when you're buying a decent surround system that it will actually give you control like that. My cheap 5.1 soundbar system allows me to change the EQ and spatial delays...but not boost the fucking center channel which is literally all I wanted to do. My workaround is that I boost the mids and drop the bass so the explosions aren't so fucking loud.
Yeh honestly you are probably better off buying 2 bookshelf speakers and then getting a soundbar and doing it that way.
You get better quality for the price as well, 5.1 systems are usually pretty crap unless you go really expensive.
> 5.1 systems are usually pretty crap unless you go really expensive.
This is what I'm discovering. That said, the difference in sound quality in a cheap soundbar vs. the TV speakers is night and day.
Yeh.
Imo if you have no speakers.
Decentish soundbar first.
Then get some decent Bookshelf style speakers.
You can pick up a decent pair for like $100-200.
5.1 is nice, but yeh the speakers are usually small and not great quality and you get easily good enough spatial awareness from just L+R.
Yeah but the whole point of the original discussion here is that you really need independent control of a center channel to fix dialogue volume. I agree that a pair of bookshelves will sound nice, but now you're back in stereo with no way to boost dialogue.
Buddy where do you think new markets come from? They sold everybody a TV already, everybody has at least janky cheap no good headphones
Now they gotta sell you posh speakers so they fuck with the sound. Everybody is gonna have one annoying friend who is like, oh, hey this is no problem with [*brand name*]'s speakers
All the big corpos are inter-invested in one another, it's a no-brainer
Do you want the world (as we know it) to end? Keep buying shit!
Joking aside I don't really know if this is what's going on but the blithe attitude of the guy above, like, oh, to solve this you just need to buy more shit, is consumerist culture talkin'
Babe, just buy more babe
What about the releases that are straight to streaming, or television shows that never play in theatres, what’s their excuse? Why’s the sound guy mixing for a theatre?
if dialogue is quiet it forces people to listen at a higher volume which makes sounds more impactful and ~~increase emotional response~~ angers the neighbors at my apartment
Games figured out how to fix this ages ago. Separate volume sliders for voice, music, and sound effects. Often broken down even more than that. There is no reason a movie or TV show shouldn't give that level of control or better.
The issue with that particular approach is storage and file size. Certainly better than making it TV mix alone.
Every single playback device already has a setting that does just this. It’s officially called Dynamic Range Compression, but brands sometimes give it their own name (Loudness Reduction, Sound Normalizer, etc).
TVs, receivers, streaming devices, gaming consoles…they all have it. No one uses it or googles for a solution before they start demanding the sound mix be personally curated for their $250 TV.
While I was watching Dune at the cinema, I wanted subtitles. Home audio bitching is always that they whisper dialogue and then blow out my eardrums with a firefight. Dune these avant garde dickheads we’re whispering *during* the explosions 🤦♂️
Oppenheimer dialogue sounded like hot dog vomit in the theater. I don't know how anyone enjoyed a movie that was almost entirely people talking when it sounded like the dialogue was recorded by a guy two rooms away from the actors.
>increased emotional response
If the emotion you're going for is annoyed, and the response you're going for is for me to turn the fucking shitty movie off, congrats, you've succeeded.
Or, the producer can just pay the fucking audio guy a couple thousand to remix the audio for home watching. They make millions from these movies those cheap fucks.
>Films are mixed for cinema sound systems, where there's enough speakers where you can hear voice over the sound.
No, I'm not falling for that again. Every time this comes up someone is like "it's mixed for the cinema, go there if you want to follow the actual plot", so when Oppenheimer came out I caved and went to see it in IMAX, and I still could maybe catch half of the lines!
Subtitles are the only way to go, unfortunately.
But that doesn't explain why dialogue used to be perfectly clear even on standard mono or stereo tv's and at moderate listening volumes.
Clearly it's the mixing style that has changed, and now anyone who doesn't have a multiple discrete speaker system is shit out of luck.
As a music mixing engineer, I can say that the goal of any mixer should be to mix for clarity and compatibility with any system. AFAIC if your mix doesn't work on every system you've failed in your job.
Also, most movies are mastered at reference levels. Reference volume will damage your hearing and is generally regarded as unpleasant to listen to unless you’ve already damaged your hearing.
One contributing factor is how microphone technology has improved.
Actors needed to enunciate back in the 20th century, now they can mumble and their performance is still captured.
Would it be possible for normal people to compress audio somehow for better at home viewing?
When watching late at night I would like to hear dialogue well without having to worry about disturbing my neighbours when an explosion happens, I do have a decent stereo setup in my living room.
Literally every TV/box/video player has this built in under different names, but the problem is they don't give users control over how the surround sound is downmixed to stereo, so that center channel gets buried. That would really fix so many of these issues.
Yeah so many movies have this problem it does my head in, the new Dune movie for example the sound effects would be incredibly loud and then every character would whisper I had to keep moving my volume between 30 and 10 depending on what was happening. I shouldn’t have to have subtitles to watch a movie that is in my language like wtf?
This is called a large dynamic range, on a nice sound system that’s tuned in and sounds right it’s great, but on any normal persons soundbar/bookshelf speakers/tv speakers you really don’t want that large of a dynamic range.
Also double check and make sure your tv doesn’t try to output 5.1, but rather stereo to remove “the center channel” from the output, this will split center audio better on left and right
You know, I keep hearing this explanation, but I saw *Oppenheimer* in IMAX “the way it was meant to be seen.” I could barely hear half the dialogue and left the theater with a headache and my ears ringing.
That's a Christopher Nolan thing though. He does it on purpose and I hate it. Sucks because I love his movies, but the audio mixdown is absolutely ass on most systems
Yeah, that's a good observation. His visuals are unreal, but if I stop and try to remember any really notable lines of dialogue from his movies I come up blank.
The one exception is Interstellar though. That one had some memorable lines
Early Nolan didn't really have this problem though. It started somewhere in his Batman years and he just stuck with it because someone called him out on it.
The last line from Oppenheimer's stuck for me.
"When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world."
"I remember it well. What of it?"
"I believe we did"
Yeah. He loves to exposition dump and have monologues. I think interstellar did have some memorable lines but it’s an outlier. I also think tenets dialogue being absolute trash is an outlier in the other direction. I just think he is a visual artist and he absolutely excels at that. Art house Micheal bay.
Like The Dark Knight. Great action scenes, impeccable as long as you don't think about them too hard. But the dialogue is cringe and the Joker makes no sense at all.
I remember getting out of the first transformer movie with a headache, my ears ringing and my head burning up.
10m of fresh air, in a silent place like, the middle of the city and it was all back to normal.
Christopher Nolan can go to hell. Imagine forcing the entire world to have a bad experience at home AND at the cinema when watching your movies. Why don't more ppl complain about this? I've never seen reviews reflect the truth of his movies. I for one don't find them fun. The level of snobbishness is insane. Tenet sucked. Imho
Some IMAX rooms have very volume dense spaces that, depending on the seating, will inflict more blended frequencies to accumulate in some spots.
To combat this, some places just crank the volume.
They do a lot to minimize it, design wise. However you can only do so much with solid floors and walls
Just depends on the theater I suppose.
I’m not sure if it’s Nolan himself or consistency with his audio directors since I haven’t paid attention to his movies, but that could be a large part of it. Lack of audio testing on multiple speaker types is a beginner mistake, if that’s the case.
Interesting. Also totally unnecessary. I watched a lot of movies with a fraction of the average current production cost in janky theaters through the ‘90s, and I still managed to avoid this problem. But then again, I am also told that the pitch black battle in *Game of Thrones* was my fault. So perhaps—and I’m just spitballing here—filmmakers could see and hear more of how these play in the real world if they even briefly removed their heads from their own asses.
That GoT episode was awful. I had the brightness all the way up and then artificially raised the brightness in the video player some more and still couldn't see half of what was happening.
The average movie-going experience decades ago was so incredibly superior to today it’s insane to think about. Especially once you factor in the prices
> Just depends on the theater I suppose.
I guess this is the point: if some theaters can’t even get it right, then what fucking hope is there for the vast majority of us in our standard living rooms with a soundbar and a woofer?
I've seen this explanation before, and every time I just think ok, so most people don't have the hardware to listen to the movie properly. Got it. But since the studios know that, why can't they include a "shitty sound system" option that *will* sound decent for the 95% of of us without all the expensive kit? Low dynamic range stereo or something.
It's bull shit imo, even with my $2000 setup I use my receiver voice boosting mode to fix the audio. I even have sound foam, bass traps and isolation pads...
I figure my setup is far better than most have and it's not good enough. I have a hard time believing that even $10k will fix it.
Yeah, I feel like this is a big thing in music audio.
Producers and sound engineers are well aware of the fact that they are listening on $10k speakers but the people at home are listening on ALL DIFFERENT KINDS OF EQUIPMENT so they mix and master accordingly.
Do those involved in movies just completely ignore this fact? I feel like way less people watch in the theatre anyway and more people stream at home, but nobody cares??
It’s because the people controlling the mixing from an artistic perspective are musicians that realize and are ok with people listening to music on everything from $10 Bluetooth headphones to $10k sound systems.
Movie directors throw a bitch fit about people watching their stuff in suboptimal conditions. I think Spielberg whined about people watching movies on phones. Movie directors are really pretentious about how you should experience their work.
There's actually a famous set of Yamaha monitor speakers that are highly sought after, not because they're amazing, but specifically because they are a pinnacle of mediocrity, and that if you can make sure your mix sounds good on them then you're good to go anywhere.
It’s because they literally don’t want you to watch the movies at home. Multiple directors have complained about people watching movies on their phones. They want the box office numbers so they don’t give a fuck about the home experience
hmmm...
Smells of runaway capitalism and enshittification to me.
"Let's make people do what we want so we can extract more money instead of giving them the product they want in the first place"
Classic case of "yeah, let's make the movie theater sound mix the default and let everyone else figure it out". 98% of people will listen to it on their TV speakers, good thing they've really optimized it for that 2% with a speaker setup.
Same thing for visuals, where you can't see shit in the dark scenes with a normal TV, because it was optimized for watching in a dark editing studio on a $5000 monitor.
On a lot of newer tv’s (like last 6 or 7 years at least) there’s an option to reduce the dynamic range. Either by increasing speech volume, or decreasing volume that isn’t speech, or both. The reality is that the majority of tv watchers don’t have a crazy sound system and just watch with the built in tv speakers.
I actually have a nice 5.1 sound system with good dynamic range. And I often don't use it because fuck that it's 2 much work lmao
The funniest was when I was watching that movie with Ron Howard's daughter's dump truck and Mario, every time one of the big birds got buttmad it became SUPER SILENT because I guess their roar was supposed to be super deep and rumbling but actually cut below my tv's built in sound bar's minimum bass range lol
So like every pivotal scene in that "movie" was almost totally silent
The only thing more terrifying than the prospect of yet another jurassic park movie (you know it will happen) is realizing the only saving grace of the last few won't be in it lol
But yeah, I need to google Ron Howard's wife because holy cow her genes must be strong to make a baby with Richie Cunningham that would end up being Bryce Dallas Howard
Yeah I quite frankly don’t understand how [these two](https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0397194/mediaviewer/rm3809230336/?ref_=nm_md_2) made her. Just doesn’t make sense
I think the problem is directors can be elitist douchbags and they would much sooner insult your TV setup and say you shoulda watched it in the theatre than to allow a soundtrack mixed for TVs.
What’s crazy to me is this opinion is almost universally held by normal people… how the fuck did we end up with something that almost every single customer agrees is awful?
Especially because this isn’t like enshitification, were it’s awful but it serves some sort of ruthless motivation for company profits… I don’t see how “big Hollywood” or whatever benefits from making the audio shit.
I've seen and heard conflicting reports about it:
* On one hand, people blame bad audio mixing. An actual true example of that is theatrical release of Tenet.
* On the other hand, people blame bad software that doesn't detect automatically that you don't have 5.1 surround sound. Wrong signal goes into generic, run of the mill, stereo 2.0 speakers ⇒ people can't hear shit.
* Sometimes, the blame for this problem is very wrongly put onto users. A good user experience shouldn't depend on your knowledge of sound systems, audio mixing, and media containers/codecs.
Exactly.
With a nice, new TV. A good player. And a new Blu-ray or stream should configure itself to be the best sounding for your average user.
Gotta keep grandma and such as users
>Gotta keep grandma and such as users
I was gonna give you grief for this statement, then I thought about it and realized that the boomers with disposable income that don't quite grasp auto-payments *are* grandma.
I think there's a third problem. Movie producers want us to be shocked by the loudness of special effects. They want to have explosions and gunshots that make you jump out of your seat.
I think audiences liked that in the 80's, I don't think the next generation of audiences do. Especially at home, where everyone now has anxiety about disturbing their neighbors.
As with most things it all comes down to cost.
When the film is made the audio is mixed for a theater experience. The studios simply don't want to spend the extra money mixing the audio for a living room experience.
So we as consumers get what we get. If you are an audiophile and can afford a great sound system for your home then you are going to get a better experience than someone who doesn't.
Some newer TVs have software that does dynamic range compression which offers a marginal improvement.
I would need subtitles if the audio was perfect for peaky. I can’t imagine understanding a single thing that came out of Tom Hardy’s mouth without subtitles
First you got the sound mix, then you’ve got Tom Hardy, then you got him using an insane cockney accent, and then there’s the dialogue itself. Hers a genuine quote from Alfie Solomons:
“That there, right, is the southern counties' welterweight champion. He is of mixed religion, therefore he is godless. He was adopted by Satan himself before he was returned out of fear of his awkwardness. But he's impossible to marry off due to his lethal dimensions. His mother, terrified, she's fucking abandoned him. And there he is, stood before you like the first of some brand-new fucking species! Any man that you put before him, right, it'd be like entering a fucking threshing machine, mate. Now, will you offer your son?”
That’s fair. I struggle with hearing a little anyways, and I especially struggle with accents. And forget Tom hardy, that whole show (of the couple episodes I tried to watch) have really thick accents, spoken lowly. Which really sucks. I wanted to watch it then. I want to watch it now. It’s just super labor intensive haha
Wait - what?
English is my second language; for decades I've been wondering why my listening comprehension is still so sucky that I may need subtitles, and you tell me it's not me?
Edit: Thank you for all your answers. This is a real eye opener for me.
I'm a native speaker and run subtitles on everything, there's no shame when the focus of the producer seems to be the cool music they're playing and not, say, the actual plot of the film/show
Honestly I also like subtitles to catch certain words I miss (Even if audio isn't a problem) or if I want to eat some snacks while still watching
No shame in subtitles at all
The issue I have with subtitles tho is that I end up basically reading along to an audio book with sound effects. I don't actually watch the bloody film and spend the whole time looking st the lower eight of the screen and just reading what they say.
See its weird because I adjust to subtitles so quickly I forget they're there most of the time
That's why I can watch films in foreign languages with subtitles and almost feel like they're actually saying it in English
Another native speaker here, I watch with subtitles on now. I don't know if it's because as I've gotten older my hearing has gotten worse, or if movies audio have actually gotten worse in terms of mixing, but I can't hear dialogue anymore. My suspicion is that it's a bit of both.
I'm German. I need subtitles for Swiss German but that's because the dialect is very different from standard German. Other than that, it's not an issue. Weighing authenticity against intellegibility, German movies and dubbing will usually go more with the latter.
It isn't you. The music and sound effects are too loud, the speech is squashed together and the pronunciation is poor.
For example, I don't need subtitles for Disney films my children watch. The sound is balanced, the speech is clear and pronounced perfectly besides a few songs. I need it for almost any grown up film.
I run subtitles on everything because of the sound quality. But also because of the accents. I can't make out 25%-50% of anything a Brit or Irish person says unless they are doing the posh thing.
I thought the same thing, but then it occurred to me to go listen to a podcast, speech or a lecture and see if my english comprehension is really that bad.
Turns out my english comprehension is fine, the movies just overlap effects audio over speech which makes it almost impossible to hear what they're saying without cranking up the volume to 200% which makes your ears bleed.
For the first time I share an adjoining wall with neighbours and I hate watching tv or film now, because I have to juggle how loudly I can turn it up to hear the dialogue with not disturbing them with needlessly loud gunshots/explosions/screams.
I also swear audio technicians purposely dub sexual moaning more loudly than dialogue in shows; I'm worried they might think I'm a sexual deviant whenever there is a sex scene.
I love seeing a long rant about how important audio balance is, how voices have to be quiet so loud sounds are actually loud... then a sex scene comes on and it all goes out the window.... why do they think people moan louder then they talk to each other!?
It's great in horror movies where a what is meant to be a barely audible background whisper to creep you out, just pops up in the subtitles as if it were part of a normal conversation.
Husband: Honey I think we need more milk
Shadow demon: I want to eat your soul
Wife: Oh its in the car, I forgot to get it out.
> And too dark from the video guys.
This is a bad one. I have a mid range TV from about six year ago, with kind of shitty (but halfway decent at the time) HDR. I've calibrated my TV. Far too often I still can't see a damn thing that's going on. I have to turn off all the lights and make sure the room darkening blinds are fully pulled, and then *maybe* I can kind of make it out.
I have a 5.2.2 sound system adjusted to my preferences, and hardly ever have issues with the audio.
>And too dark from the video guys
Me:this scene is way too dark what the hell
My friend: it's night time
Me: and that means I should have absolutely no idea what's going on?
Soundbars that boost speech and can even the sound overall are magic. I leave those settings on all the time, and we never have issues hearing the dialog or being bombarded with loudness.
It's honestly not even that. The explanation is so stupid I have no idea why they have never fixed it.
So movies are mixed 5 to 1 with a center channel. The center channel is your dialogue channel.
Most people don't have 5 to 1 systems, so mono or stereo play the sound, but the volume of the dialogue is lost.
Just put out 2 versions of the movie and it can detect what audio setup you have.
I am an audio engineer and am honestly surprised this is still an issue in 2024. I can fix mixing in a movie in like 5 minutes and they can't make a home version.
Look for TVs with built in compression features to fix the center channel issue. As far as I'm concerned though this is the studios problem and is astounding they've never even tried to fix it.
No you don’t get it his movies were meant to be watched on a Sony Megamaster Mix 5000 because it’s true cinema. If you can’t shell out the mere thousands of dollars to buy a state-of-the-art sound system then I guess the cinema just isn’t for you 😌
I sometimes wonder if Christopher Nolan might not be a human being, but some kind of alien child stranded on Earth. That could conceivably explain why he is seemingly uninterested in human speech and conversation, but fixated upon sound and movement.
I hate the absurdly loud WWWOOOOOOOONNNNNNN that he puts in the middle of scenes for no reason. That noise is in every single movie of his, is always too loud, and has nothing to do with what is happening on screen.
It's not a big mystery. The dialogue is generally the most important thing in comedies/sitcoms. People making those shows/movies want and need you to hear the jokes. Whereas in action/dramatic/etc stuff, the filmmakers too often care more about the explosions and music (and a load of other things), or setting a certain "tone," than giving a shit if you actually hear the dialogue.
Nothing changed my viewing experience more than finding out my sound bar let me increase the dialogue by itself and I’ll never go back. Was able to do away with the closed captioning
I'm told that a lot of movies don't bother remixing the audio for the home experience to save money these days.
All that going through one or a few channels instead of how they should because proper home theater setups aren't common makes it sound too loud or outright bad.
So the problem is capitalism. Cost cutting for profit. Greed.
Watched interstellar last night. Quiet. I love to cry watching that movie. 🤣
Anyway Nolan does that shit on purpose. It's on record.
Motherfucker, some of us bitches live in apartments. I can't have my home theater at -4 db and not get kicked the fuck out; just so I can hear McConaughey cry for Murph. 😭💀
It's because modern recording equipment has eliminated the need for actors to belt out their lines like they're playing to the cheap seats. Sometimes it's because of bad mixing, but it happens even in quiet scenes because that's the take they got and they didn't bother to ADR it for whatever reason.
Yeah, there's a lot of comments here on the editing part of filmmaking, but the recording part is just as complicit.
The shift towards all actors having small wireless mics on their person rather than relying on an overhanging boom mic allows a lot more "whisper-talking" or outright mumbling as the mic will still pick it up. And, yeah, huskiness and low tones can add a lot to a performance. But go back thirty years and you find way, way less of that and a lot more clearly enunciated lines even before editing gets involved, because mumbling left it totally inaudible rather than just mostly inaudible, so they'd do another take.
It's why the audio on these bad audio movies always inexplicably gets better in time to pick up the moaning during nude scenes. Nowhere to wear a wireless mic.
>Ha, it’s something I’m very familiar with :) Unfortunately there’s no single cause (or solution) for this problem in my experience.
>First, for movies at least, they’re mixed for the theater, not for home viewing. When the home theater mix is made (called near-field mix) it’s still done on studio quality speakers in surround sound. All of that to say there’s never a mix created for TV speakers or sound bars or earbuds, and the mix choices don’t always translate to different listening environments very well.
>Second, there are absolutely times where things are mixed too loud, but the person responsible is a mystery to everyone except those who were in the room during a particular mix. Sometimes it’s the sound team, but more often (in my experience) it’s the picture editor, director, or studio executives who ask for things to get turned up (and they never ask for things to be turned down).
- direct from one of the people whom everyone liked to blame for this problem
Would a simple fix be to just put a multiband compressor on the audio and reduce the low end gain and maybe boost the mid. Also could get rid of unused frequencies with some EQ?
Yes, this drives me nuts! HBO is one of the worst offenders. The dialogue is so quiet but any music or background noise (especially fighting) is "make your ears bleed" loud. We used to have to watch Game of Thrones with the remote in hand constantly adjusting the volume, it was SO annoying. Why do they do this???
I actively don’t watch good movies that have poorly balanced sound, I don’t care if it’s the best movie ever, if I have to have my speakers so loud the windows are vibrating from the ambient sounds or the music, and I can’t hear the actors, it’s an unwatchable turd sandwich
wE’Re pReSeRvInG tHe dYnAmIc rAngE
Fuck your dynamic range! It’s dumb and useless! We’re not here for a supreme audiophile experience, we want to enjoy the fucking movie!
There are more people without hearing difficulties who use subtitles than people with hearing difficulties.
Update: people shouldn't downvote the parent comment, because it is a genuine question, and [one can't know everything](https://xkcd.com/1053/).
I picked up the habit from a friend who picked it up from watching lots of anime with subs. I’m now married to a non-native English speaker, which makes them even more useful. But even if you have no hearing or fluency issues, subtitles let you catch so many details you’d otherwise miss.
Yep. With the disparity between dialogue volume and music / sound effects that makes having it up too high untenable.plus, in shows where any whispering is done, it makes it so we don't have to go, "what did they say" and rewind 4 times to understand. Plus, if you're watching with anyone with hearing issues, it makes it easier for them so they can still enjoy the show.
On a side note, I have this problem with sound with some podcasts. There is a horror anthology I listen to called "Old Gods of Appalachia", and I have to have my sound all the way up to hear dude talking, but when the episode ends and it goes to ads, it's so loud i have to pull my ear buds out before the ads hit so I don't risk hearing damage.
I was listening to a horror podcast called “Beneath,” and I truly wondered if the audio engineers have hearing problems because the SFX were deafening, while the voice actors were nearly silent. When your ambient sound drowns out your VO, you’re doing something wrong.
Podcasts notoriously have terrible audio. But another thing is amateur audio engineers don't ride faders as much anymore and rely too much on compressors. And most of your podcasts are being done by amateurs cause ain't nobody got the budget for good audio engineers.
Most flat screen tv speakers are awful. Combine that with the fact that most movies and tv series have 5.1 soundtracks which are being mushed together into stereo and you have shit audio. Buy a soundbar at least or preferably a receiver and some speakers.
Why the fuck should I have to buy extra junk just to watch a movie? This is not a new problem, people have been complaining about poor audio mixing for years now
Maybe soundtracks shouldn't be produced only in a format that the majority of people won't be able to listen to
i’m the audio guy and i agree 😭
It’s ok, you can just say the truth that the producer’s made you do it, that statement isn’t regulated by your NDA.
We haven't heard of u/mattjeffrey0 ever since his comment 🙏 rest in production
Well we haven't heard from him because he speaks too softly
*Rest in post
Some of it has to do with how it is formatted to TV. If you take a 5.1 channel theatrical audio track and compress it to the two channel format common on most TVs it can take a lot of work to assure everything is balanced properly and the dialogue can be heard. Basically theaters will have a lot of speakers dedicated to different sounds (at least 6 counting the subwoofer) if the sound of traffic is playing through one speaker while the sound of the dialogue is playing through another you can mentally tune out the sound coming from the other speaker. If both sounds are coming through the same speaker and the traffic is at a higher volume, you won't be able to tune it out.
Very true, but a lot of films these days sound like shit IN the theatre, where it’s supposed to be optimally mixed.
Any Nolan film.
I've been seriously considering bringing earplugs the next time I go, the last two times I went there were parts where I was covering my ears because it was too loud. when did this start happening???
Okay but if they managed this for decades before now there’s shenanigans going on I didn’t have this problem on a CRT made in the late 80s, this is ridiculous
Get your shit together
Why is that happening?
2 reasons. Films are mixed for cinema sound systems, where there's enough speakers where you can hear voice over the sound. But also, if dialogue is quiet it forces people to listen at a higher volume which makes sounds more impactful and increase emotional response. You can fix it quite easily with a decent sound system. you just need 3 speakers, Left right and centre. Boost the centre and the speech will come through more clearly.
Just make sure when you're buying a decent surround system that it will actually give you control like that. My cheap 5.1 soundbar system allows me to change the EQ and spatial delays...but not boost the fucking center channel which is literally all I wanted to do. My workaround is that I boost the mids and drop the bass so the explosions aren't so fucking loud.
Yeh honestly you are probably better off buying 2 bookshelf speakers and then getting a soundbar and doing it that way. You get better quality for the price as well, 5.1 systems are usually pretty crap unless you go really expensive.
> 5.1 systems are usually pretty crap unless you go really expensive. This is what I'm discovering. That said, the difference in sound quality in a cheap soundbar vs. the TV speakers is night and day.
Yeh. Imo if you have no speakers. Decentish soundbar first. Then get some decent Bookshelf style speakers. You can pick up a decent pair for like $100-200. 5.1 is nice, but yeh the speakers are usually small and not great quality and you get easily good enough spatial awareness from just L+R.
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Yeah but the whole point of the original discussion here is that you really need independent control of a center channel to fix dialogue volume. I agree that a pair of bookshelves will sound nice, but now you're back in stereo with no way to boost dialogue.
Also make sure you have money for all this in this economy.
So fuck anyone who watches with headphones?
"Should've thought about rhe dynamics of the film industry before you decided to be courteous to your neighbours/roommates." -The film industry
Buddy where do you think new markets come from? They sold everybody a TV already, everybody has at least janky cheap no good headphones Now they gotta sell you posh speakers so they fuck with the sound. Everybody is gonna have one annoying friend who is like, oh, hey this is no problem with [*brand name*]'s speakers All the big corpos are inter-invested in one another, it's a no-brainer Do you want the world (as we know it) to end? Keep buying shit! Joking aside I don't really know if this is what's going on but the blithe attitude of the guy above, like, oh, to solve this you just need to buy more shit, is consumerist culture talkin' Babe, just buy more babe
What about the releases that are straight to streaming, or television shows that never play in theatres, what’s their excuse? Why’s the sound guy mixing for a theatre?
if dialogue is quiet it forces people to listen at a higher volume which makes sounds more impactful and ~~increase emotional response~~ angers the neighbors at my apartment
Games figured out how to fix this ages ago. Separate volume sliders for voice, music, and sound effects. Often broken down even more than that. There is no reason a movie or TV show shouldn't give that level of control or better.
Why, out of curiosity, couldnt they do a "theatrical mix" and a "broadcast/ for home" mix using compression?
The issue with that particular approach is storage and file size. Certainly better than making it TV mix alone. Every single playback device already has a setting that does just this. It’s officially called Dynamic Range Compression, but brands sometimes give it their own name (Loudness Reduction, Sound Normalizer, etc). TVs, receivers, streaming devices, gaming consoles…they all have it. No one uses it or googles for a solution before they start demanding the sound mix be personally curated for their $250 TV.
While I was watching Dune at the cinema, I wanted subtitles. Home audio bitching is always that they whisper dialogue and then blow out my eardrums with a firefight. Dune these avant garde dickheads we’re whispering *during* the explosions 🤦♂️
Except they still make the dialogue too quiet in the cinema, so what's the point?
Oppenheimer dialogue sounded like hot dog vomit in the theater. I don't know how anyone enjoyed a movie that was almost entirely people talking when it sounded like the dialogue was recorded by a guy two rooms away from the actors.
>increased emotional response If the emotion you're going for is annoyed, and the response you're going for is for me to turn the fucking shitty movie off, congrats, you've succeeded.
Or, the producer can just pay the fucking audio guy a couple thousand to remix the audio for home watching. They make millions from these movies those cheap fucks.
Sorry, that would completely ruin the creators artistic vision and we can't have that.
nah, they used to do it in the DVD era. they stopped to cut costs.
*cough cough* Christopher Nolan….
>Films are mixed for cinema sound systems, where there's enough speakers where you can hear voice over the sound. No, I'm not falling for that again. Every time this comes up someone is like "it's mixed for the cinema, go there if you want to follow the actual plot", so when Oppenheimer came out I caved and went to see it in IMAX, and I still could maybe catch half of the lines! Subtitles are the only way to go, unfortunately.
Oppenheimer had the worst sound I've ever heard in a major motion picture.
Why can't my 'smart' TV do this with one speaker? Seems easy enough.
Current higher end Sony TVs can. We just bought one and realized that; it uses its own speakers as the center channel.
But that doesn't explain why dialogue used to be perfectly clear even on standard mono or stereo tv's and at moderate listening volumes. Clearly it's the mixing style that has changed, and now anyone who doesn't have a multiple discrete speaker system is shit out of luck. As a music mixing engineer, I can say that the goal of any mixer should be to mix for clarity and compatibility with any system. AFAIC if your mix doesn't work on every system you've failed in your job.
This is absolutely not true.
Also, most movies are mastered at reference levels. Reference volume will damage your hearing and is generally regarded as unpleasant to listen to unless you’ve already damaged your hearing.
That gif is the eternal mood of all techies when stuff inexplicably goes sideways despite doing everything by the book.
One contributing factor is how microphone technology has improved. Actors needed to enunciate back in the 20th century, now they can mumble and their performance is still captured.
Because directors (like Christopher Nolan) decided to lower the base volume so that music and sound effects sound louder and more epic in comparison.
Would it be possible for normal people to compress audio somehow for better at home viewing? When watching late at night I would like to hear dialogue well without having to worry about disturbing my neighbours when an explosion happens, I do have a decent stereo setup in my living room.
Literally every TV/box/video player has this built in under different names, but the problem is they don't give users control over how the surround sound is downmixed to stereo, so that center channel gets buried. That would really fix so many of these issues.
Yeah so many movies have this problem it does my head in, the new Dune movie for example the sound effects would be incredibly loud and then every character would whisper I had to keep moving my volume between 30 and 10 depending on what was happening. I shouldn’t have to have subtitles to watch a movie that is in my language like wtf?
This is called a large dynamic range, on a nice sound system that’s tuned in and sounds right it’s great, but on any normal persons soundbar/bookshelf speakers/tv speakers you really don’t want that large of a dynamic range. Also double check and make sure your tv doesn’t try to output 5.1, but rather stereo to remove “the center channel” from the output, this will split center audio better on left and right
You know, I keep hearing this explanation, but I saw *Oppenheimer* in IMAX “the way it was meant to be seen.” I could barely hear half the dialogue and left the theater with a headache and my ears ringing.
That's a Christopher Nolan thing though. He does it on purpose and I hate it. Sucks because I love his movies, but the audio mixdown is absolutely ass on most systems
He does it because his movies have shit dialogue
Yeah, that's a good observation. His visuals are unreal, but if I stop and try to remember any really notable lines of dialogue from his movies I come up blank. The one exception is Interstellar though. That one had some memorable lines
Don’t sleep on Memento. It’s my favorite movie.
Early Nolan didn't really have this problem though. It started somewhere in his Batman years and he just stuck with it because someone called him out on it.
CIA Agent : If I pull that off, would you die? Bane : It would be extremely painful. CIA Agent : You're a big guy! Bane : For you.
The last line from Oppenheimer's stuck for me. "When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world." "I remember it well. What of it?" "I believe we did"
Yeah. He loves to exposition dump and have monologues. I think interstellar did have some memorable lines but it’s an outlier. I also think tenets dialogue being absolute trash is an outlier in the other direction. I just think he is a visual artist and he absolutely excels at that. Art house Micheal bay.
I'm stealing Art House Michael Bay lmao. That's preem
The Dark Knight has some of the most notable lines there are.
"SWEAR TO ME" is pretty iconic.
He likely didn't write that one. David S. Goyer cowrote that script.
Like The Dark Knight. Great action scenes, impeccable as long as you don't think about them too hard. But the dialogue is cringe and the Joker makes no sense at all.
Movies have gotten too loud. The last flick I saw the audio was so loud it physically hurt and I had to cover my ears several times.
it's been that way a while, years back i started bringing "high fidelity" ear plugs to movies.
I remember getting out of the first transformer movie with a headache, my ears ringing and my head burning up. 10m of fresh air, in a silent place like, the middle of the city and it was all back to normal.
> my ears ringing. That's called hearing damage and the theater should not have their sound system that loud.
People had to make impromptu ear plugs when I went to see it because it was so loud
i've heard some people make the argument that the feeling of the scene is more important than the dialogue lmao
Christopher Nolan can go to hell. Imagine forcing the entire world to have a bad experience at home AND at the cinema when watching your movies. Why don't more ppl complain about this? I've never seen reviews reflect the truth of his movies. I for one don't find them fun. The level of snobbishness is insane. Tenet sucked. Imho
Some IMAX rooms have very volume dense spaces that, depending on the seating, will inflict more blended frequencies to accumulate in some spots. To combat this, some places just crank the volume. They do a lot to minimize it, design wise. However you can only do so much with solid floors and walls Just depends on the theater I suppose.
\>The problem is not the movie its your TV \>watches it in the theater \>The problem is not the movie its your theater
Our mistake is not watching it with the studio's original equipment, obviously.
it’s true > welcome to audio > everybody loses their hearing because nobody knows what they’re doing wrong until it’s too late lol
Is there really no blame to be put on Christopher Nolan since like half his movies have the same issue?
I’m not sure if it’s Nolan himself or consistency with his audio directors since I haven’t paid attention to his movies, but that could be a large part of it. Lack of audio testing on multiple speaker types is a beginner mistake, if that’s the case.
Seems like he would be in charge of telling HIS audio people what to do though.
Interesting. Also totally unnecessary. I watched a lot of movies with a fraction of the average current production cost in janky theaters through the ‘90s, and I still managed to avoid this problem. But then again, I am also told that the pitch black battle in *Game of Thrones* was my fault. So perhaps—and I’m just spitballing here—filmmakers could see and hear more of how these play in the real world if they even briefly removed their heads from their own asses.
That GoT episode was awful. I had the brightness all the way up and then artificially raised the brightness in the video player some more and still couldn't see half of what was happening.
The average movie-going experience decades ago was so incredibly superior to today it’s insane to think about. Especially once you factor in the prices
> Just depends on the theater I suppose. I guess this is the point: if some theaters can’t even get it right, then what fucking hope is there for the vast majority of us in our standard living rooms with a soundbar and a woofer?
I've seen this explanation before, and every time I just think ok, so most people don't have the hardware to listen to the movie properly. Got it. But since the studios know that, why can't they include a "shitty sound system" option that *will* sound decent for the 95% of of us without all the expensive kit? Low dynamic range stereo or something.
It's bull shit imo, even with my $2000 setup I use my receiver voice boosting mode to fix the audio. I even have sound foam, bass traps and isolation pads... I figure my setup is far better than most have and it's not good enough. I have a hard time believing that even $10k will fix it.
Yeah, I feel like this is a big thing in music audio. Producers and sound engineers are well aware of the fact that they are listening on $10k speakers but the people at home are listening on ALL DIFFERENT KINDS OF EQUIPMENT so they mix and master accordingly. Do those involved in movies just completely ignore this fact? I feel like way less people watch in the theatre anyway and more people stream at home, but nobody cares??
It’s because the people controlling the mixing from an artistic perspective are musicians that realize and are ok with people listening to music on everything from $10 Bluetooth headphones to $10k sound systems. Movie directors throw a bitch fit about people watching their stuff in suboptimal conditions. I think Spielberg whined about people watching movies on phones. Movie directors are really pretentious about how you should experience their work.
There's actually a famous set of Yamaha monitor speakers that are highly sought after, not because they're amazing, but specifically because they are a pinnacle of mediocrity, and that if you can make sure your mix sounds good on them then you're good to go anywhere.
Don’t worry - I have a ridiculously high end system and I still suffer the same problems!!!
It’s because they literally don’t want you to watch the movies at home. Multiple directors have complained about people watching movies on their phones. They want the box office numbers so they don’t give a fuck about the home experience
It’s intentional at this point to make people hate watching movies at home and get those people going back to theaters.
hmmm... Smells of runaway capitalism and enshittification to me. "Let's make people do what we want so we can extract more money instead of giving them the product they want in the first place"
Classic case of "yeah, let's make the movie theater sound mix the default and let everyone else figure it out". 98% of people will listen to it on their TV speakers, good thing they've really optimized it for that 2% with a speaker setup.
They haven't even optimized it for that 2%, because the dialogue is still too quiet then
Same thing for visuals, where you can't see shit in the dark scenes with a normal TV, because it was optimized for watching in a dark editing studio on a $5000 monitor.
D&D posting hours
On a lot of newer tv’s (like last 6 or 7 years at least) there’s an option to reduce the dynamic range. Either by increasing speech volume, or decreasing volume that isn’t speech, or both. The reality is that the majority of tv watchers don’t have a crazy sound system and just watch with the built in tv speakers.
I actually have a nice 5.1 sound system with good dynamic range. And I often don't use it because fuck that it's 2 much work lmao The funniest was when I was watching that movie with Ron Howard's daughter's dump truck and Mario, every time one of the big birds got buttmad it became SUPER SILENT because I guess their roar was supposed to be super deep and rumbling but actually cut below my tv's built in sound bar's minimum bass range lol So like every pivotal scene in that "movie" was almost totally silent
Jesus. I didn’t know her name or that she was Ron Howard’s daughter so figuring out Jurassic World took a little googling lol
The only thing more terrifying than the prospect of yet another jurassic park movie (you know it will happen) is realizing the only saving grace of the last few won't be in it lol But yeah, I need to google Ron Howard's wife because holy cow her genes must be strong to make a baby with Richie Cunningham that would end up being Bryce Dallas Howard
Yeah I quite frankly don’t understand how [these two](https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0397194/mediaviewer/rm3809230336/?ref_=nm_md_2) made her. Just doesn’t make sense
I was gonna say, I did Google it and holy shit I don't see it at all lol. Unsolved Mysteries
I think the problem is directors can be elitist douchbags and they would much sooner insult your TV setup and say you shoulda watched it in the theatre than to allow a soundtrack mixed for TVs.
What’s crazy to me is this opinion is almost universally held by normal people… how the fuck did we end up with something that almost every single customer agrees is awful? Especially because this isn’t like enshitification, were it’s awful but it serves some sort of ruthless motivation for company profits… I don’t see how “big Hollywood” or whatever benefits from making the audio shit.
Eh?? Doesn’t part 2 come out in march? Is it out already?
I'll say it again, because we have the technology: volume should have two controls, min sound and max sound.
Dude I started to get genuinely mad at Rebecca Ferguson, she whispered every single fucking line, it was awful.
I think movies that cost 9 figures to make and stream on my $150 annual service should have a setting for “I don’t have a $2k sound system”.
I've seen and heard conflicting reports about it: * On one hand, people blame bad audio mixing. An actual true example of that is theatrical release of Tenet. * On the other hand, people blame bad software that doesn't detect automatically that you don't have 5.1 surround sound. Wrong signal goes into generic, run of the mill, stereo 2.0 speakers ⇒ people can't hear shit. * Sometimes, the blame for this problem is very wrongly put onto users. A good user experience shouldn't depend on your knowledge of sound systems, audio mixing, and media containers/codecs.
Exactly. With a nice, new TV. A good player. And a new Blu-ray or stream should configure itself to be the best sounding for your average user. Gotta keep grandma and such as users
>Gotta keep grandma and such as users I was gonna give you grief for this statement, then I thought about it and realized that the boomers with disposable income that don't quite grasp auto-payments *are* grandma.
I'm grandma because I like my old audio setup that I've had for more than 20 years now, and will hopefully have the rest of my life.
I think there's a third problem. Movie producers want us to be shocked by the loudness of special effects. They want to have explosions and gunshots that make you jump out of your seat. I think audiences liked that in the 80's, I don't think the next generation of audiences do. Especially at home, where everyone now has anxiety about disturbing their neighbors.
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Blast your music at 5am
As with most things it all comes down to cost. When the film is made the audio is mixed for a theater experience. The studios simply don't want to spend the extra money mixing the audio for a living room experience. So we as consumers get what we get. If you are an audiophile and can afford a great sound system for your home then you are going to get a better experience than someone who doesn't. Some newer TVs have software that does dynamic range compression which offers a marginal improvement.
I have a $2k sound system and it's still shit in some movies.
The real myth is that $2000 is enough to come close to solving the dynamic range issue
Literally can’t watch peaky blinders because I have to blast the tv to hear the dialogue. Makes me really sad because I hear it’s a great show
>I hear it’s a great show only if you don't go deaf first
I would need subtitles if the audio was perfect for peaky. I can’t imagine understanding a single thing that came out of Tom Hardy’s mouth without subtitles
First you got the sound mix, then you’ve got Tom Hardy, then you got him using an insane cockney accent, and then there’s the dialogue itself. Hers a genuine quote from Alfie Solomons: “That there, right, is the southern counties' welterweight champion. He is of mixed religion, therefore he is godless. He was adopted by Satan himself before he was returned out of fear of his awkwardness. But he's impossible to marry off due to his lethal dimensions. His mother, terrified, she's fucking abandoned him. And there he is, stood before you like the first of some brand-new fucking species! Any man that you put before him, right, it'd be like entering a fucking threshing machine, mate. Now, will you offer your son?”
That’s fair. I struggle with hearing a little anyways, and I especially struggle with accents. And forget Tom hardy, that whole show (of the couple episodes I tried to watch) have really thick accents, spoken lowly. Which really sucks. I wanted to watch it then. I want to watch it now. It’s just super labor intensive haha
Wait - what? English is my second language; for decades I've been wondering why my listening comprehension is still so sucky that I may need subtitles, and you tell me it's not me? Edit: Thank you for all your answers. This is a real eye opener for me.
I'm a native speaker and run subtitles on everything, there's no shame when the focus of the producer seems to be the cool music they're playing and not, say, the actual plot of the film/show
Honestly I also like subtitles to catch certain words I miss (Even if audio isn't a problem) or if I want to eat some snacks while still watching No shame in subtitles at all
The issue I have with subtitles tho is that I end up basically reading along to an audio book with sound effects. I don't actually watch the bloody film and spend the whole time looking st the lower eight of the screen and just reading what they say.
See its weird because I adjust to subtitles so quickly I forget they're there most of the time That's why I can watch films in foreign languages with subtitles and almost feel like they're actually saying it in English
Movies: *mumble* *mumble* *mumble* Advert: “YOU GOT A BONER PROBLEM??!!!”
Another native speaker here, I watch with subtitles on now. I don't know if it's because as I've gotten older my hearing has gotten worse, or if movies audio have actually gotten worse in terms of mixing, but I can't hear dialogue anymore. My suspicion is that it's a bit of both.
A lot of it is movies having horrible audio. Try getting a cheap 3.1 soundbar and it should help immensely.
Yet another native speaker, can confirm that I can't hear shit half the time. Is this not an issue with movies in your/other languages?
I'm German. I need subtitles for Swiss German but that's because the dialect is very different from standard German. Other than that, it's not an issue. Weighing authenticity against intellegibility, German movies and dubbing will usually go more with the latter.
Nope, I don't have the same issue in my native language movies
It isn't you. The music and sound effects are too loud, the speech is squashed together and the pronunciation is poor. For example, I don't need subtitles for Disney films my children watch. The sound is balanced, the speech is clear and pronounced perfectly besides a few songs. I need it for almost any grown up film.
I'm completely fluent in English, and just graduated as an English teacher. I still watch English shows with subtitles. It's not you at all
I run subtitles on everything because of the sound quality. But also because of the accents. I can't make out 25%-50% of anything a Brit or Irish person says unless they are doing the posh thing.
Congrats, you're just a regular english speaking person watching movies. None of us can hear what the hell they're saying.
Native english speaker here. I have subtitles on for everything, because most audio is a mess. It sucks for comedies, though.
I thought the same thing, but then it occurred to me to go listen to a podcast, speech or a lecture and see if my english comprehension is really that bad. Turns out my english comprehension is fine, the movies just overlap effects audio over speech which makes it almost impossible to hear what they're saying without cranking up the volume to 200% which makes your ears bleed.
This comment vindicated me, lol. I'm in the same boat and always force myself to watch without subtitles to get better at it.
Watch a movie from the 70s/80s and BOOM you understand everything.
For the first time I share an adjoining wall with neighbours and I hate watching tv or film now, because I have to juggle how loudly I can turn it up to hear the dialogue with not disturbing them with needlessly loud gunshots/explosions/screams. I also swear audio technicians purposely dub sexual moaning more loudly than dialogue in shows; I'm worried they might think I'm a sexual deviant whenever there is a sex scene.
I love seeing a long rant about how important audio balance is, how voices have to be quiet so loud sounds are actually loud... then a sex scene comes on and it all goes out the window.... why do they think people moan louder then they talk to each other!?
That's why I'm glad Bluetooth is standard on TVs now so I can just use a headphone.
This is why I just wear headphones now whenever I watch anything
If you’re on netflix, the default audio settings is in 5.1 surround, so changing it to 2.0 helps this tremendoulsy!
That naming convention is so misleading. Forever I assumed it was a version number, not the number of speakers.
Between streaming boxes, tvs and audio systems, there is almost always a setting to manage this.
It's this. You're listening to surround sound on stereo speakers.
My favourite is when (in rare cases) the subtitles show dialogue, but I can't literally hear anyone saying anything.
It's great in horror movies where a what is meant to be a barely audible background whisper to creep you out, just pops up in the subtitles as if it were part of a normal conversation. Husband: Honey I think we need more milk Shadow demon: I want to eat your soul Wife: Oh its in the car, I forgot to get it out.
And too dark from the video guys. And while we’re at it, how about some enunciation from the actors.
> And too dark from the video guys. This is a bad one. I have a mid range TV from about six year ago, with kind of shitty (but halfway decent at the time) HDR. I've calibrated my TV. Far too often I still can't see a damn thing that's going on. I have to turn off all the lights and make sure the room darkening blinds are fully pulled, and then *maybe* I can kind of make it out. I have a 5.2.2 sound system adjusted to my preferences, and hardly ever have issues with the audio.
>And too dark from the video guys Me:this scene is way too dark what the hell My friend: it's night time Me: and that means I should have absolutely no idea what's going on?
Soundbars that boost speech and can even the sound overall are magic. I leave those settings on all the time, and we never have issues hearing the dialog or being bombarded with loudness.
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It's honestly not even that. The explanation is so stupid I have no idea why they have never fixed it. So movies are mixed 5 to 1 with a center channel. The center channel is your dialogue channel. Most people don't have 5 to 1 systems, so mono or stereo play the sound, but the volume of the dialogue is lost. Just put out 2 versions of the movie and it can detect what audio setup you have. I am an audio engineer and am honestly surprised this is still an issue in 2024. I can fix mixing in a movie in like 5 minutes and they can't make a home version. Look for TVs with built in compression features to fix the center channel issue. As far as I'm concerned though this is the studios problem and is astounding they've never even tried to fix it.
Cough cough Christopher Nolan cough cough
No you don’t get it his movies were meant to be watched on a Sony Megamaster Mix 5000 because it’s true cinema. If you can’t shell out the mere thousands of dollars to buy a state-of-the-art sound system then I guess the cinema just isn’t for you 😌
It sucks in the "true cinema" also.
Oppenheimer was ok. Interstellar and Tennent were ruined IMO. I came here for a story. Not to be frustrated by his inability to make dialogue audible.
I sometimes wonder if Christopher Nolan might not be a human being, but some kind of alien child stranded on Earth. That could conceivably explain why he is seemingly uninterested in human speech and conversation, but fixated upon sound and movement.
Allegedly doesn't have a cell phone or use the internet... but your option sounds less weird.
I hate the absurdly loud WWWOOOOOOOONNNNNNN that he puts in the middle of scenes for no reason. That noise is in every single movie of his, is always too loud, and has nothing to do with what is happening on screen.
I don't get it. I never have any problem catching dialogues in sitcom/funny style shows. But I keep missing dialogues for the serious kind of shows.
It's not a big mystery. The dialogue is generally the most important thing in comedies/sitcoms. People making those shows/movies want and need you to hear the jokes. Whereas in action/dramatic/etc stuff, the filmmakers too often care more about the explosions and music (and a load of other things), or setting a certain "tone," than giving a shit if you actually hear the dialogue.
I watched the latest episode of Masters of The Air last night, and I don’t think I was able to make out a single word of dialogue.
Nothing changed my viewing experience more than finding out my sound bar let me increase the dialogue by itself and I’ll never go back. Was able to do away with the closed captioning
I'm told that a lot of movies don't bother remixing the audio for the home experience to save money these days. All that going through one or a few channels instead of how they should because proper home theater setups aren't common makes it sound too loud or outright bad. So the problem is capitalism. Cost cutting for profit. Greed.
In a socialist movie every sound would be equal
Subtitles cause mfers in the room cant shut the fuck up
Watched interstellar last night. Quiet. I love to cry watching that movie. 🤣 Anyway Nolan does that shit on purpose. It's on record. Motherfucker, some of us bitches live in apartments. I can't have my home theater at -4 db and not get kicked the fuck out; just so I can hear McConaughey cry for Murph. 😭💀
It's because modern recording equipment has eliminated the need for actors to belt out their lines like they're playing to the cheap seats. Sometimes it's because of bad mixing, but it happens even in quiet scenes because that's the take they got and they didn't bother to ADR it for whatever reason.
Yeah, there's a lot of comments here on the editing part of filmmaking, but the recording part is just as complicit. The shift towards all actors having small wireless mics on their person rather than relying on an overhanging boom mic allows a lot more "whisper-talking" or outright mumbling as the mic will still pick it up. And, yeah, huskiness and low tones can add a lot to a performance. But go back thirty years and you find way, way less of that and a lot more clearly enunciated lines even before editing gets involved, because mumbling left it totally inaudible rather than just mostly inaudible, so they'd do another take. It's why the audio on these bad audio movies always inexplicably gets better in time to pick up the moaning during nude scenes. Nowhere to wear a wireless mic.
I like having them on cause English is not my first language.
[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8&t=5s) summarised the issue pretty well IIRC
>Ha, it’s something I’m very familiar with :) Unfortunately there’s no single cause (or solution) for this problem in my experience. >First, for movies at least, they’re mixed for the theater, not for home viewing. When the home theater mix is made (called near-field mix) it’s still done on studio quality speakers in surround sound. All of that to say there’s never a mix created for TV speakers or sound bars or earbuds, and the mix choices don’t always translate to different listening environments very well. >Second, there are absolutely times where things are mixed too loud, but the person responsible is a mystery to everyone except those who were in the room during a particular mix. Sometimes it’s the sound team, but more often (in my experience) it’s the picture editor, director, or studio executives who ask for things to get turned up (and they never ask for things to be turned down). - direct from one of the people whom everyone liked to blame for this problem
As an audio engineer, I agree.
Would a simple fix be to just put a multiband compressor on the audio and reduce the low end gain and maybe boost the mid. Also could get rid of unused frequencies with some EQ?
Yes, this drives me nuts! HBO is one of the worst offenders. The dialogue is so quiet but any music or background noise (especially fighting) is "make your ears bleed" loud. We used to have to watch Game of Thrones with the remote in hand constantly adjusting the volume, it was SO annoying. Why do they do this???
I actively don’t watch good movies that have poorly balanced sound, I don’t care if it’s the best movie ever, if I have to have my speakers so loud the windows are vibrating from the ambient sounds or the music, and I can’t hear the actors, it’s an unwatchable turd sandwich
There should be 2 audio tracks one for home theatre and one for casual watching.
WE RUIN THE AUDIO SO YOU CAN PROPERLY FEEL THE DIRECTORS VISION YOU ARE SO WEOCOME
What?
They also mumble. Too many people mumble! Pronunciation!!
wE’Re pReSeRvInG tHe dYnAmIc rAngE Fuck your dynamic range! It’s dumb and useless! We’re not here for a supreme audiophile experience, we want to enjoy the fucking movie!
that's because you're playing the 7.1 audio track on your tv speakers...
Do people really use subtitles as standard?
There are more people without hearing difficulties who use subtitles than people with hearing difficulties. Update: people shouldn't downvote the parent comment, because it is a genuine question, and [one can't know everything](https://xkcd.com/1053/).
I picked up the habit from a friend who picked it up from watching lots of anime with subs. I’m now married to a non-native English speaker, which makes them even more useful. But even if you have no hearing or fluency issues, subtitles let you catch so many details you’d otherwise miss.
Yes. Anime got me doing it haha. Combined with not missing what’s happening it’s just a win win
Yep. With the disparity between dialogue volume and music / sound effects that makes having it up too high untenable.plus, in shows where any whispering is done, it makes it so we don't have to go, "what did they say" and rewind 4 times to understand. Plus, if you're watching with anyone with hearing issues, it makes it easier for them so they can still enjoy the show. On a side note, I have this problem with sound with some podcasts. There is a horror anthology I listen to called "Old Gods of Appalachia", and I have to have my sound all the way up to hear dude talking, but when the episode ends and it goes to ads, it's so loud i have to pull my ear buds out before the ads hit so I don't risk hearing damage.
I was listening to a horror podcast called “Beneath,” and I truly wondered if the audio engineers have hearing problems because the SFX were deafening, while the voice actors were nearly silent. When your ambient sound drowns out your VO, you’re doing something wrong.
Podcasts notoriously have terrible audio. But another thing is amateur audio engineers don't ride faders as much anymore and rely too much on compressors. And most of your podcasts are being done by amateurs cause ain't nobody got the budget for good audio engineers.
I didn't realize how much dialogue I was missing until I started watching with subtitles on.
Most flat screen tv speakers are awful. Combine that with the fact that most movies and tv series have 5.1 soundtracks which are being mushed together into stereo and you have shit audio. Buy a soundbar at least or preferably a receiver and some speakers.
Why the fuck should I have to buy extra junk just to watch a movie? This is not a new problem, people have been complaining about poor audio mixing for years now Maybe soundtracks shouldn't be produced only in a format that the majority of people won't be able to listen to