Dunno if it's because it's all mixed for cinema or 5.1 and then badly turned to stereo but something they're doing is trash for 99% of those watching.
The center channel is generally devoted to the spoken track. Adding a center channel is one of the best upgrades you can do for a home theater system.
It sounds like it would be very useful to include a virtual mixer where you could adjust center (or dialogue) channel volume separately from side channels.
It’s not like people have invented some newfangled thing in their living rooms. Most people have super vanilla audio setups and tuning the audio in a way that sucks for nearly everyone is simply a mistake.
Making excuses for people who make a bad product doesn’t do anyone any favors. We can calmly and clearly call out the error and request that people who make the error cease.
The "Enhance Dialogue / Reduce Loud Sounds" feature on the Apple TV has been amazing for helping to rectify this, but I would prefer to leave the dynamic range of the track alone.
Object-based audio (MPEG-H, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X) can do this, and lots more.
Running these codecs can still be quite challenging, however. A third channel is almost certainly a better solution for the widest possible compatibility.
Most home cinema receivers have a 'dynamic range compression' option which is meant to solve this problem.
- As I said, English is not my first language. Thus I'm not that proficient in listening.
- Actors nowadays speak with worse diction. Sometimes they just mumble something unintelligible, no matter how much you rewind and replay.
- The sound balance makes voices to come off as drowned by the environmental sounds and the soundtrack. This is very different from, e.g., classical movies where sound and diction was very clear almost at all times.
- Some accents are very hard to parse. Canadian folks, for example, make it very difficult to be understood.
So, the subtitles feature are a lifesaver a lot of times.
"Welyuno..." "Wellyouno..." "Well youknow..." "Well, you know..."
But if you didn't know "welyuno" in English, tough luck you'll understand it in as a second language learner.
You're both right as for colloquial speech. But we are talking about movies. Actors used to study elocution and diction techniques to polish their speech. As I said in my comment, this was apparent in older movies. Now, they don't even care about this, it seems.
Films definitely have worse sound mixing these days (unless they all target 7.1 Ultra-Whatever), but even with old films it can get really hard to hear what they're saying when you've got so little to work with.
The whole thing though goes to show the importance of decent subtitling. Accessibility should be a good enough reason by itself, but if more than 40% of your audience uses it, then it's a lot more than just that.
I think televisions have EQ'ing that makes dialogue (the mids mostly) much louder. The main usecase for TV was specifically films and shows (with dialogue) so they could justify adjusting the sound for that specific usecase. Now we watch films and shows on devices that also need to sound good playing music, podcasts, games, etc, so it makes less sense to EQ the sound to a specific usecase.
Particularly in the mid-to-late 00's, centre speaker dialogue was very bombastic and stood out very well even in high action scenes. Yes the volume was still sometimes mismatched, but not to the point a discreet multi-channel setup needed to constantly adjust volume. Films from the previous two decades had even less issues just thanks to the simplicity.
Atmos feels like a huge wasted potential to me personally. With the added height channels, you can create some amazing effects and absurd imaging that was never possible before, but the reliance on this kind of swerved sounds and vocals to overlap each other in more awkward ways that makes it feel like everything is originating from a reverberation chamber. Particularly with dialogue, Atmos helps create positional ambiance with indoor scenes, so vocals often sound muddier than they should be.
Even worse, streaming services provide a mix that obviously caters to handheld devices, TVs and soundbars, while being Atmos 7.1.4, sounding particularly terrible for both kinds of watchers. Blu-ray's thankfully still often directly target home theatres and sound much better for the latter.
That's just been my experience so far. Going from a simple 5.1 Jamo from 2007 to an upgraded Atmos setup, I've been blown away far less by action films these days. It's even amazing if you hear the rears getting utilised at all.
Christopher Nolan is probably the most infamous offender; he's said even other filmmakers contact him and complain about his mixes. It's apparently how he wants it to sound, and he's said things like he sometimes treats dialogue as a sound effect and mixes it low on purpose, despite the many many articles and such about how much audiences hate it. I could swear at one point he even countered with something like "you shouldn't need to hear all the dialogue to understand what's going on". Ugh.
jim-jim-jim•4mo ago
stubish•4mo ago