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Volume [Mr Lovenstein]
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Source/secret panel: https://m.tapas.io/episode/3005249
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this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
did you read anything I said or do you just want to complain?
Good news then, a more-than-decent 5.1 setup can be had for ~500 €. A decent soundbar for a few hundred.
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 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, 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.