"It's called dynamic range, you philistines!" quoth the audio engineer who hasn't consumed his own work on consumer-grade hardware since his early teens.
Yep. I think this is the real problem right here. Whenever I’m producing my first pass at a music project, I do it on my laptop speakers or similar. That way I know the core idea of the track still works on basic speakers. I’ve tried going the other way and all that comes through is a melody if I’m lucky.
I also check in the car and on a crappy BT speaker after. The fact that they’re producing entire movies and shows without ever seeming to do a consumer audio check is just annoying.
Yeah, my test checklist after mixing/mastering using my studio headphones is:
It’s only final until it sounds good on all the above.
lol, I posted simultaneously with you. And basically posted that. 🤣
This being the Internet - and great minds thinking alike - it was bound to happen sooner or later :)
I hate audio dynamic range. And i also hate how they don't ensure dialogue is audible over other noises unless it's dubbed.
This last one is so bad that I basically don't watch any American content in the original language anymore, because the French dub has clear voices and doesn't force me to use subtitles. So ridiculous.
You don't hate dynamic range, you hate bad mixes, two different things, without dynamics audio sounds like shit. An explosion is supposed to be louder than talking speech.
It's just not supposed to try to mimic the absurdity of an actual explosion, to the point of discomfort.
Also, like said before in the parent comment, most consumer systems don't even even have the dynamics to reproduce it without distortion (or damage the woofers).
Imma be honest, I don't see why the explosion should be louder than speech. I can see the boom; I can tell that it's an explosion. It doesn't need to be reinforced to be through volume.
Mr. Lovenstein version
Nah, Christopher Nolan says it’s our fault that we don’t have IMAX theater setups at home.
Or--and hear me out here, Mr. Nolan--maybe have the important dialogue take place once the characters are off the speedboat.
(I assume that wasn't actually important dialogue, but I'll never know.)
Dynamic ads in podcasts are absolutely terrible for this.
I am driving along listening to a podcast, and suddenly the ads appear at 50% higher volume, with zero warning.
I wonder if you could sue a podcast provider for dammages if you are hard of hearing and need the podcast playing loud, and the ads come on and blow your speakers out...
What should be especially illegal is those ads that use "alert" sounds. Door knocks/bells, phone rings, and worst of all, fucking car horn and other alarm noises.
Anything beeping or sounding like a siren should be completely forbidden for safety reasons.
It’s literally the non-verbal equivalent of the classic “crying fire in a crowded theatre” scenario, it should already be illegal by existing law imo.
“Honking horn at the operator of high speed multi-ton machine on their radio” seems pretty clear cut recklessness in my book.
I thought it was quite bad already in the EU but we at least have standards for it. I'm currently in the US and watching TV I have to turn on closed captions for everything because voices are just so damm silent, while Ads and stuff just blast your face off.
I think the US passed some sort of standard, under Obama, to normalize the volume for commercials on broadcast TV.
That worked for a while, but now that everything is streaming, they're fucking doing it again. Because of course they are.
And now they wonder why people use adblockers whenever they can
There also the fact that speakers on modern tvs suck because they want only a little black frame around the screen. CRTV speakers pointed at the viewer and modern tvs point downward or behind the screen, so everything is a bit muffled. It's like they forgot that audio is a big aspect of watching shows and movies or they are wanting to make a ton of money off a separate speaker system.
but we at least have standards for it
Holy shit. I didnt know that. We're on the baby-mode kiddy-gloved nanny-state-in-muh-TV mode?
Poor Americans. They must be going deaf.
The standards are still pretty bad, and most producers of movies and tv shows still don't balance their audio for home TVs, but I do believe Ads have a limited allowed "loudness".
If it was real baby mode we would have a regulated minimum and maximum loudness for everything, so we don't have to change volume constantly.
Yeah I can't hear the dialogue, but when those two characters kissed I could hear everything happening in their mouthes and that's what's really important.
Two characters kiss in deep space 9 and it sounds like a kiss irl. Two characters kiss in superman (2025) (or almost any modern media) and I'm listening to a 30+ second close-up of the actors trying to wetly suck the other's lips into their mouth. Why??
No idea why anyone thinks the kissing audio needs to be so pronounced. Drives me up the wall. Watching a tender scene, only to be ripped out of the moment by kissing audio that was recorded by having toddlers eating fettuccine alfredo for the first time.
Because DS9's tagline is "To wetly suck what no one has sucked before."
Can someone tell me why I'm an idiot: streaming services have access to the entire video you're about to watch. They know the max and the min volume of that video. Why is there no setting to shrink that range? Is it going to degrade the audio really bad and they don't want to be blamed?
This goes double for home theater software like Jellyfin, Kodi, and Plex. They have 10,000 customizations and settings, so why can't I define my own custom audio range in them?
Technically speaking it's very easy to implement, it's just a compressor, oldest thing in audio after maybe the EQ.
VLC has a compressor under effects, if you're using Linux you can add effects to pulse or pipewire really easy too.
Even if you can hear them, you'll still need captions because actors today mumble so much.
What you need is dynamic range compression. You can get a browser extension to apply it to everything you watch in a browser. VLC also has a setting for it, but I think they call it something else.
If you're using an app or a smart tv, then sucks to be you I guess.
Do u know where that setting is in vlc?
I'll do you one better, i give you instructions:
https://www.geekality.net/blog/settings-for-vlc-dynamic-range-compression
It's not the broadcasters fault you don't have a 7.1 audio setup and they refuse to allow channel selection. That would involve remastering, dammit!
Yes it’s dynamic range but the most common cause is listening to a source that’s been mixed for a centre vocal speaker.
It will play on a stereo (Left and right speakers only) but you will have very little vocals and lots of special fx.
This is also completely ignoring the us lack of lufs standards for advertising (apparent loudness.)
Not necessarily the end users fault. If the wrong audio source is selected/streamed then you are stuck. There are workarounds but no real solution
Except I have Dolby 5.1 set-up and it’s still dogshit
If you don't have a 649.2.2 Atmos setup, that's your fault. Get hearing loss, scrub!
/s because... sigh...
If you have a true 5.1 setup then increase the centre speaker levels relative to the others. Or get a much bigger centre speaker.
Most centre speakers are woefully small compared to the left and right fronts being towers.
Fuck your dynamic range, it doesn't enhance the media what so ever.
enables loudness equalization
Breakaway audio volume leveler (if you're on a Windows device).
This is good for the source audio itself for complicated reasons, but why tf isn't stable sound more standardized?? It's just a compressor!! Just send the values for the compressor in the metadata!!
Same issue with white balance settings in cameras - the setting should be non-linear to give the same perceived change per step.
You watched the same minute physics video then
There are lots of controls in the world I’ve noticed over the years that are mapped linearly when they should be mapped logarithmically. But that’s harder to program, so almost no one does.
French dubs have intentionally higher speech volume
Do what you want with that info
Very good explainer from Tom Scott.
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