27 ms·

Movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand

293 points by andyjohnson0 5y ago

mleonhard 5y ago
Product idea: Volume-leveling headphones. They bring the explosions down to a tolerable volume and boost the whispers to an audible level. They have external microphones for use in the cinema, BlueTooth for your phone, and a wire for low-latency on video calls.
deleted 5y ago
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PaulHoule 5y ago
There's also the technical fix in AC4 and some other modern formats where the dialog track can be split out and additional metadata added so that the audio can be "remixed" for whatever listening environment people are in. The truth about it is that people listen to audio in less-than-perfect environments all the time. The ideal "Home Theater" is a room that has one door and isn't a passage from one place to another and doesn't have people doing other things. In real life a lot of people have a big TV in an room that's part of an open plan and a "boomy" soundtrack which is great in the theater will drive people apart in their home.
- musicale 5y ago
  This is a nice idea. Theater mix is definitely different from what I want at home, and being able to switch between various mixes (e.g. headphone, binaural, small speaker, home theater, stereo image/surround, clarity, immersive music, immersive effects, personal preference, etc.) would be great.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Syracuse New York has an ATSC 3.0 TV transmitter that I pick up with https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-flex-4k/ https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-flex-4k/ I'd like to say that this is a wonderful product that "just works" but unfortunately some of the devices I have (XBOX ONE, 8th gen iPad) don't support the AC4 soundtrack even though my various trashy Android devices handle it just fine.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  DTS:X has that as well, my receiver has a "dialog level" control to adjust it. There's a Dolby equivalent as well, but as far as I know there are zero titles that make use of it except for a couple of demo discs.
musicale 5y ago
I thought it was common practice to re-record dialogue tracks (i.e. ADR) to make them clearer. Another option (if they wanted to use it) would be to use signal processing techniques to extract and improve the dialogue tracks.
notreallyserio 5y ago
It's interesting AMC cites surveys. I haven't seen a survey but even if I did I'm not sure I'd complain to them about unintelligible dialogue -- as a layman, I've assumed that's mostly a problem with the movie and not the theater (they don't have a separate dialogue track they can boost). And I guess now that I read this I'm not sure how much it'd matter, given directors themselves are complaining about the problem.
- macintux 5y ago
  There are few things more frustrating than researching a problem, taking it to the people responsible, and having them dismiss it with “no one has complained before.” I don’t think I’ve ever dismissed someone coming to me in that way, and I hope if I ever do that I’m fired for it.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Maybe one thing is more frustrating: stalebot closing issues that have recent responses (I count emoji reactions).
shantnutiwari 5y ago
For me-- I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays; can't understand half the dialog. Part is the too many audio tracks being mixed in, that the article talks about. Also, I've noticed American actors seem to mumble their lines a lot, I dont know why. British actors (usually) speak clearly. Maybe its a cultural thing, like Americans prefer method acting more? Also, I've noticed that stage actors like Patrick Stewart , speak clearly, maybe because on stage you have to enunciate properly. The end result is: If a movie doesn't have subtitles, we don't watch it. (And havent been to a cinema for 2+ years, obviously, in cinemas you rarely get the option). On an unrelated note: I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. It might make sense when viewed in a theater, but when viewing at home, I can't see anything. The last few scenes of Edge of Tomorrow were impossible to understand because of this. My impression is: The "arteestes" have taken over Hollywood, and making stylish movies take precedence over making movies that are easy to watch and hear.
- Brajeshwar 5y ago
  Few years back, India theaters started adding subtitles in Hollywood/English movies. It increased viewership dramatically.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  Patrick Stewart is Royal Shakespeare Company trained. You won't find an actor trained by the Royal Shakespeare Company that mumbles their lines.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    If you mumble on the stage anywhere the director will (or should!) kick your ass.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    It's interesting to note that Patrick Steward might be responsible for changing the way people commonly pronounce the word Data. If so, I wonder how much impact his stage training had on how he chose to pronounce the word.
pkulak 5y ago
The article starts at the headline "It's in the Acting".
sillyquiet 5y ago
Anybody else find it very weird and off-putting that folks thought even talking about these issues would affect their careers? I mean, does that not speak volumes about the toxic professional atmosphere hollywood labors in?
- aaronbrethorst 5y ago
  I assumed this was breathless overstatement designed to hook the reader with some ‘forbidden knowledge.’ Not anything real.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  I like to think they tried to talk to more sound engineers but their dialog was inaudible.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I'd be afraid to talk negatively about any of the jobs I've had at a FAANG while working there.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  It is hard to find any industry where skilled consultants are willing to trash talk their repeat customers.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  You're often going to have to cite specific movies, specific directors when talking about this. With Nolan, it's easy because he's acknowledged this stuff and it's well known. Same with Tom Hardy. But start mentioning other directors, actors and films with specific complaints about how the vocal mix was handled, and I imagine you'll be persona non grata for vocal mixing fairly soon.
at_a_remove 5y ago
In my naive younger years, when Blu-Ray was being announced, I thought, "Hey, they could put the dialogue on one track, the music on another, and the foley business somewhere else, then you could mix those as you needed." Just put the baby down? Switch to dialogue, with only ten percent explosions and soundtrack. (This of course would only be useful where you had original audio tracks)
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  The video games have pretty much universally been having at least two separate volume sliders (one for music, other for SFX, optionally the third one for the dialog) for about 15? 20? years. Maybe in another 20 years the cinema industry will adopt something like it, who knows?
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    I keep waiting for this setting and I don’t understand why a service like Netflix or HBO hasn’t offered it yet.
    - josefx 5y ago
      Do they have access to the individual audio tracks for anything that they haven't produced themselves?
      - the-pigeon 5y ago
        Unlikely but if they offered it on their own stuff it could create a trend. And increasingly they are losing the quality content that they didn't produce themselves.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      Directors and the like would probably refuse to cooperate. This is mostly prevalent in video games because they lack auteurs obsessed with this kind of thing.
  - 5y ago
raxxorrax 5y ago
As someone living in the city with a lot of neighbors, I mostly have the problem with high dynamic range. I hate it so much and you cannot deactivate it in most streaming media. I get that it is effect-full, but either I need subtitles or I blast my neighbors to insanity. Ever watched a Youtube video and then switched to Netflix and you couldn't hear anything? That is because the amplitude is set to very low for them to have a buffer with which they suddenly blast you out of the window in case anything happens. That sound guys aren't even allowed to utter criticism of director or risk career speaks volumes about the industry.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  It’s not even just the neighbors. Sometimes (almost always) I don’t want ear-splitting explosions just to be able to barely hear dialog.
  - goostavos 5y ago
    Yeah, it's always immediately frustrating when you realize it's "one of those movies" where I'm going to have to ride the volume the entire time. The nice side-effect from that constant volume changing is that the volume display covers the subtitles, which means I can neither hear nor even read the subtitles the dialogue >:(
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      Yeah, I really wished home video releases had a separate professional surround mix with a much lower dynamic range between normal dialog and the loudest sounds. Dynamic range compression works, but it's often heavy-handed and very noticeable (especially on an Apple TV). I think cinema mixes are conventionally around 30 dB between dialog and the loudest sounds, which works great in the cinema (both because there is less ambient sound, and because you expect really loud sounds in the cinema), but is pretty extreme at home if you don't have a proper "home theater" setup. That's like the difference between normal conversation and a lawn mower. If you're watching a movie at home and two characters are talking and then one of them starts their lawn mower, do you actually want it to be as loud as if you fired up a lawn mower in your living room? For sustained sounds I generally wouldn't want it much more than 10 dB above dialog (that's like running a washing machine) and for very peaky effects like gunshots 20 dB is probably pushing it for most people's living room setups.
jrace 5y ago
This is the part that bothers me: "I think in the case of Mr. Nolan, with ["Tenet"], the characters have a mask, and he wants to keep the original sound because I think for him it's more real," he says. Presumably, that mentality also extends to "The Dark Knight Rises," in which Bane's mask muffled a significant percentage of that character's lines. Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?utm_campaign=clip https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha... ---If that is the case, that the director does not want us to understand the dialogue then why make it so important to the story? Why make it so dialogue heavy then?
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  For Tenet specifically, lots of dialogue without masks was still nearly inaudible on my home theater, while gunplay was deafening. It's not a mask issue, or at least not exclusively - it's an audio mix issue. There are scenes with just two unmasked people that were inaudible to me without having the background sounds painfully loud.
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    What you describe is infuriating. Many shows suffer from the same issue that even background noise obscures dialogue of main characters that is crucial for the story. It got so prevalent and so annoying that I started to vote with my feet. If in the first few minutes I have problems hearing the dialogue, I just stop watching, leave a 1-star review with a comment that the audio is incomprehensible and ask for a refund in case I paid for watching. Hopefully, the others would start doing the same and the trend will go away.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    I had the same problem. A fairly high end 5.1 system and I was unable to hear most of the dialogue. I have no idea what was going on in that movie, but I could hear the firing pin hit the primer in crystal clarity.
- leetcrew 5y ago
daveslash 5y ago
During the pandemic's "shelter in place", I started watching (and re-watching) older movies (anything pre 2000). I'm still on that binge.... I also got into 35mm film photography (developing it at home in my bathroom), and learning a ton about the chemistry, etc... I've discovered, and in some cases re-discovered, how much I prefer the older movies over newer ones. And my work in 35mm/analog gives me a new appreciation for movies shot on film. Movies like the original "Planet of the Apes" has found new appreciation in my eyes. There are some real, true, gems from the 60s - 90s. Edit: I know this comment isn't about the audio, specifically - but rather, just about how movies have changed more generally.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  I sure miss my darkroom. Don't miss ST:TNG in 1080p. So glad it was shot on film.
  - daveslash 5y ago
    Same. I miss the darkroom, and ST:TNG looks so great on film! In case you're unaware, you don't need a darkroom to develop 35mm film. I don't use an enlarger to transfer my photos onto photo paper (which would require a darkroom). Instead, I develop in the light but using a light-proof changing bag to load my film into a light-proof Paterson developing tank. After I pull the developed film out and let it dry, I scan the negatives using a photo scanner (I use an Epson v600, but there are plenty of options out there for scanning film negatives). Reddit's r/analog and r/analogcommunity is a thriving community.
axiomdata316 5y ago
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that struggled understanding Tenet. I think it's almost impossible to understand that movie without subtitles (I've watched Tenet over five times and still struggle at parts, especially the end). Interesting point to is with subtitles it identifies the main character as the Protagonist. Just watching the movie with subtitles is very difficult to come to that conclusion.
nimbius 5y ago
with regard to the art of cinema, purposefully and clearly communicating the story is an absolutely critical requirement. without coherent dialogue, you've released a million dollar screen saver. for executives: this type of failure can crucify everything from box office earnings to streaming. every copy you send to an emmy voter will be shrugged off as dark-and-mumbly.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  I think Christopher Nolan's movies make money, but every one I've seen is nearly unwatchable between the whispers and explosions.
steve76 5y ago
What worked for me: 1. Move front and surround and height if you have them speakers to full range. 2. Set center speaker cutoff a few hz higher than normal, like 80 or 100 3. Turn up level going to sub. Turn down volume knob on the sub. This prevents auto off You get a lot of the low end effects off the sub, and the center and sub is just for dialogue. You get that depth effect without the dialogue being muted. I feel filmmakers do this so their movies don't age. Supposedly they're going to have a laser speaker, and the flat panel tv will be a speaker itself with the sound shot across the screen. All those movies get a new release for that.
baggy_trough 5y ago
Another problem is movies that race over important plot points so quickly that if you blink you can't understand what's going on. I hate it when I have to read the wikipedia article to get half the plot explained.
qalmakka 5y ago
So it's not only me then. Fair enough, English isn't my first language but I have been studying it since I was very little, and usually in the real world I tend to have close to zero issues at understanding speech, be it in first person, YouTube videos, talk shows, radio or animated shows. I always watch BBC documentaries or clips from the previous night late shows (such as Colbert's or Kimmel's), often while cooking or doing chores, and I can follow basically the entire thing without having to go back, even if I'm distracted or if there's some environmental noise. I can't say that it's the same with films, though. They are often hard to follow for me without subtitles, I suspect due to IMHO just how terribly they are mixed. Sound effects and music are usually boosted up to outrageous levels, which cause the dialogue to become muffled or close to inaudible. It just sucks and it's not a good experience at all.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > not only me then I wonder if this explains part of TV's surging popularity relative to film. I also find modern movies frustrating to watch, in part because I can't follow the dialogue. (I assumed it was a hearing thing.)
  - qalmakka 5y ago
    I think that one reason is often that a film is way longer than a single TV series episode, so it requires a bigger "commitment". I can potentially watch 3 episodes of different TV series in a single evening or either 3 episodes of the same series, while I can only watch a single movie due to its length. Also, often TV series have more time to properly introduce and develop storylines, while films have to either simplify the plot or be unbearably long in order for the format to be feasible. This makes them often harder to follow or less interesting, for instance Game of Thrones would have been probably turned into utter rubbish if it was made into a film instead of (lots of) episodes - not that it ended that well anyway, though.
Sunspark 5y ago
I've been wrestling with this problem lately. 5.1 audio tracks tend to put most of the voices in the center channel only. If you listen in stereo, there is a challenge here with down-mixing to left and right. Several band-aids to alleviate it: If you watch using MPC-HC, turn normalize on at 400% in the settings, or alternatively if using anything else, turn on Realtek's loudness equalization to do the same thing. If not wishing to use normalization, then if using LAV change center mix level to 1.00 from 0.71, or if using MPC-BE in the mixer change center from 0.0 dB to 3.0 dB. I use normalize myself, because it's still too quiet even with a mixing boost to the center channel.
- mjgoeke 5y ago
  upvoted - and MPC-HC isn't really available anymore - MPC-BC is a good replacement
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    It actually is still around: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases I use both players actually.
teeray 5y ago
> When it comes to dialogue unintelligibility, one name looms above all others: Christopher Nolan I’m glad this was called out. I was super-excited for Tenet last year. I had a brand-new 7.2 Atmos setup… and I had to watch with subtitles on because I couldn’t understand anyone. Very frustrating… glad it wasn’t just me!
el_don_almighty 5y ago
I seriously thought my wife and I were going deaf and crazy because we only watch movies at home with subs on. This article eliminates one of those concerns, but now we are crazy and mad. This is worse than compression of pop music for Spotify broadcasting, this affects the core storytelling of the media. We purposely did NOT go see James Bond in the theater knowing that we wouldn't understand anything people were saying. My first instinct is to throw a Raspberry PI at the problem, but I am not sure where to start.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Theaters are deploying captioning solutions for ADA compliance. I'm not sure what amount of "proof" of need you'd have to provide, though. Hopefully I'll get to go back to a theater someday!
post_break 5y ago
My center channel is at like +12db permanently. It's a fucking joke these days.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  Mine's at +3 and I just assumed my hearing was shit so stopped there. Glad to see it's not me it's streaming. I might actually consider going back to in mail Netflix blu-ray for better quality.
junon 5y ago
The writing style of this article really drives me nuts. Let me tell you why. <ad> I talked to some people. Some of them wanted to. Others didn't. Some were anonymous. Some weren't. Let's get to the bottom of this topic. <NSFW ad> "It's really a lot of problems all at once." said one person I talked to. What they say next will shock you. <ad> This article drags on so long I almost forgot what I was reading about. Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  1. you could make sure you read articles like this on a platform that sensibly allows effective ad blocking like ublock origin. 2. the fact that you consider this a long article says a lot more about you than the article or the author. I read the whole thing (with ublock origin active) and I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context.
  - junon 5y ago
    > you could make sure you read articles like this on a platform that sensibly allows effective ad blocking like ublock origin. Ah yes, victim blame. > the fact that you consider this a long article I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content. Not that the article itself was long. > I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context. Good for you. We had different experiences, then.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      I'm not victim blaming you. Anyone who reads HN understands that a huge chunk of the contemporary web provides a fucked up experience for readers and viewers because of ad placement. I consider that complaining about any particular instance of ads doing that is essentially redundant at this point. The web is screwed up by ads, use an ad blocker or complain about online ads in general, not any particular article. > I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content. There are 6 paragraphs of introduction before jumping right into the Nolan case. With default font sizing, it's a bit less than 1 page of content in my web browser. How is that "drags on so long before it gets to the actual content"? I tried to restrict my remarks to the article in question. You closed with the sweeping generalization "Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next."
mjgoeke 5y ago
The fix for me has been surround sound. I have the center channel bumped several steps louder than the others on my receiver. This makes a world of difference over stereo mixes. (I will admit the voice sound can be more uneven - wind noise etc starts to show through) Hmm, thinking out loud - I bet a multichannel mix could be calibrated on your system to bump the center channel, even if outputting to 2 speaker
soneca 5y ago
Oh, what a great article! Such a relief to not a read a long form that starts with a long anecdote with literary pretensions nor a listicle with bullet points explained in one paragraph. A very short introduction in the form of a personal experience to explain the issue clearly and objectively and then explaining each issue with good research and relevant quotes. I learned a lot!
beebeepka 5y ago
Has a movie creator explained the shift to incompressible dialogue coupled with obnoxiously loud music and effects and stuff. It's really annoying but strangely persistent so ther must be a very concerned effort
- acuozzo 5y ago
  High dynamic range sound mixes have been with us for a long time. Have you ever watched Lawrence of Arabia in a movie theater? If you do the mixdown to stereo poorly and/or refuse to compress the DR and then play the result from built-in TV speakers I guarantee that you won't be able to hear the dialogue at an acceptable volume even though the film is from 1962 and features clearly-spoken lines from former professional stage actors.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I think it's the interpretation/bias of louder as better/clearer. If the sound effects are louder, they're seen as better. This bias even works on the small scale when testing audiophiles: You play them a sample of music twice but tell them the sound is coming from two different sources. If you play one sample slightly louder than the other, they'll identify it as coming from from a higher-quality system. Sound people complain about compression (muddy), not wide dynamic range (drama and depth.)
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    This is well-known and one reason some audiofools are rightfully laughed at for not doing when comparing speakers or cables or whatever they want to wax lyrical with flowery descriptions about. All AB testing of audio equipment should be done with volume matched. Even 0.1dB difference can skew results I believe. Also the switching should be as quick as possible because auditory memory is short. More bass also corresponds to better reported listening tests. Harman did a lot of great blind testing on this and came up with preferred frequency response curves and speaker characteristics (smooth directivity rolloff and a target in-room response).
rootsudo 5y ago
That link is horrible, it's all posture and no content.
jaywalk 5y ago
I enjoyed this quote: "I was at a matinee with a lot of elderly people because I took my mom, and I'm like, 'None of these people can hear what's happening.' The manager, who was probably all of 22 years old, said, 'Well, that's how the film was done.' And I said, 'No, I did the sound on the film. That's not how it was done.'" I've been in a meeting where a third-party vendor was explaining how I was incorrect about how some particular functionality in an application worked, and I had to stop him and inform him that I was the one who developed that functionality and knew exactly how it worked.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  I had the same sort of experience with a third party IT solution who was in on a call with my client and I... he started babbling on how his company had years of experience dealing with this exact piece of software and it would be no problem at all to take over the development and maintenance for it. I was the ONLY developer who had ever touched a line of code in that software. Which is just as funny as the recruiter who wanted to recruit me for a position and said I'd be a great fit and a shoe-in for the interview because he had years of experience working with the company in question as a partner. ...I wrote the job description. It was literally an open position for my direct subordinate. I was the hiring manager and had never heard of the recruiter before. So I replied with "interest," we went through the interview process, I submitted my resume, and then he called us up to speak to the person hiring for the position saying that he had a GREAT candidate. This guy hadn't even read the resume, because my current employer was on it as it was obviously my current job. I let him in on my secret, and also let his manager know about my experience with him too. She used to work for me on my team as a recruiter before taking the job to start the firm's New Orleans office.
- cosmodisk 5y ago
  We have this very famous writer in our country whos works are in the secondary school curriculum. So one day a teacher is giving a lesson to the kids and off she goes into the wilderness about the man. One girl in the class quickly points out that she's wrong about this and that and in fact it happened this way. Teacher quickly goes into a meltdown accusing the girl of being out of her place. The she asks who is she to tell these kind of things to her. "I'm his granddaughter"- replied the girl...
poulsbohemian 5y ago
I’ll admit - I don’t watch much tv or movies anymore, but I can’t help but think the “problem” here is how many of these programs are the equivalent of “ouch my balls” from Idiocracy - that is to say, the dialog is just filler between explosions anyway (IE: it’s being watched for the over-the-top action, it isn’t like the dialog is Goethe.)
- goostavos 5y ago
  Yep. You nailed it, man. Everyone who watches TV or movies is a big ol' dum-dum consuming real bottom of the barrel entertainment. They should really be doing more enlightened things with their time, like... commenting on Hacker News about things to let people know that they're not involved in the consumption of such drivel.
  - poulsbohemian 5y ago
    No - you misunderstand my point. My point isn't to denigrate the viewer, but rather to acknowledge that in some genres the dialog simply isn't the point. Even in the article they appear to acknowledge this, noting that in romcom and whatnot that the audio is more clearly articulated and audible, versus the various examples of action type movies.
vhold 5y ago
One of the most interesting technical details is buried in a giant quote. > All it took was a little bit of collaboration and communication, and all of a sudden, grip and electric are moving generators a hundred yards away instead of having them right around the corner from the set.
ww520 5y ago
The one thing really grinds my gear is the music volume has been tuned up so loud while the conversation volume turned so low.
- MarkLowenstein 5y ago
  Yeah, if I found a remote control with a "QUIET" button instead of just "MUTE", I'd buy it in an instant.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    On my AVR you can set how many dBs the mute button attenuates.
technobabbler 5y ago
FYI, most of the big theater chains can provide subtitles in their theaters. There are two types of devices they'll give you... one is a personal two-line LED display that fits in your cupholder and sits around eye level, the other is a pair of electronic glasses that overlays them onto the picture. Both sync to a wireless signal that gets broadcast in the theater itself. I can't watch movies without those anymore. You just have to go to guest services and ask for them; sometimes the frontline staff won't know they have them, but a manager almost always knows how to get one and set it up for you. It's free.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  There's also a lower-tech solution in some places, with a display at the back of the theater showing subtitles and a mirror on a stick that fits into a cupholder to reflect it.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Yikes! That seems like it'd a real PITA for anyone sitting behind you, constantly seeing flashes of light from the projector if you happened to hold it the wrong angle for just a second.
newsbinator 5y ago
> "Mumbling, breathy, I call it self-conscious type of acting, is so frustrating," she says. "I would say a lot of the younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus also falls on the directors to say, 'I can't understand a word you're saying. I'm listening to dailies, and I can't understand.' No amount of volume is going to fix that." In Star Trek: Discovery, all other issues aside, one that irks me a lot is the main character delivers about 2/3rds of her lines in a literal whisper. This is meant to convey emotion, since the writing on Star Trek now is dripping with deep emotion in every scene. I'm not sure if it's the direction or the acting, but when every line is whispered, then nothing is.
pessimizer 5y ago
A lot of blame can be put on the mumbly pseudo-naturalistic trend of prestige acting, but the real blame is dynamic ranges that are too wide in order to make effects/soundtracks ass-quakingly loud. I thought they were going to mention that in the last item. If the dialog were mixed louder, lower volume at the cinema wouldn't be corrected (because everybody would understand what was going on) but sound meant to make the audience jump, wouldn't. This transfers to home viewing, because people at home aren't going to max out the volume of their TVs to watch your movie, so they now can't hear the dialog (unless you remix home releases.) It's like the opposite of the loudness war. Enforcing loudness when the viewer has control of the volume knob requires making the necessary sound (the dialog) so quiet that people have to turn it up. It's like the volume blast of TV commercials before it was regulated. https://www.fcc.gov/media/policy/loud-commercials https://www.fcc.gov/media/policy/loud-commercials
AlbertCory 5y ago
Great, great article. A long time ago, I took a tour of some recording studios. Many of them had some car radio speakers in the booth, so they could hear what the record sounded like in the car with shitty sound. Now, of course, cars have much better sound. It does seem like a movie sound guy would need the equivalent, with some home theater setups that simulate how people are actually hearing it.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  Even with a proper, calibrated surround setup like I have at home the dynamic range is ridiculous - dialog is way too soft and explosions are way too loud.
everybodyknows 5y ago
News we can use (as home video consumers): "Very often, the streamed audio is a compressed version that you wouldn't get on a Blu-ray," Mangini explains: "On Blu-ray, if you select 7.1, that is our full fidelity, 48 kilohertz, 24-bit master audio, just as it came from the mixing studio. You can get that on a Blu-ray, and you can get that on certain premium platforms. I think you have to pay extra money for that.
tyingq 5y ago
The worst one ever for me was "Public Enemies". I had to walk out of the theater because I couldn't hear the dialogue. I did end up watching at home, even there it was a challenge so I turned on the subtitles. I recall someone saying it was typical for films directed by Michael Mann.
difosfor 5y ago
I hate it how volume is maxed out in movie theaters way too often these days. I can't remember the last time I was able to watch a movie without putting my fingers in my ears for some parts of it. I've even Sat through whole movies with ear plugs in like I was at a concert (same problem there). I guess they pander to the physical sensation of loud music and/or people with damaged hearing? I'd be happy to find a theater where they lower the volume and even happier to find one where they would reasonably normalize it.
MarkLowenstein 5y ago
The problem is multiplied by an information-theory phenomenon: like a mathematics textbook, each line of dialog these days is distilled to contain maximum information. There is little redundancy. If you miss a line, it really matters. Combine that with this trend of filming long, brooding pauses punctuated by only occasional dialog, and you get a lot of resentful watchers after they've waited for 30 seconds for the actor to finally say something, and then it trails off unintelligibly, leading to a 90-second adventure in rewinding not far enough, then too far, then waiting for buffering...
- cwilkes 5y ago
  To add to that: this gives the show some (undeserved) re-watchablility in that you’ll finally be able to understand some bit of dialog.
gnicholas 5y ago
We actually stopped watching Man in the High Castle due to audio issues with the dialog. The volume difference was so great, we were constantly increasing/decreasing the volume depending on whether there was dialog or not. This was using a Mac mini, plugged into a Bose Wave Radio, which normally works great for TV/movies.
lazyeye 5y ago
I had a thought that subtitles could also be used to provide an "explainer" for those movies where the plot is so complex and so much knowledge is assumed, its almost impossible to understand what is going on. This would have been great for the Foundation movie.
gkop 5y ago
> "If you listen to, say, 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' you'll hear every word ... the sound was cut on film back then, and with limited time, track count, and budget, these are the results you got." Can somebody translate this, what is meant by “cut on film” in this context? I found [0] via web search, but it seems to be about distribution and not production. It seems unlikely to me that a 1994 movie’s sound was initially recorded in an optical format. But I can see how if it was planned to be distributed with sound-on-film, that could influence the production. Is that what was meant by the quote above? What do movie sound people mean by the word “cut” in this context, or does it have no specific meaning? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  The sound track was an analog track, rendered onto the film itself (either as a magnetic tape strip on the film or an optical track outside the projected image) and was read by the projector as the film rolled through.
  - gkop 5y ago
    Thanks. Would you spell out the implications of this distribution format, for production? Why does the number of channels (for example) that the film is distributed with, matter for production, with regard to recording and processing techniques to do with dialogue? Also, can you speculate on how the dialogue on that movie was initially recorded? Digitally? Analog tape?
    - jamesmaniscalco 5y ago
      I think the "track count" has to do with the number of tracks available for mixing in the sound editing stage, not how many channels are in the final mix. At the time the sound editors would have been limited by the mixing board itself - how many tapes can run simultaneously. These days, computer audio workstations can have essentially an unlimited number of tracks, allowing endless tinkering and post-production that can become a crutch. My experience is in music production but I think the same applies to film.
goshx 5y ago
And I thought I couldn't understand some dialogs because I am an immigrant...
FalconSensei 5y ago
> "Not everything really has a very crisp, cinematic sound to it in real life, and I think some of these people are trying to replicate that," he tells me. Well... there's no loud background music in real life, and some sounds (like rain, etc...) are usually less loud in real life than in movies...
simplyaccont 5y ago
As countermeasure, some of the higher end receivers have Dialogue Enhancement functionality
gnicholas 5y ago
Relatedly, does anyone know why subtitles are displayed over the video itself, as opposed to in the black rectangle that often exists below? I can see that it might be a little harder to look down to the text, but it would be much easier to have sufficient contrast against a black background. I wish this were at least an option!
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I believe that DVD subtitles are just dumb bitmaps overlaid onto the video. You'd have to have logic to slice up the bitmap and relocate it off-screen. Closed caption is textual stream with metadata (x/y position). That would be a cinch to play in an off-screen area.
- thegoleffect 5y ago
  The black rectangles exist because the video is a different aspect ratio than your monitor. Not all displays have the same ratio, a monitor with a matching ratio will have no black bars on any side. So by nature, closed captioning has to be within the video bounds.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    I'm aware of the reason for the black bars. The point is that the captions that are not part of the video stream (I believe on DVDs they are not) can be presented below the video if that space exists and the user desires.
    - layer8 5y ago
      That feature is called "subtitle shift", some DVD/BD players have it (and VLC IIRC). Unfortunately streaming clients generally don’t.
ilaksh 5y ago
When they are talking about familiarity, it really is about a change in perception rather than lack of focus. Once you know what it is supposed to say, you can't just concentrate and then not understand it anymore. All of our perception including understanding spoken language is based on pre-knowledge.
Johnny555 5y ago
I always blamed it on my declining hearing and assumed I could understand the dialog in older movies because I'd already seen them and knew the dialog. I usually turn on subtitles not just because it's hard to understand the dialog, but I often watch movies at night after my spouse is in bed and if I turn it up to the point where the dialog is easy to hear, the sound effects/music are often way too loud. My soundbar has a "night" mode that compresses the volume levels and makes it a bit more tolerable, but I still generally leave the volume turned down so low that I need to use subtitles to understand all of the dialog.
- handrous 5y ago
  One thing that happened was that home copies of movies used to have a stereo audio mix, I assume professionally and manually mixed down and rebalanced, even if they didn't originally (though older movies—and not even that old—mostly were stereo to begin with) but then at some point in the DVD era they started only shipping 5.1 or better, even though very few home viewers have a 5.1 or better speaker setup, and even fewer have it calibrated anything like correctly. Result: most people are getting 5.1 dowmnixed to 2 by whatever shit-tier hardware + software their TV or budget-level DVD/Bluray/streaming player has, then played over bad TV speakers or, at best, a mediocre soundbar. To be clear, this isn't their fault, it's the fault of media distributors for no longer distributing an audio mix appropriate for most people, which would be a stereo mix focused on clarity of dialog at normal playback volume. The result is that all the trends of making the 'splosions louder and the dialogue quieter are amplified (haha) for the vast majority of home viewers, to the point that they can't understand any of the dialog unless the background music and explosions are waking up the neighbors. And that's without the film itself having made some questionable choices to begin with (as—which others have mentioned here—Tenet)
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    I have a 5.1 setup and it's the same though. They just use waay too much dynamic range. It's like they're going for realistic sound levels. If the dialog is normal speaking volume, then the gunshots are ear-splitting. I don't want the car chase to be at actual volume...
jrace 5y ago
I recommend using the chrome plugin https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-channel/hafdgamhnmiioimpcdhhbhgcjndgmphd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-channel/hafd... to apply your own compression to the audio signal for chrome-based playback.
xwowsersx 5y ago
Fascinating and, I have to admit, a relief to hear this isn't just my hearing. I am finding, more and more, that I have to turn closed captioning/subtitles on.
efields 5y ago
Would it be so hard to offer a “high vocals” mix? Even if it was just a simple filter/preset in whatever sound software studios use???
- handrous 5y ago
  I just got a new 7.2 receiver (thanks, Black Friday) and it has a "don't wake the baby" mode of some sort, that I think is pretty much exactly what you're asking for. Flattens out the dynamics and raises the level of channels that tend to carry dialog. [EDIT] But yes, a better option would be for production companies to deliver that as an option to begin with, complete with professional attention to make sure it's good for its purpose.
gkop 5y ago
Just want to share a completely different cause of the same symptom, I'm curious if anyone else has experienced: I watch movies at home with Netflix on a PS4 Slim plugged into an TX-NR636 receiver running in bi-amp stereo mode. Netflix defaults the audio to 5.1, and this causes muffled dialog and extremely loud music and explosions. When I manually choose stereo in Netflix, the sound comes out perfect. My searching online suggests my receiver is not doing its job properly, since it should losslessly mux the 5.1 to stereo (it officially supports the four speakers in bi-amp stereo mode configuration), but I've gone through all its settings and gave up trying to fix it. I notice this issue because I'm compulsive, but other people that still have stereo speakers but receive 5.1 signals are just presumably "living with it", and suffering muddled dialogue...
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  > it should losslessly mux the 5.1 to stereo Downmixing 5.1 to stereo is almost always trash. I've never come across a solution that does it well out-of-the-box. Most people imagine 5.1 as stereo, just subdivided into front and back, with an added center channel for funsies. In reality, it's basically mono. The center channel is the main thing, which delivers most of the dialogue, and there are 4 auxiliary speakers sprinkled around you for sound effects. When downmixing 5.1 to stereo, you should turn up the volume of the center channel a ton before splitting it up to the left and right speakers. This is rarely done in reality, so you end up with a weird mix where the sound effects and off-screen noises are way too loud, and the would-be-center-channel dialogue is way too quiet.
  - gkop 5y ago
    Thank you! Who do I blame in my setup then? Any idea why Netflix doesn't allow configuring a default to stereo? Or why my PS4 doesn't have a choice for stereo for HDMI Audio Output (it just allows choosing between 5.1 and 7.1)? Is it just a conspiracy to sell speakers?? More to the point: in a world where Netflix and PS4 default to 5.1 output, should we not expect everyone with just two speakers to be getting crappy sound?
    - 5y ago
stunt 5y ago
I first thought it's because new TVs hide speakers on the back, but even a decent soundbar didn't help much. Best you can do is to use a headphone.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Baker Landers knows on which side of that divide she falls. "We mix and release the film for the best case scenario, saying, 'This is how it should be.' A lot of times, we'll hear people say, 'They're not going to be able to hear this in certain theaters in the Midwest, so should we do this louder?' But then you don't have a standard any longer. You have to say, 'This is the standard. We're doing it for the optimum viewing experience.' And hopefully theaters and everyone else rise to that." That and other parts of the article seem like clear analogs to IT design issues: If we follow the standard, then we get a lot of failures by people not following the standard. Think of web design, for example. IME, the answer in IT is: Deal with it. Appealing to the standard as an excuse for the failures is BS. If your website fails because some end-user platform doesn't implement standards properly, that's on you. You need to build for the messy real world, not for an idealistic, perfect, clean-room world of standards. Is there no user-centric design concept in film?
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  I think that's a bad analogy. What you're suggesting would be complete chaos for film. Most films adhere to the standard, thankfully. The cinemas are meant to be calibrated. People can calibrate their home cinemas the same.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    The status quo is not working, so what do you propose?
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      Not that. That would be much worse than the status quo. I'm not unhappy technically with what's happening now, it seems to be an artistic decision from directors to fuck it up. Technically everything is set up nicely to have great sound. If directors want to release shit audio on purpose there is nothing we can do but not pay for their movies.
simonblack 5y ago
Not just movie dialogue. I find that some TV dialogue is difficult also. Often enough, I will replay some pieces of dialogue only to give up after several attempts in working out what was said.
wolverine876 5y ago
In music, often you can't understand the lyrics at first, and sometimes not at all. When talking to people, often you can't understand every word or syllable. People go to operas where they can't understand the language at all. There is much more to communication than the literal words.
jbverschoor 5y ago
In music, you would listen to the mix on different speakers. Also, an impulse response helps a lot to emulate certain situations.
bob332 5y ago
Boring
idworks1 5y ago
Here is what you can do. Take an episode from The Simpsons in 2005, then take one that was released this year. Listen. In the 2005 audio, the silent parts have grains. Both the sound effect and voice are almost at the same level. You don't spend your time constantly lowering and increasing the volume as music, sfx, and voice alternate. Now in 2021, (or more like 2018 the last time I watched), it almost feels like the voice is on a different track. Unless you wear earphones, you will be smashing the volume button up and down from scene to scene. With headphones, it sounds disconnected. You can feel the voice actors standing there in that empty soundproof room. The quality of the recording is so flawless that maybe you need studio monitors to hear. The home sound system doesn't cut it anymore. The soundsystem of the future is subtitles.
DerekL 5y ago
The actual title is “Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)”. It seems like HN believes that the word why is clickbait, even though removing it changes the meaning of the title.
_nalply 5y ago
> [...] would want stuff mixed at a level that was just ear-bleeding I am Deaf. Whenever I start a Paw Patrol episode for my children I have to turn downward the sound. Even I can feel that someone cranked up the sound to 11. The table starts vibrating, the children cover their ears and the Yacker Tracker flashes red. It's really annoying and as a Deaf person I don't know how to fix the sound level.
systemBuilder 5y ago
I completely agree there is so much mumbling that we watch movies with subtitles turned on, most of the time!
animal531 5y ago
I consider this to be the movie version of an AAA game developed for PC, but where all configurable settings have been disabled. All the time in the production has been spent on the game, but for some reason they couldn't be bothered to implement the first basic thing that the player is going to want to change, settings/keybindings etc. Perhaps it is a case of the producer having lost touch with what the consumer experience is?
the_wolo 5y ago
Recently I figured out that this is why I like the German synced version of most movies so much more. Other than the English original versions, I have no problems understanding those. I do understand English quite well but I always had problems with movies. I thought it was just a mic positioning problem but it was quite enlightening to see it is a structural one that has developed over the past 10 years and is known in the sound community.
dorafmon 5y ago
God I always thought this is because I am not a native English speaker, although I have been living in UK for more than 10 years I thought it is just becasue my English is not good enough.
ammar_x 5y ago
This post and comments increased my confidence in my English skills. I don't have issues with understanding my American colleagues and talking with them, but when I try to watch a movie without a subtitle, I feel that I'm far from being good enough in English. I thought I was alone in that, so thanks for posting this.

293 points by andyjohnson0 5y ago

Product idea: Volume-leveling headphones. They bring the explosions down to a tolerable volume and boost the whispers to an audible level. They have external microphones for use in the cinema, BlueTooth for your phone, and a wire for low-latency on video calls.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 5y ago

There's also the technical fix in AC4 and some other modern formats where the dialog track can be split out and additional metadata added so that the audio can be "remixed" for whatever listening environment people are in. The truth about it is that people listen to audio in less-than-perfect environments all the time. The ideal "Home Theater" is a room that has one door and isn't a passage from one place to another and doesn't have people doing other things. In real life a lot of people have a big TV in an room that's part of an open plan and a "boomy" soundtrack which is great in the theater will drive people apart in their home.

musicale 5y ago
This is a nice idea. Theater mix is definitely different from what I want at home, and being able to switch between various mixes (e.g. headphone, binaural, small speaker, home theater, stereo image/surround, clarity, immersive music, immersive effects, personal preference, etc.) would be great.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Syracuse New York has an ATSC 3.0 TV transmitter that I pick up with https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-flex-4k/ https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-flex-4k/ I'd like to say that this is a wonderful product that "just works" but unfortunately some of the devices I have (XBOX ONE, 8th gen iPad) don't support the AC4 soundtrack even though my various trashy Android devices handle it just fine.
brokenmachine 5y ago
DTS:X has that as well, my receiver has a "dialog level" control to adjust it. There's a Dolby equivalent as well, but as far as I know there are zero titles that make use of it except for a couple of demo discs.

musicale 5y ago

I thought it was common practice to re-record dialogue tracks (i.e. ADR) to make them clearer. Another option (if they wanted to use it) would be to use signal processing techniques to extract and improve the dialogue tracks.

notreallyserio 5y ago

It's interesting AMC cites surveys. I haven't seen a survey but even if I did I'm not sure I'd complain to them about unintelligible dialogue -- as a layman, I've assumed that's mostly a problem with the movie and not the theater (they don't have a separate dialogue track they can boost). And I guess now that I read this I'm not sure how much it'd matter, given directors themselves are complaining about the problem.

macintux 5y ago
There are few things more frustrating than researching a problem, taking it to the people responsible, and having them dismiss it with “no one has complained before.” I don’t think I’ve ever dismissed someone coming to me in that way, and I hope if I ever do that I’m fired for it.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Maybe one thing is more frustrating: stalebot closing issues that have recent responses (I count emoji reactions).

shantnutiwari 5y ago

For me-- I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays; can't understand half the dialog. Part is the too many audio tracks being mixed in, that the article talks about. Also, I've noticed American actors seem to mumble their lines a lot, I dont know why. British actors (usually) speak clearly. Maybe its a cultural thing, like Americans prefer method acting more? Also, I've noticed that stage actors like Patrick Stewart , speak clearly, maybe because on stage you have to enunciate properly. The end result is: If a movie doesn't have subtitles, we don't watch it. (And havent been to a cinema for 2+ years, obviously, in cinemas you rarely get the option). On an unrelated note: I dont know why so many movies are shot in the dark. It might make sense when viewed in a theater, but when viewing at home, I can't see anything. The last few scenes of Edge of Tomorrow were impossible to understand because of this. My impression is: The "arteestes" have taken over Hollywood, and making stylish movies take precedence over making movies that are easy to watch and hear.

Brajeshwar 5y ago
Few years back, India theaters started adding subtitles in Hollywood/English movies. It increased viewership dramatically.
mnw21cam 5y ago
Patrick Stewart is Royal Shakespeare Company trained. You won't find an actor trained by the Royal Shakespeare Company that mumbles their lines.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  If you mumble on the stage anywhere the director will (or should!) kick your ass.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  It's interesting to note that Patrick Steward might be responsible for changing the way people commonly pronounce the word Data. If so, I wonder how much impact his stage training had on how he chose to pronounce the word.

pkulak 5y ago

The article starts at the headline "It's in the Acting".

sillyquiet 5y ago

Anybody else find it very weird and off-putting that folks thought even talking about these issues would affect their careers? I mean, does that not speak volumes about the toxic professional atmosphere hollywood labors in?

aaronbrethorst 5y ago
I assumed this was breathless overstatement designed to hook the reader with some ‘forbidden knowledge.’ Not anything real.
vlunkr 5y ago
I like to think they tried to talk to more sound engineers but their dialog was inaudible.
colordrops 5y ago
I'd be afraid to talk negatively about any of the jobs I've had at a FAANG while working there.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
It is hard to find any industry where skilled consultants are willing to trash talk their repeat customers.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
You're often going to have to cite specific movies, specific directors when talking about this. With Nolan, it's easy because he's acknowledged this stuff and it's well known. Same with Tom Hardy. But start mentioning other directors, actors and films with specific complaints about how the vocal mix was handled, and I imagine you'll be persona non grata for vocal mixing fairly soon.

at_a_remove 5y ago

In my naive younger years, when Blu-Ray was being announced, I thought, "Hey, they could put the dialogue on one track, the music on another, and the foley business somewhere else, then you could mix those as you needed." Just put the baby down? Switch to dialogue, with only ten percent explosions and soundtrack. (This of course would only be useful where you had original audio tracks)

Joker_vD 5y ago
The video games have pretty much universally been having at least two separate volume sliders (one for music, other for SFX, optionally the third one for the dialog) for about 15? 20? years. Maybe in another 20 years the cinema industry will adopt something like it, who knows?
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I keep waiting for this setting and I don’t understand why a service like Netflix or HBO hasn’t offered it yet.
  - josefx 5y ago
    Do they have access to the individual audio tracks for anything that they haven't produced themselves?
    - the-pigeon 5y ago
      Unlikely but if they offered it on their own stuff it could create a trend. And increasingly they are losing the quality content that they didn't produce themselves.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Directors and the like would probably refuse to cooperate. This is mostly prevalent in video games because they lack auteurs obsessed with this kind of thing.
- 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

As someone living in the city with a lot of neighbors, I mostly have the problem with high dynamic range. I hate it so much and you cannot deactivate it in most streaming media. I get that it is effect-full, but either I need subtitles or I blast my neighbors to insanity. Ever watched a Youtube video and then switched to Netflix and you couldn't hear anything? That is because the amplitude is set to very low for them to have a buffer with which they suddenly blast you out of the window in case anything happens. That sound guys aren't even allowed to utter criticism of director or risk career speaks volumes about the industry.

tshaddox 5y ago
It’s not even just the neighbors. Sometimes (almost always) I don’t want ear-splitting explosions just to be able to barely hear dialog.
- goostavos 5y ago
  Yeah, it's always immediately frustrating when you realize it's "one of those movies" where I'm going to have to ride the volume the entire time. The nice side-effect from that constant volume changing is that the volume display covers the subtitles, which means I can neither hear nor even read the subtitles the dialogue >:(
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Yeah, I really wished home video releases had a separate professional surround mix with a much lower dynamic range between normal dialog and the loudest sounds. Dynamic range compression works, but it's often heavy-handed and very noticeable (especially on an Apple TV). I think cinema mixes are conventionally around 30 dB between dialog and the loudest sounds, which works great in the cinema (both because there is less ambient sound, and because you expect really loud sounds in the cinema), but is pretty extreme at home if you don't have a proper "home theater" setup. That's like the difference between normal conversation and a lawn mower. If you're watching a movie at home and two characters are talking and then one of them starts their lawn mower, do you actually want it to be as loud as if you fired up a lawn mower in your living room? For sustained sounds I generally wouldn't want it much more than 10 dB above dialog (that's like running a washing machine) and for very peaky effects like gunshots 20 dB is probably pushing it for most people's living room setups.

jrace 5y ago

This is the part that bothers me: "I think in the case of Mr. Nolan, with ["Tenet"], the characters have a mask, and he wants to keep the original sound because I think for him it's more real," he says. Presumably, that mentality also extends to "The Dark Knight Rises," in which Bane's mask muffled a significant percentage of that character's lines. Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?utm_campaign=clip https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha... ---If that is the case, that the director does not want us to understand the dialogue then why make it so important to the story? Why make it so dialogue heavy then?

AutumnCurtain 5y ago
For Tenet specifically, lots of dialogue without masks was still nearly inaudible on my home theater, while gunplay was deafening. It's not a mask issue, or at least not exclusively - it's an audio mix issue. There are scenes with just two unmasked people that were inaudible to me without having the background sounds painfully loud.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  What you describe is infuriating. Many shows suffer from the same issue that even background noise obscures dialogue of main characters that is crucial for the story. It got so prevalent and so annoying that I started to vote with my feet. If in the first few minutes I have problems hearing the dialogue, I just stop watching, leave a 1-star review with a comment that the audio is incomprehensible and ask for a refund in case I paid for watching. Hopefully, the others would start doing the same and the trend will go away.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  I had the same problem. A fairly high end 5.1 system and I was unable to hear most of the dialogue. I have no idea what was going on in that movie, but I could hear the firing pin hit the primer in crystal clarity.
leetcrew 5y ago

daveslash 5y ago

During the pandemic's "shelter in place", I started watching (and re-watching) older movies (anything pre 2000). I'm still on that binge.... I also got into 35mm film photography (developing it at home in my bathroom), and learning a ton about the chemistry, etc... I've discovered, and in some cases re-discovered, how much I prefer the older movies over newer ones. And my work in 35mm/analog gives me a new appreciation for movies shot on film. Movies like the original "Planet of the Apes" has found new appreciation in my eyes. There are some real, true, gems from the 60s - 90s. Edit: I know this comment isn't about the audio, specifically - but rather, just about how movies have changed more generally.

thanatos519 5y ago
I sure miss my darkroom. Don't miss ST:TNG in 1080p. So glad it was shot on film.
- daveslash 5y ago
  Same. I miss the darkroom, and ST:TNG looks so great on film! In case you're unaware, you don't need a darkroom to develop 35mm film. I don't use an enlarger to transfer my photos onto photo paper (which would require a darkroom). Instead, I develop in the light but using a light-proof changing bag to load my film into a light-proof Paterson developing tank. After I pull the developed film out and let it dry, I scan the negatives using a photo scanner (I use an Epson v600, but there are plenty of options out there for scanning film negatives). Reddit's r/analog and r/analogcommunity is a thriving community.

axiomdata316 5y ago

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that struggled understanding Tenet. I think it's almost impossible to understand that movie without subtitles (I've watched Tenet over five times and still struggle at parts, especially the end). Interesting point to is with subtitles it identifies the main character as the Protagonist. Just watching the movie with subtitles is very difficult to come to that conclusion.

nimbius 5y ago

with regard to the art of cinema, purposefully and clearly communicating the story is an absolutely critical requirement. without coherent dialogue, you've released a million dollar screen saver. for executives: this type of failure can crucify everything from box office earnings to streaming. every copy you send to an emmy voter will be shrugged off as dark-and-mumbly.

brokenmachine 5y ago
I think Christopher Nolan's movies make money, but every one I've seen is nearly unwatchable between the whispers and explosions.

steve76 5y ago

What worked for me: 1. Move front and surround and height if you have them speakers to full range. 2. Set center speaker cutoff a few hz higher than normal, like 80 or 100 3. Turn up level going to sub. Turn down volume knob on the sub. This prevents auto off You get a lot of the low end effects off the sub, and the center and sub is just for dialogue. You get that depth effect without the dialogue being muted. I feel filmmakers do this so their movies don't age. Supposedly they're going to have a laser speaker, and the flat panel tv will be a speaker itself with the sound shot across the screen. All those movies get a new release for that.

baggy_trough 5y ago

Another problem is movies that race over important plot points so quickly that if you blink you can't understand what's going on. I hate it when I have to read the wikipedia article to get half the plot explained.

qalmakka 5y ago

So it's not only me then. Fair enough, English isn't my first language but I have been studying it since I was very little, and usually in the real world I tend to have close to zero issues at understanding speech, be it in first person, YouTube videos, talk shows, radio or animated shows. I always watch BBC documentaries or clips from the previous night late shows (such as Colbert's or Kimmel's), often while cooking or doing chores, and I can follow basically the entire thing without having to go back, even if I'm distracted or if there's some environmental noise. I can't say that it's the same with films, though. They are often hard to follow for me without subtitles, I suspect due to IMHO just how terribly they are mixed. Sound effects and music are usually boosted up to outrageous levels, which cause the dialogue to become muffled or close to inaudible. It just sucks and it's not a good experience at all.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> not only me then I wonder if this explains part of TV's surging popularity relative to film. I also find modern movies frustrating to watch, in part because I can't follow the dialogue. (I assumed it was a hearing thing.)
- qalmakka 5y ago
  I think that one reason is often that a film is way longer than a single TV series episode, so it requires a bigger "commitment". I can potentially watch 3 episodes of different TV series in a single evening or either 3 episodes of the same series, while I can only watch a single movie due to its length. Also, often TV series have more time to properly introduce and develop storylines, while films have to either simplify the plot or be unbearably long in order for the format to be feasible. This makes them often harder to follow or less interesting, for instance Game of Thrones would have been probably turned into utter rubbish if it was made into a film instead of (lots of) episodes - not that it ended that well anyway, though.

Sunspark 5y ago

I've been wrestling with this problem lately. 5.1 audio tracks tend to put most of the voices in the center channel only. If you listen in stereo, there is a challenge here with down-mixing to left and right. Several band-aids to alleviate it: If you watch using MPC-HC, turn normalize on at 400% in the settings, or alternatively if using anything else, turn on Realtek's loudness equalization to do the same thing. If not wishing to use normalization, then if using LAV change center mix level to 1.00 from 0.71, or if using MPC-BE in the mixer change center from 0.0 dB to 3.0 dB. I use normalize myself, because it's still too quiet even with a mixing boost to the center channel.

mjgoeke 5y ago
upvoted - and MPC-HC isn't really available anymore - MPC-BC is a good replacement
- Sunspark 5y ago
  It actually is still around: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases I use both players actually.

teeray 5y ago

> When it comes to dialogue unintelligibility, one name looms above all others: Christopher Nolan I’m glad this was called out. I was super-excited for Tenet last year. I had a brand-new 7.2 Atmos setup… and I had to watch with subtitles on because I couldn’t understand anyone. Very frustrating… glad it wasn’t just me!

el_don_almighty 5y ago

I seriously thought my wife and I were going deaf and crazy because we only watch movies at home with subs on. This article eliminates one of those concerns, but now we are crazy and mad. This is worse than compression of pop music for Spotify broadcasting, this affects the core storytelling of the media. We purposely did NOT go see James Bond in the theater knowing that we wouldn't understand anything people were saying. My first instinct is to throw a Raspberry PI at the problem, but I am not sure where to start.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Theaters are deploying captioning solutions for ADA compliance. I'm not sure what amount of "proof" of need you'd have to provide, though. Hopefully I'll get to go back to a theater someday!

post_break 5y ago

My center channel is at like +12db permanently. It's a fucking joke these days.

CountDrewku 5y ago
Mine's at +3 and I just assumed my hearing was shit so stopped there. Glad to see it's not me it's streaming. I might actually consider going back to in mail Netflix blu-ray for better quality.

junon 5y ago

The writing style of this article really drives me nuts. Let me tell you why. <ad> I talked to some people. Some of them wanted to. Others didn't. Some were anonymous. Some weren't. Let's get to the bottom of this topic. <NSFW ad> "It's really a lot of problems all at once." said one person I talked to. What they say next will shock you. <ad> This article drags on so long I almost forgot what I was reading about. Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
1. you could make sure you read articles like this on a platform that sensibly allows effective ad blocking like ublock origin. 2. the fact that you consider this a long article says a lot more about you than the article or the author. I read the whole thing (with ublock origin active) and I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context.
- junon 5y ago
  > you could make sure you read articles like this on a platform that sensibly allows effective ad blocking like ublock origin. Ah yes, victim blame. > the fact that you consider this a long article I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content. Not that the article itself was long. > I did not notice much if anything that I would consider "noise" in the context. Good for you. We had different experiences, then.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I'm not victim blaming you. Anyone who reads HN understands that a huge chunk of the contemporary web provides a fucked up experience for readers and viewers because of ad placement. I consider that complaining about any particular instance of ads doing that is essentially redundant at this point. The web is screwed up by ads, use an ad blocker or complain about online ads in general, not any particular article. > I didn't say that. I said the article drags on so long before it gets to the actual content. There are 6 paragraphs of introduction before jumping right into the Nolan case. With default font sizing, it's a bit less than 1 page of content in my web browser. How is that "drags on so long before it gets to the actual content"? I tried to restrict my remarks to the article in question. You closed with the sweeping generalization "Maybe they should investigate the decreasing signal:noise ratio of modern journalism next."

mjgoeke 5y ago

The fix for me has been surround sound. I have the center channel bumped several steps louder than the others on my receiver. This makes a world of difference over stereo mixes. (I will admit the voice sound can be more uneven - wind noise etc starts to show through) Hmm, thinking out loud - I bet a multichannel mix could be calibrated on your system to bump the center channel, even if outputting to 2 speaker

soneca 5y ago

Oh, what a great article! Such a relief to not a read a long form that starts with a long anecdote with literary pretensions nor a listicle with bullet points explained in one paragraph. A very short introduction in the form of a personal experience to explain the issue clearly and objectively and then explaining each issue with good research and relevant quotes. I learned a lot!

beebeepka 5y ago

Has a movie creator explained the shift to incompressible dialogue coupled with obnoxiously loud music and effects and stuff. It's really annoying but strangely persistent so ther must be a very concerned effort

acuozzo 5y ago
High dynamic range sound mixes have been with us for a long time. Have you ever watched Lawrence of Arabia in a movie theater? If you do the mixdown to stereo poorly and/or refuse to compress the DR and then play the result from built-in TV speakers I guarantee that you won't be able to hear the dialogue at an acceptable volume even though the film is from 1962 and features clearly-spoken lines from former professional stage actors.
pessimizer 5y ago
I think it's the interpretation/bias of louder as better/clearer. If the sound effects are louder, they're seen as better. This bias even works on the small scale when testing audiophiles: You play them a sample of music twice but tell them the sound is coming from two different sources. If you play one sample slightly louder than the other, they'll identify it as coming from from a higher-quality system. Sound people complain about compression (muddy), not wide dynamic range (drama and depth.)
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  This is well-known and one reason some audiofools are rightfully laughed at for not doing when comparing speakers or cables or whatever they want to wax lyrical with flowery descriptions about. All AB testing of audio equipment should be done with volume matched. Even 0.1dB difference can skew results I believe. Also the switching should be as quick as possible because auditory memory is short. More bass also corresponds to better reported listening tests. Harman did a lot of great blind testing on this and came up with preferred frequency response curves and speaker characteristics (smooth directivity rolloff and a target in-room response).

rootsudo 5y ago

That link is horrible, it's all posture and no content.

jaywalk 5y ago

I enjoyed this quote: "I was at a matinee with a lot of elderly people because I took my mom, and I'm like, 'None of these people can hear what's happening.' The manager, who was probably all of 22 years old, said, 'Well, that's how the film was done.' And I said, 'No, I did the sound on the film. That's not how it was done.'" I've been in a meeting where a third-party vendor was explaining how I was incorrect about how some particular functionality in an application worked, and I had to stop him and inform him that I was the one who developed that functionality and knew exactly how it worked.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
I had the same sort of experience with a third party IT solution who was in on a call with my client and I... he started babbling on how his company had years of experience dealing with this exact piece of software and it would be no problem at all to take over the development and maintenance for it. I was the ONLY developer who had ever touched a line of code in that software. Which is just as funny as the recruiter who wanted to recruit me for a position and said I'd be a great fit and a shoe-in for the interview because he had years of experience working with the company in question as a partner. ...I wrote the job description. It was literally an open position for my direct subordinate. I was the hiring manager and had never heard of the recruiter before. So I replied with "interest," we went through the interview process, I submitted my resume, and then he called us up to speak to the person hiring for the position saying that he had a GREAT candidate. This guy hadn't even read the resume, because my current employer was on it as it was obviously my current job. I let him in on my secret, and also let his manager know about my experience with him too. She used to work for me on my team as a recruiter before taking the job to start the firm's New Orleans office.
cosmodisk 5y ago
We have this very famous writer in our country whos works are in the secondary school curriculum. So one day a teacher is giving a lesson to the kids and off she goes into the wilderness about the man. One girl in the class quickly points out that she's wrong about this and that and in fact it happened this way. Teacher quickly goes into a meltdown accusing the girl of being out of her place. The she asks who is she to tell these kind of things to her. "I'm his granddaughter"- replied the girl...

poulsbohemian 5y ago

I’ll admit - I don’t watch much tv or movies anymore, but I can’t help but think the “problem” here is how many of these programs are the equivalent of “ouch my balls” from Idiocracy - that is to say, the dialog is just filler between explosions anyway (IE: it’s being watched for the over-the-top action, it isn’t like the dialog is Goethe.)

goostavos 5y ago
Yep. You nailed it, man. Everyone who watches TV or movies is a big ol' dum-dum consuming real bottom of the barrel entertainment. They should really be doing more enlightened things with their time, like... commenting on Hacker News about things to let people know that they're not involved in the consumption of such drivel.
- poulsbohemian 5y ago
  No - you misunderstand my point. My point isn't to denigrate the viewer, but rather to acknowledge that in some genres the dialog simply isn't the point. Even in the article they appear to acknowledge this, noting that in romcom and whatnot that the audio is more clearly articulated and audible, versus the various examples of action type movies.

vhold 5y ago

One of the most interesting technical details is buried in a giant quote. > All it took was a little bit of collaboration and communication, and all of a sudden, grip and electric are moving generators a hundred yards away instead of having them right around the corner from the set.

ww520 5y ago

The one thing really grinds my gear is the music volume has been tuned up so loud while the conversation volume turned so low.

MarkLowenstein 5y ago
Yeah, if I found a remote control with a "QUIET" button instead of just "MUTE", I'd buy it in an instant.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  On my AVR you can set how many dBs the mute button attenuates.

technobabbler 5y ago

FYI, most of the big theater chains can provide subtitles in their theaters. There are two types of devices they'll give you... one is a personal two-line LED display that fits in your cupholder and sits around eye level, the other is a pair of electronic glasses that overlays them onto the picture. Both sync to a wireless signal that gets broadcast in the theater itself. I can't watch movies without those anymore. You just have to go to guest services and ask for them; sometimes the frontline staff won't know they have them, but a manager almost always knows how to get one and set it up for you. It's free.

crooked-v 5y ago
There's also a lower-tech solution in some places, with a display at the back of the theater showing subtitles and a mirror on a stick that fits into a cupholder to reflect it.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Yikes! That seems like it'd a real PITA for anyone sitting behind you, constantly seeing flashes of light from the projector if you happened to hold it the wrong angle for just a second.

newsbinator 5y ago

> "Mumbling, breathy, I call it self-conscious type of acting, is so frustrating," she says. "I would say a lot of the younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus also falls on the directors to say, 'I can't understand a word you're saying. I'm listening to dailies, and I can't understand.' No amount of volume is going to fix that." In Star Trek: Discovery, all other issues aside, one that irks me a lot is the main character delivers about 2/3rds of her lines in a literal whisper. This is meant to convey emotion, since the writing on Star Trek now is dripping with deep emotion in every scene. I'm not sure if it's the direction or the acting, but when every line is whispered, then nothing is.

pessimizer 5y ago

A lot of blame can be put on the mumbly pseudo-naturalistic trend of prestige acting, but the real blame is dynamic ranges that are too wide in order to make effects/soundtracks ass-quakingly loud. I thought they were going to mention that in the last item. If the dialog were mixed louder, lower volume at the cinema wouldn't be corrected (because everybody would understand what was going on) but sound meant to make the audience jump, wouldn't. This transfers to home viewing, because people at home aren't going to max out the volume of their TVs to watch your movie, so they now can't hear the dialog (unless you remix home releases.) It's like the opposite of the loudness war. Enforcing loudness when the viewer has control of the volume knob requires making the necessary sound (the dialog) so quiet that people have to turn it up. It's like the volume blast of TV commercials before it was regulated. https://www.fcc.gov/media/policy/loud-commercials https://www.fcc.gov/media/policy/loud-commercials

AlbertCory 5y ago

Great, great article. A long time ago, I took a tour of some recording studios. Many of them had some car radio speakers in the booth, so they could hear what the record sounded like in the car with shitty sound. Now, of course, cars have much better sound. It does seem like a movie sound guy would need the equivalent, with some home theater setups that simulate how people are actually hearing it.

brokenmachine 5y ago
Even with a proper, calibrated surround setup like I have at home the dynamic range is ridiculous - dialog is way too soft and explosions are way too loud.

everybodyknows 5y ago

News we can use (as home video consumers): "Very often, the streamed audio is a compressed version that you wouldn't get on a Blu-ray," Mangini explains: "On Blu-ray, if you select 7.1, that is our full fidelity, 48 kilohertz, 24-bit master audio, just as it came from the mixing studio. You can get that on a Blu-ray, and you can get that on certain premium platforms. I think you have to pay extra money for that.

tyingq 5y ago

The worst one ever for me was "Public Enemies". I had to walk out of the theater because I couldn't hear the dialogue. I did end up watching at home, even there it was a challenge so I turned on the subtitles. I recall someone saying it was typical for films directed by Michael Mann.

difosfor 5y ago

I hate it how volume is maxed out in movie theaters way too often these days. I can't remember the last time I was able to watch a movie without putting my fingers in my ears for some parts of it. I've even Sat through whole movies with ear plugs in like I was at a concert (same problem there). I guess they pander to the physical sensation of loud music and/or people with damaged hearing? I'd be happy to find a theater where they lower the volume and even happier to find one where they would reasonably normalize it.

MarkLowenstein 5y ago

The problem is multiplied by an information-theory phenomenon: like a mathematics textbook, each line of dialog these days is distilled to contain maximum information. There is little redundancy. If you miss a line, it really matters. Combine that with this trend of filming long, brooding pauses punctuated by only occasional dialog, and you get a lot of resentful watchers after they've waited for 30 seconds for the actor to finally say something, and then it trails off unintelligibly, leading to a 90-second adventure in rewinding not far enough, then too far, then waiting for buffering...

cwilkes 5y ago
To add to that: this gives the show some (undeserved) re-watchablility in that you’ll finally be able to understand some bit of dialog.

gnicholas 5y ago

We actually stopped watching Man in the High Castle due to audio issues with the dialog. The volume difference was so great, we were constantly increasing/decreasing the volume depending on whether there was dialog or not. This was using a Mac mini, plugged into a Bose Wave Radio, which normally works great for TV/movies.

lazyeye 5y ago

I had a thought that subtitles could also be used to provide an "explainer" for those movies where the plot is so complex and so much knowledge is assumed, its almost impossible to understand what is going on. This would have been great for the Foundation movie.

gkop 5y ago

> "If you listen to, say, 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' you'll hear every word ... the sound was cut on film back then, and with limited time, track count, and budget, these are the results you got." Can somebody translate this, what is meant by “cut on film” in this context? I found [0] via web search, but it seems to be about distribution and not production. It seems unlikely to me that a 1994 movie’s sound was initially recorded in an optical format. But I can see how if it was planned to be distributed with sound-on-film, that could influence the production. Is that what was meant by the quote above? What do movie sound people mean by the word “cut” in this context, or does it have no specific meaning? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film

throwawayboise 5y ago
The sound track was an analog track, rendered onto the film itself (either as a magnetic tape strip on the film or an optical track outside the projected image) and was read by the projector as the film rolled through.
- gkop 5y ago
  Thanks. Would you spell out the implications of this distribution format, for production? Why does the number of channels (for example) that the film is distributed with, matter for production, with regard to recording and processing techniques to do with dialogue? Also, can you speculate on how the dialogue on that movie was initially recorded? Digitally? Analog tape?
  - jamesmaniscalco 5y ago
    I think the "track count" has to do with the number of tracks available for mixing in the sound editing stage, not how many channels are in the final mix. At the time the sound editors would have been limited by the mixing board itself - how many tapes can run simultaneously. These days, computer audio workstations can have essentially an unlimited number of tracks, allowing endless tinkering and post-production that can become a crutch. My experience is in music production but I think the same applies to film.

goshx 5y ago

And I thought I couldn't understand some dialogs because I am an immigrant...

FalconSensei 5y ago

> "Not everything really has a very crisp, cinematic sound to it in real life, and I think some of these people are trying to replicate that," he tells me. Well... there's no loud background music in real life, and some sounds (like rain, etc...) are usually less loud in real life than in movies...

simplyaccont 5y ago

As countermeasure, some of the higher end receivers have Dialogue Enhancement functionality

gnicholas 5y ago

Relatedly, does anyone know why subtitles are displayed over the video itself, as opposed to in the black rectangle that often exists below? I can see that it might be a little harder to look down to the text, but it would be much easier to have sufficient contrast against a black background. I wish this were at least an option!

EvanAnderson 5y ago
I believe that DVD subtitles are just dumb bitmaps overlaid onto the video. You'd have to have logic to slice up the bitmap and relocate it off-screen. Closed caption is textual stream with metadata (x/y position). That would be a cinch to play in an off-screen area.
thegoleffect 5y ago
The black rectangles exist because the video is a different aspect ratio than your monitor. Not all displays have the same ratio, a monitor with a matching ratio will have no black bars on any side. So by nature, closed captioning has to be within the video bounds.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I'm aware of the reason for the black bars. The point is that the captions that are not part of the video stream (I believe on DVDs they are not) can be presented below the video if that space exists and the user desires.
  - layer8 5y ago
    That feature is called "subtitle shift", some DVD/BD players have it (and VLC IIRC). Unfortunately streaming clients generally don’t.

ilaksh 5y ago

When they are talking about familiarity, it really is about a change in perception rather than lack of focus. Once you know what it is supposed to say, you can't just concentrate and then not understand it anymore. All of our perception including understanding spoken language is based on pre-knowledge.

Johnny555 5y ago

I always blamed it on my declining hearing and assumed I could understand the dialog in older movies because I'd already seen them and knew the dialog. I usually turn on subtitles not just because it's hard to understand the dialog, but I often watch movies at night after my spouse is in bed and if I turn it up to the point where the dialog is easy to hear, the sound effects/music are often way too loud. My soundbar has a "night" mode that compresses the volume levels and makes it a bit more tolerable, but I still generally leave the volume turned down so low that I need to use subtitles to understand all of the dialog.

handrous 5y ago
One thing that happened was that home copies of movies used to have a stereo audio mix, I assume professionally and manually mixed down and rebalanced, even if they didn't originally (though older movies—and not even that old—mostly were stereo to begin with) but then at some point in the DVD era they started only shipping 5.1 or better, even though very few home viewers have a 5.1 or better speaker setup, and even fewer have it calibrated anything like correctly. Result: most people are getting 5.1 dowmnixed to 2 by whatever shit-tier hardware + software their TV or budget-level DVD/Bluray/streaming player has, then played over bad TV speakers or, at best, a mediocre soundbar. To be clear, this isn't their fault, it's the fault of media distributors for no longer distributing an audio mix appropriate for most people, which would be a stereo mix focused on clarity of dialog at normal playback volume. The result is that all the trends of making the 'splosions louder and the dialogue quieter are amplified (haha) for the vast majority of home viewers, to the point that they can't understand any of the dialog unless the background music and explosions are waking up the neighbors. And that's without the film itself having made some questionable choices to begin with (as—which others have mentioned here—Tenet)
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  I have a 5.1 setup and it's the same though. They just use waay too much dynamic range. It's like they're going for realistic sound levels. If the dialog is normal speaking volume, then the gunshots are ear-splitting. I don't want the car chase to be at actual volume...

jrace 5y ago

I recommend using the chrome plugin https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-channel/hafdgamhnmiioimpcdhhbhgcjndgmphd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-channel/hafd... to apply your own compression to the audio signal for chrome-based playback.

xwowsersx 5y ago

Fascinating and, I have to admit, a relief to hear this isn't just my hearing. I am finding, more and more, that I have to turn closed captioning/subtitles on.

efields 5y ago

Would it be so hard to offer a “high vocals” mix? Even if it was just a simple filter/preset in whatever sound software studios use???

handrous 5y ago
I just got a new 7.2 receiver (thanks, Black Friday) and it has a "don't wake the baby" mode of some sort, that I think is pretty much exactly what you're asking for. Flattens out the dynamics and raises the level of channels that tend to carry dialog. [EDIT] But yes, a better option would be for production companies to deliver that as an option to begin with, complete with professional attention to make sure it's good for its purpose.

gkop 5y ago

Just want to share a completely different cause of the same symptom, I'm curious if anyone else has experienced: I watch movies at home with Netflix on a PS4 Slim plugged into an TX-NR636 receiver running in bi-amp stereo mode. Netflix defaults the audio to 5.1, and this causes muffled dialog and extremely loud music and explosions. When I manually choose stereo in Netflix, the sound comes out perfect. My searching online suggests my receiver is not doing its job properly, since it should losslessly mux the 5.1 to stereo (it officially supports the four speakers in bi-amp stereo mode configuration), but I've gone through all its settings and gave up trying to fix it. I notice this issue because I'm compulsive, but other people that still have stereo speakers but receive 5.1 signals are just presumably "living with it", and suffering muddled dialogue...

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
> it should losslessly mux the 5.1 to stereo Downmixing 5.1 to stereo is almost always trash. I've never come across a solution that does it well out-of-the-box. Most people imagine 5.1 as stereo, just subdivided into front and back, with an added center channel for funsies. In reality, it's basically mono. The center channel is the main thing, which delivers most of the dialogue, and there are 4 auxiliary speakers sprinkled around you for sound effects. When downmixing 5.1 to stereo, you should turn up the volume of the center channel a ton before splitting it up to the left and right speakers. This is rarely done in reality, so you end up with a weird mix where the sound effects and off-screen noises are way too loud, and the would-be-center-channel dialogue is way too quiet.
- gkop 5y ago
  Thank you! Who do I blame in my setup then? Any idea why Netflix doesn't allow configuring a default to stereo? Or why my PS4 doesn't have a choice for stereo for HDMI Audio Output (it just allows choosing between 5.1 and 7.1)? Is it just a conspiracy to sell speakers?? More to the point: in a world where Netflix and PS4 default to 5.1 output, should we not expect everyone with just two speakers to be getting crappy sound?
  - 5y ago

stunt 5y ago

I first thought it's because new TVs hide speakers on the back, but even a decent soundbar didn't help much. Best you can do is to use a headphone.

wolverine876 5y ago

> Baker Landers knows on which side of that divide she falls. "We mix and release the film for the best case scenario, saying, 'This is how it should be.' A lot of times, we'll hear people say, 'They're not going to be able to hear this in certain theaters in the Midwest, so should we do this louder?' But then you don't have a standard any longer. You have to say, 'This is the standard. We're doing it for the optimum viewing experience.' And hopefully theaters and everyone else rise to that." That and other parts of the article seem like clear analogs to IT design issues: If we follow the standard, then we get a lot of failures by people not following the standard. Think of web design, for example. IME, the answer in IT is: Deal with it. Appealing to the standard as an excuse for the failures is BS. If your website fails because some end-user platform doesn't implement standards properly, that's on you. You need to build for the messy real world, not for an idealistic, perfect, clean-room world of standards. Is there no user-centric design concept in film?

brokenmachine 5y ago
I think that's a bad analogy. What you're suggesting would be complete chaos for film. Most films adhere to the standard, thankfully. The cinemas are meant to be calibrated. People can calibrate their home cinemas the same.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  The status quo is not working, so what do you propose?
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    Not that. That would be much worse than the status quo. I'm not unhappy technically with what's happening now, it seems to be an artistic decision from directors to fuck it up. Technically everything is set up nicely to have great sound. If directors want to release shit audio on purpose there is nothing we can do but not pay for their movies.

simonblack 5y ago

Not just movie dialogue. I find that some TV dialogue is difficult also. Often enough, I will replay some pieces of dialogue only to give up after several attempts in working out what was said.

wolverine876 5y ago

In music, often you can't understand the lyrics at first, and sometimes not at all. When talking to people, often you can't understand every word or syllable. People go to operas where they can't understand the language at all. There is much more to communication than the literal words.

jbverschoor 5y ago

In music, you would listen to the mix on different speakers. Also, an impulse response helps a lot to emulate certain situations.

bob332 5y ago

Boring

idworks1 5y ago

Here is what you can do. Take an episode from The Simpsons in 2005, then take one that was released this year. Listen. In the 2005 audio, the silent parts have grains. Both the sound effect and voice are almost at the same level. You don't spend your time constantly lowering and increasing the volume as music, sfx, and voice alternate. Now in 2021, (or more like 2018 the last time I watched), it almost feels like the voice is on a different track. Unless you wear earphones, you will be smashing the volume button up and down from scene to scene. With headphones, it sounds disconnected. You can feel the voice actors standing there in that empty soundproof room. The quality of the recording is so flawless that maybe you need studio monitors to hear. The home sound system doesn't cut it anymore. The soundsystem of the future is subtitles.

DerekL 5y ago

The actual title is “Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)”. It seems like HN believes that the word why is clickbait, even though removing it changes the meaning of the title.

_nalply 5y ago

> [...] would want stuff mixed at a level that was just ear-bleeding I am Deaf. Whenever I start a Paw Patrol episode for my children I have to turn downward the sound. Even I can feel that someone cranked up the sound to 11. The table starts vibrating, the children cover their ears and the Yacker Tracker flashes red. It's really annoying and as a Deaf person I don't know how to fix the sound level.

systemBuilder 5y ago

I completely agree there is so much mumbling that we watch movies with subtitles turned on, most of the time!

animal531 5y ago

I consider this to be the movie version of an AAA game developed for PC, but where all configurable settings have been disabled. All the time in the production has been spent on the game, but for some reason they couldn't be bothered to implement the first basic thing that the player is going to want to change, settings/keybindings etc. Perhaps it is a case of the producer having lost touch with what the consumer experience is?

the_wolo 5y ago

Recently I figured out that this is why I like the German synced version of most movies so much more. Other than the English original versions, I have no problems understanding those. I do understand English quite well but I always had problems with movies. I thought it was just a mic positioning problem but it was quite enlightening to see it is a structural one that has developed over the past 10 years and is known in the sound community.

dorafmon 5y ago

God I always thought this is because I am not a native English speaker, although I have been living in UK for more than 10 years I thought it is just becasue my English is not good enough.

ammar_x 5y ago

This post and comments increased my confidence in my English skills. I don't have issues with understanding my American colleagues and talking with them, but when I try to watch a movie without a subtitle, I feel that I'm far from being good enough in English. I thought I was alone in that, so thanks for posting this.