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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 usual

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...

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...