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> the center channel is often just played out of both speakers Well what other option do you have when there are only two speakers? Only play it out of one?
by chrisseaton 5y ago
> the center channel is often just played out of both speakers
Well what other option do you have when there are only two speakers? Only play it out of one?
- mulmen 5y agoThe next sentence explains why this is a problem. > This means that sound can be muffled, because its drowned out by the incidental noise that comes from the left/right channel.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 5y agoYeah I read the same comment you did, but if you're taking a signal with 6 channels, and only have two channels out, you don't really have any option but send the middle channel to both outputs, else it'll sound far too intense in a single ear.
- wmf 5y agoA separate stereo audio mix.
- chrisseaton 5y agoHow else would you mix the dialogue except to come out of both speakers though?
- noizejoy 5y agoJust make it a bit louder, before summing it into the left and right channel
- chrisseaton 5y agoRight... so why isn't that done already from the 5.1 signal?
- noizejoy 5y agoI have no idea why that’s not being automatically done when the mixdown occurs in the player.
- eropple 5y agoBecause other times when it's not dialogue (or even when it is--the busy/crowded street effect) you may not want the center channel gain to be raised during mixdown. Consumer hardware can only guess. A sound engineer can know.
- Grakel 5y agoYou mix the dialog louder for the entire piece, and every other sound in the middle. No extreme highs, no extreme lows. General compression with dialog forward choices.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoI don't know why compression isn't built in to consumer media devices, it's so often called for (and closely followed by volume normalisation ... but I guess the advertisers veto that).
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago> I don't know why compression isn't built in to consumer media devices As always, it depends on the device. Dynamic range compression seems to be a relatively common feature, usually as an option described (inaccurately) with something like "Reduce Loud Sounds" like it is on the Apple TV.
- noizejoy 5y agoThe center channel needs to be made louder in the mixdown to 2 channels
- chrisseaton 5y agoBut why can't that be done automatically from the 5.1 signal on the consumer's device?
- noizejoy 5y agoExactly and I have no idea, why this is not done - is it a technical reason, or is it lazy consumer device programming?
- eropple 5y agoIt could. But it's an artistic and a sound engineering decision that changes based on what you actually want the listener to hear. The defaults for automatic sound mixing will almost always be wrong. And they will differ in how they are wrong from consumer box to consumer box.
- chrisseaton 5y agoIf wonder if instead of a separate mix, 5.1 could be modified to include hints for how to better down-mix a given production.
- eropple 5y agoIt can. That's part of the Blu-ray spec. But it's not standardized in streaming video AFAIK (not that Netflix has to care about that, they have their own player) and, even if the feature exists, somebody still has to go do it.
- rbanffy 5y agoA speech recognition model can give you a reading on how understandable the speech is and use that information to guide the channel volume in the mixing. OTOH, a lot of the models end up trained on features that are very different from what humans hear.
- KaiserPro 5y agoNo, When you master for 5.1, because you have the centre speaker, you can have dialogue at 100% volume, then out of left and right, you can have incidental noise, be that music or "atmosphere" also at 100% (its been a while since I've mastered in 5.1) However, two channels of 100% volume (well 0dbu) is louder than just one channel. Which means that if you have lots of music, wind or other foley it'll drown out the dialogue. It requires artistic choices from the sound team to make work properly.