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Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.

• hedora 4y ago
  Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet. Also, it is now fashionable for actors to mumble. I'm reasonably sure I am not going deaf, since I have no problem following audio fiction podcasts with the windows down in my car during my commute.
  • derefr 4y ago
    > Also, it is now fashionable for actors to mumble. Why does it matter that actors are mumbling, though? Don't most lines in Hollywood movies (that aren't already recorded on a soundstage with a boom mic inches from the actor's face) get ADRed these days?
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      If the actor's intention is to mumble instead of enunciatiting clearly (presumably because of some notion of authenticity), then they will also mumble the studio takes. It's not a problem of sound volume/background noise, which ADR can fix, it's a problem of style over ease of understanding the dialogue. This mirrors the problem of TV series sometimes becoming too dark to easily follow the action on a TV screen in usual conditions (infamously so in the Long Night episode of Game of Thrones).
      • Godel_unicode 4y ago
        Those scenes look amazing on good TVs. Making bad screens show them well seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve.
        • tsimionescu 4y ago
          99.9% of the audience will strain to see what is going on, but let's blame their screen buying acumen (and their viewing practices - even the best screen will not make those scenes easily watchable in a sunny room, which is how most people watch TV) instead of making them actually watchable.
          • Godel_unicode 4y ago
            What part of “seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve” makes it seem like this is blaming the people who buy the screens and not the people that make the screens. Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.
            • dmitriid 4y ago
              Art is worse though. From intangible sludge https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-digital-color-sludge https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d... to modern DPs and directors not being able to film a dark scene competently https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1564633641828884483 https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1564633641828884483
              • zimpenfish 4y ago
                James Stephanie Sterling did a video a long time ago (which I currently cannot find) about "the best game for your HD TV" and concluded (IIRC) that it was Viva Pinata because of the ludicrous colourfulness of the game which really showed off the power of HD TVs. Contrasted with the "intangible sludge" of the Dooms, Quakes, etc.
                • dmitriid 4y ago
                  Now I have the urge to play that and Guacamele will n myy brand new OLED :)
              • 4y ago
      • rdtwo 4y ago
        The mandolorian is so dark my iPad has issues with not enough dynamic range. I think they shoot that way too cover bad cg
  • copperx 4y ago
    > Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet. I thought the equipment selected the stereo mix (or did a perfectly compatible mixdown) when playing back a 5.1 mix in a stereo system. Is that not what happens? If it isn't, is it because user error?
    • Sholmesy 4y ago
      Not a sound guy, and have struggled for a while w/ this for my plex setup @ home, so grain of salt. If there's not a separate track for e.g 2.0, then the mixing down from 5.1 -> 2.0 will not have a human who validates the output. An automatic conversion can't accurately confirm that "this is legible for human ears at the right levels"
      • zbuf 4y ago
        The conversion isn't so much as "automatic" or opinionated, but clearly defined in a spec. And it _is_ mathematically correct in terms of sound energy entering the ears. A device may be doing the conversion incorrectly of course. But there is still an omission, which is the introduction of the centre speaker was (as I understand it) to "pin" dialogue to the screen more effectively. That implies there _is_ some physical phenomenon takes place (eg. phasing/interference) which is not compensated for in the spec. My own system is set up to deliberately boost the centre channel in the mix and it does help a lot, however I'm interested to know how to define this amount of compensation in terms of an actual physics or acoustics phenomenon.
        • hunter2_ 4y ago
          The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations. Having dialog in a center speaker means it comes from a different location than the music/fx, so it's easy to hone in on it even if it's a little quieter than the music/fx. Having dialog in the same speakers as music/fx makes it much harder. The specified 5.1 to 2.x mixdown ratios might be good or might be inadequate depending on how correlated the original left track is with the original right track. A ridiculously loud blast only on the 5.1 left means your brain can hear dialog from your 2.1 right unimpeded. A medium volume explosion on the 5.1 left and right (but not center!) leaves you with no 2.1 speaker producing dialog without it being masked by the explosion, especially if the explosion sound is mono-ish.
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    Even listening on a good, calibrated 5.1 setup, the center dialog is way too quiet.
• deleted 4y ago
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• imgabe 4y ago
  Would it not be possible to have multiple audio mixes available and play the one that is appropriate for your setup?
  • vel0city 4y ago
    This is the idea of Atmos. They deliver the source with an absurd number of channels. Your local player knows your room and speaker arrangement (from setup tuning ahead of time) and remaps the stupid number of channels into the right playback based on the equipment available. Got 20 speakers all around the room? Cool. Have a 5.1 setup? No problem. Just have the stereo speakers on your TV? Supposedly, no problem. Whether they actually achieved that depends a lot on your equipment and its tuning.
    • izacus 4y ago
      Atmos doesn't have channels - it has played tracks with their 3d location encoded to the receiver can convert it into the correct channel setup. It's fundamentally different from the "static" channel mixes we had before.
  • noisem4ker 4y ago
    Yes, but audio tracks used to take up valuable space on physical media, so you might indeed sometimes find distinct 5.1 and 2.0 tracks, but usually for the main language only. And of course this duplication is one of the first things pirate releases do away with, in order to reduce the final file size, so you won't find them on most mainstream scene releases either.
  • Too 4y ago
    Yes, on Netflix you can choose. Choosing the stereo mix does offer a significant improvement on hearing dialogue. Regrettably, it has no idea of sensible default or even choice of default, so it always goes to 5.1 even if your setup doesn't have it.
• noisem4ker 4y ago
  At least Dolby Digital takes the scenario into account, applying dynamic range control on 5.1 downmixing. Be sure to set the DD decoder to RF mode (as opposed to line mode) to adapt the range for stereo. With DTS there's no such feature that I know of. Depending on the setup, though, I guess one could always tweak the mix coefficients (privileging the center channel, where most of the voices should end up) and apply a DRC effect somewhere on the audio chain. TVs and receivers sometimes have this last bit built in and exposed as "night mode".
• epistasis 4y ago
  It's hard to believe that TVs are still so buggy that they would intentionally play 5.1 in an unusable way on regular TVs. Of all the ways to deal with the situation, just adding up all the channels equally and dumping them out has to be the stupidest. It's ruined so many people's experiences over the years.
  • zaroth 4y ago
    There’s been a bug for years in the Apple TV VLC app where it plays the audio channels on the wrong speakers. Center channel ends up on back right or something totally ridiculous. There’s an open issue on the bug tracker. It’s wild.
  • ConceptJunkie 4y ago
    I'm just fed up with modern sound. It never sounds right, and it's just too complicated. I use captions on a lot of shows where there is dialog that is too quiet, etc. I'm pretty sure my sound system is not set up right, but I just don't want to figure it out. I debug software for a living. I just want my entertainment system to be plug and play.
• jader201 4y ago
  > most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most Wait, is this true? I’ve always thought I was in the minority for “still” having “just” 2.0. I’ve been needing to upgrade my receiver for a while, but mostly putting it off since I can’t find a decent 2.0 one with a good number of inputs. Almost every receiver is (5+2n).1 these days (where n >= 0). I feel so behind the times in my simple 2.0 system, even though I think it sounds better than almost any other setup I’ve heard — and my speakers are probably 30 years old! So I really don’t care if I’m behind the times, but would still be nice to find someone produce a first-class 2.0 receiver.
  • vel0city 4y ago
    A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer. A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that. Most of my extended family is decently well off in the US. Among a dozen or so households, I'm one of I think two with an actual receiver, and I've only got a 5.1 setup. A few have a sound bar on their fancy movie watching setup. Most of my friends rely on the included speakers on their TVs. Its just not a priority for a lot of people, even people with enough income to afford vacation homes and boats and what not.
    • zaroth 4y ago
      What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup. Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that! Why is sound stuck so far behind?
      • rocqua 4y ago
        One big downside of 5.1 is that you now have 6 speakers to place all around you. Depending on the room and layout, that can be hard to impossible to do without looking ugly, or even to do at all.
• whatevertrevor 4y ago
  I don't think that's true. In fact movie producers are notorious for "phoning in" the 5.1 mixes for the streaming platforms, focusing most of their energy on the theatre mix with Dolby atmos and what not. Usually the 5.1 mix you get on netflix is hurriedly put together as an afterthought.
  • OJFord 4y ago
    That's basically the same point though - it's not that special attention is given to specifically 5.1, it's that a) more separate speakers helps in itself; b) it's primarily mixed for such a multi-separate-speaker system.
    • novok 4y ago
      I have a 5.0 system, and the dynamic range mumble voice + super loud explosion is still very present, even when I artificially boost the center channel. I think voices are actually better on a typical tv speaker 2.0 setup.
      • zepearl 4y ago
        I agree. In my case I had a huge problem with eg. the music in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knives_Out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knives_Out being a lot louder then the rest (source blue ray). The only fix I found was to rip all tracks, apply normalization + compression filters to the audio tracks in Audacity, finally to repackage everything as MKV.
        • jakzurr 4y ago
          I'd buy more videos if they'd hire you to make alternate audio tracks.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    That would be plausible except I miss much of the dialog in theaters, too. I am not a 20-something, but I always turn on subtitles. I never could make out most of song lyrics, either, with some exceptions. Most usually, only the chorus.
• copperx 4y ago
  I would like to believe that, except that the dialog is almost always too quiet in a movie theater.
  • itronitron 4y ago
    Yeah, I enjoyed watching Dune at home more than in the theater because I could turn on the captioning.
  • adrianmsmith 4y ago
    Exactly, I saw Tenet at the cinema I really couldn't understand the dialog.
• OJFord 4y ago
  Yes that was going to be my suggestion. I rarely have this issue with my own (5.1) system, which I also use a lot more, but often struggle on others' (TV speakers, or external but <5.1).
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  It’s honestly ridiculous how bad the stereo (aka what 99% of viewers will experience) mixes are. The explosions can be heard by my neighbors yet I can barely hear the dialogue at the same volume. Find myself basically doing half the mix work myself with the volume control. Too many audiophiles in the production chain focusing on something that barely matters at the expense of most viewers.
  • orlp 4y ago
    Begs the question: why not ship 2 mixes? Not like audio is a significant chunk of the data of a modern blu-ray movie.
    • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
      I mean they do, I purposefully select stereo on Netflix, but I get the feeling the sound engineers don't change it and just hammer the 5.1 down in a way that sounds bad.
  • leeter 4y ago
    Theory: Because distribution companies for movies made having DTS/Dolby Atmos/Whatever mandatory in the theater, sound engineers primarily focus on that because that takes 99% of the time. Because theaters with just optical stereo (yes I'm aware most theaters use digital distribution and projectors now, that just hammers home the point) aren't really a thing any more they don't really bother optimizing it because "nobody will hear that anyway". Then when the film goes to home distribution the distribution company takes the automatic downmix that is the existing stereo track for the optical stereo on a print and use that because they don't want to second guess the sound engineers or the director. Long theory short: it's the same reason the Beatles mono album versions sound a ton better than the stereo versions, because that was the optimized version because that's what people listened too at the time. Sound engineers aren't being paid to optimize the stereo or even 5.1 versions of the audio, only the theater version in whatever multi-channel standard is popular at the moment, so they don't bother they let the standard downmix stand.
    • 4y ago
• dijit 4y ago
  That used to be the problem. It became less of a problem because 5.1 became a lot more common and TVs are smarter about muxing 5.1 into 2.1 than they used to be. But something changed in the last ten years and having a real 5.1 setup (like I have) isn’t helping anymore.
• eastbound 4y ago
  It’s a form of product advertising: “You should hear Steve’s 5.1 system, he can hear the movie properly, the sound is so great!”, “He also has a 1:500000 contrast ratio so he can see faces on his screen that we can’t see on our pitch-dark screens. He can actually see the orcs on LOTR!” And when half the consumers will be done with this upgrade, we’ll invent something new.
• mrweasel 4y ago
  So it’s similar to when a developer great an Electron app that works great on a 24 core machine with 32GB of RAM. It’s not going to be great unless we’re forced to test it on the average dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM?
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    Even on a good calibrated 5.1 setup the dialog is still way too quiet, so in your analogy the Electron app is still crappy on the best PC.
• YokoZar 4y ago
  I've noticed some streaming platforms (eg Paramount Plus) occasionally fail to make use of the center speaker entirely when supposedly in 5.1; this makes the dialog nearly inaudible. I only get this issue with some content sources, and forcing the mixer into stereo mode alleviates the problem. There are almost surely a whole host of bugs just outputting in the format the user has, never mind mixing issues, copyright protection, and similar.
• SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
  The 5.1 vs 2.0 is a bit of a red herring, it used to be a big problem a decade or two ago, but today it is just a small to insignificant contributor to the problem. The real problem now a days is not technical, it is 100% director's choice. Having deafening "wooooon" organ music, and ear popping explosions is simply in vogue, so all directors want that in their movie, and mix like that on purpose. And it is not about theatrical mix vs home mix either. The cinema experience also changed with this latest mixing trend, watching a modern movie in the cinema also became uncomfortable with much louder explosions/music/"wooon" than two decades ago. (To the point where I'm considering using ear protection if ever going back to a cinema). This is 100% a manufactured problem created on purpose by misguided (sound) directors.
  • leephillips 4y ago
    I’ve been using ear protection in my ears at the movies for decades. They’re just too loud.
    • emeril 4y ago
      yeah, I rec etymotic high fidelity earplugs for the least distorted sound
      • leephillips 4y ago
        That would probably be a step up from the wadded tissue I usually resort to. Not that I go to the movies much any more.
  • elzbardico 4y ago
    The last time I went to a theather was before the pandemic, and frankly, I didn't bother going back exactly because the audio became almost an agression to my senses.
  • tibbon 4y ago
    Fwiw, I just wish more systems had built in dynamics controls. I both sympathize with the problem that people are having (and sometimes have it myself), but I also really enjoy focused movie listening time on a nice Atmos system with subwoofers that has a huge dynamic range. Most people don’t enjoy watching films this way however, or not most of the time
• brokenmachine 4y ago
  I have a good 5.1 setup at home, and the dynamic range is still way too large so I'm forever adjusting the volume.