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Mumbling actors is more about the sound setup. Cinemas have enough speakers and processing to create dozens of virtual speakers. The result is that the speech

Mumbling actors is more about the sound setup. Cinemas have enough speakers and processing to create dozens of virtual speakers. The result is that the speech is given it's own location and segment of frequencies. The brain can easily pick it out in this setting. Think hearing your partner speak at a dinner party. Then people watch movie on a two backwards facing speaker thin TV and think why can't I hear anything!? It's like watching a 3D movie with no glasses and wondering why it's blurry.

dpkirchner 4y ago
It's the movie viewers that are wrong, got it!
- gryfft 4y ago
  If you don't have surround sound in your home theater, do you even deserve to watch a movie?
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
I imagine that can contribute. But then other videos don't have the problem. Old movies don't have the problem. Just this new shabby stuff. Does my sound setup know somehow?
- psychphysic 4y ago
  Bottom line a good sound engineer with time and access to the raw audio could mix it to work well with stereo systems. But that ain't happening. > But then other videos don't have the problem. They likely would if they were intended for playback on a cinema system and just flattened to mono or stereo. Christopher Noland doesn't direct/produce movies thinking about how they'll look on a phone on netflix. And the sound engineer he hired doesn't care either. How much time and money was dedicated to the sound engineering to convert that 20 speaker maybe 100 virtual channel system to your 2 speaker system? Then they need to do it for 2.1, 5.1, Atmos... Whatever else is the new thing these days. And if you have 5.1 did you consider carefully the layout? Are there multipath effects you haven't dampened? Did you consider the path to each speaker relative to listener? > Does my sound setup know somehow? Well yes, kind of. Your TV if it is at all modern will do some processing to the audio. If it's connected to a 5.1 system it might just pass through a 5.1, what does it do with a stereo audio? Or 2.1? What if it gets 7.1 it must decide what to do likely you can control this in the settings. Let's say you have a 5.1 setup at home. And your TV sends it stereo? What does it do then how does it make 6 channels from 2? The subwoofer is easy, relatively non-direction a low pass filter sends all low end to it and high pass to the regular speakers. My TV has a decent "clear speech" setting which picks out speech boosts them and then suppresses no speech audio around them. Usually it works perfectly. Playing stereo audio on a stereo system will work fine.
  - patentatt 4y ago
    I don't buy it, much recent content is nearly unintelligible on my pretty good 5.1 setup with a real AVR and real speakers, thats set up and tuned reasonably well. Older movies, from the 80's and 90's don't have this problem, just newer content. And so often it's not even a level problem, it's like the dialogue is deliberately muffled by an EQ or something. I can boost my center channel or use the AVR's speech enhancement control and it's still hard to understand. I kind of buy into the common complaint that it's the actors and actresses that don't know how to project their voices any more.
    - psychphysic 4y ago
      I seem to be failing to explain this... In the 90s cutting edge cinema.audio was 5.1 systems (cinema digital audio) before that 2.1. You own a 5.1 system you say. Today cutting edge is systems like Dolby Atmos Cinema which is a 128 virtual, 64 real speaker system. Are you really saying you can't grasp that cinemas have moved on in audio system since the 80s?
      - falcolas 4y ago
        Atmos’ big feature is to place audio properly no matter how many - or how few - speakers you have. As long as the receiver has identified the positions of your speakers accurately (something receivers have been capable of with a small microphone since the early 00’s) it should place sounds appropriately.
        psychphysic 4y ago
        That's Home Atmos. What happens if you take the 128 channel Atmos Cinema inputs and just blindly make stereo out of them? Perhaps suddenly the very quiet speech the sound engineer carefully made space for in location and frequency is suddenly muddied?
        falcolas 4y ago
        That’s the thing, Atmos doesn’t care about channels, except for how to use them to represent a sound at render time. And that render is not embedded in the tracks, it’s calculated.
watwut 4y ago
Maybe, just maybe movies remastered for home consumption should assume that people are sitting in their living rooms with normal setup rather then in large cinema? And that maybe they dont want to play the movie so loud that the whole building/house hears explosions?
- psychphysic 4y ago
  Absolutely agree.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  Had to jack the sound to max just to hear the dialogue in Tenet... which really wasn't worth much anyway, Nolan at his most sparse
brokenmachine 4y ago
I have an expensive 5.1 calibrated setup at home and the audio still sucks. Must I have my own IMAX theater? Actually, I saw some shitty Nolan movie in the cinema and the audio sucked there as well.

dpkirchner 4y ago

It's the movie viewers that are wrong, got it!

gryfft 4y ago
If you don't have surround sound in your home theater, do you even deserve to watch a movie?

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

I imagine that can contribute. But then other videos don't have the problem. Old movies don't have the problem. Just this new shabby stuff. Does my sound setup know somehow?

psychphysic 4y ago
Bottom line a good sound engineer with time and access to the raw audio could mix it to work well with stereo systems. But that ain't happening. > But then other videos don't have the problem. They likely would if they were intended for playback on a cinema system and just flattened to mono or stereo. Christopher Noland doesn't direct/produce movies thinking about how they'll look on a phone on netflix. And the sound engineer he hired doesn't care either. How much time and money was dedicated to the sound engineering to convert that 20 speaker maybe 100 virtual channel system to your 2 speaker system? Then they need to do it for 2.1, 5.1, Atmos... Whatever else is the new thing these days. And if you have 5.1 did you consider carefully the layout? Are there multipath effects you haven't dampened? Did you consider the path to each speaker relative to listener? > Does my sound setup know somehow? Well yes, kind of. Your TV if it is at all modern will do some processing to the audio. If it's connected to a 5.1 system it might just pass through a 5.1, what does it do with a stereo audio? Or 2.1? What if it gets 7.1 it must decide what to do likely you can control this in the settings. Let's say you have a 5.1 setup at home. And your TV sends it stereo? What does it do then how does it make 6 channels from 2? The subwoofer is easy, relatively non-direction a low pass filter sends all low end to it and high pass to the regular speakers. My TV has a decent "clear speech" setting which picks out speech boosts them and then suppresses no speech audio around them. Usually it works perfectly. Playing stereo audio on a stereo system will work fine.
- patentatt 4y ago
  I don't buy it, much recent content is nearly unintelligible on my pretty good 5.1 setup with a real AVR and real speakers, thats set up and tuned reasonably well. Older movies, from the 80's and 90's don't have this problem, just newer content. And so often it's not even a level problem, it's like the dialogue is deliberately muffled by an EQ or something. I can boost my center channel or use the AVR's speech enhancement control and it's still hard to understand. I kind of buy into the common complaint that it's the actors and actresses that don't know how to project their voices any more.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    I seem to be failing to explain this... In the 90s cutting edge cinema.audio was 5.1 systems (cinema digital audio) before that 2.1. You own a 5.1 system you say. Today cutting edge is systems like Dolby Atmos Cinema which is a 128 virtual, 64 real speaker system. Are you really saying you can't grasp that cinemas have moved on in audio system since the 80s?
    - falcolas 4y ago
      Atmos’ big feature is to place audio properly no matter how many - or how few - speakers you have. As long as the receiver has identified the positions of your speakers accurately (something receivers have been capable of with a small microphone since the early 00’s) it should place sounds appropriately.
      - psychphysic 4y ago
        That's Home Atmos. What happens if you take the 128 channel Atmos Cinema inputs and just blindly make stereo out of them? Perhaps suddenly the very quiet speech the sound engineer carefully made space for in location and frequency is suddenly muddied?
        falcolas 4y ago
        That’s the thing, Atmos doesn’t care about channels, except for how to use them to represent a sound at render time. And that render is not embedded in the tracks, it’s calculated.

watwut 4y ago

Maybe, just maybe movies remastered for home consumption should assume that people are sitting in their living rooms with normal setup rather then in large cinema? And that maybe they dont want to play the movie so loud that the whole building/house hears explosions?

psychphysic 4y ago
Absolutely agree.
imbnwa 4y ago
Had to jack the sound to max just to hear the dialogue in Tenet... which really wasn't worth much anyway, Nolan at his most sparse

brokenmachine 4y ago

I have an expensive 5.1 calibrated setup at home and the audio still sucks. Must I have my own IMAX theater? Actually, I saw some shitty Nolan movie in the cinema and the audio sucked there as well.