5 ms·

One problem is that the people mixing the audio already know what is being said: Top-down processing (or more specifically, top-down auditory perception) Thi

by joquarky 10mo ago

One problem is that the people mixing the audio already know what is being said: Top-down processing (or more specifically, top-down auditory perception) This refers to perception being driven by prior knowledge, expectations, and context rather than purely by sensory input. When you already know the dialog, your brain projects that knowledge onto the sound and experiences it as “clear.”

snakeboy 10mo ago
Makes sense, but how does this explain the fact that this problem seems recent, or at least to have worsened recently ?
- KeplerBoy 10mo ago
  TV shows changed completely in the streaming age it seems. These days they really are just super long movies with glacial pacing to keep users subscribed.
  - sfn42 10mo ago
    As opposed to the House model where every episode is exactly the same with some superficial differences? I like the long movie format, lots of good shows to watch. Movies feel too short to properly tell a story. It's just like a few highlights hastily shown and then it's over.
    - KeplerBoy 10mo ago
      Sure, it's completely different from procedural comedic shows like House and there's some great shows to watch! Still, sometimes it feels like the writers weren't granted enough time to write a shorter script. Brevity isn't exactly incentivized by the business model.
    - mnky9800n 10mo ago
      I feel like there are plenty of examples of movies that tell a good story. I think the reason people like long form television over movies is a movie requires an emotional commitment that it will end. But there’s always another episode of television.
      - account42 10mo ago
        The flip side is that with most serialized television stories not even the writers know where the story will go so most arcs end up being brushed under the rug while the viewers are distracted with new promises that ultimately end up being hot air.
    - atq2119 10mo ago
      A lot of this is personal preference, but I still feel like the most memorable shows tend to be the ones that have a bit of both. Season-long stories, but also episodes that can stand on their own. In a show like Stranger Things, almost none of the episodes are individually memorable or watchable on their own. They depend too much on the surrounding episodes. Compare to e.g. Strange New Worlds, which tells large stories over the course of a season, but each episode is also a self-contained story. Which in turn allows for more variety and an overall richer experience, since you can have individual episodes experiment with wacky deviations from the norm of the show. Not all of those experiments will land for everybody (musical episodes tend to be quite divisive, for example), but there is a density to the experience that a lot of modern TV lacks.
      - devilbunny 10mo ago
        The original Law & Order did a masterful job of this. Each episode (with very few exceptions) is self-contained, but deeper themes and character development run through them in long (often multi-season) arcs to reward the long-term viewer. But there was rarely more than one episode per season that was solely for the long-term viewer.
  - VBprogrammer 10mo ago
    You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone points it out? It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang theory, House and Scrubs I very rarely caught two episodes consecutively (and when I did they were on some release schedule so you'd forgotten half of the plot by next week). But they are all practically self contained with only the thread of a longer term narrative being woven between them. It's doubtful that any of these netflix series you could catch one random episode and feel comfortable that you understand what's going on. Perhaps worse is the recent trend for mini-series which are almost exactly how you describe - just a film without half of it being left on the cutting room floor.
    - mcv 10mo ago
      It's a different medium, and it's intentional. And not even new either. The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus did the same thing decades ago. Apparently they were successful enough that everybody does it now.
    - simonjgreen 10mo ago
      I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new. Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence. What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice. Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural. So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.
  - vjk800 10mo ago
    I'm fine with this. I always wished regular movies were much longer. I wish lord of the rings movies included all the songs and poems and characters from the book and lasted like 7 hours each.
    - account42 10mo ago
      I would be fine with it of the stories were fully developed before the first episode is released. Unfortunately this usually isn't the case and instead you end up with lots of "cool" story arcs that ultimately go nowhere satisfying.
  - dotancohen 10mo ago
    We used to call that a soap opera. Maybe today we should call it a couch opera.
    - chuckadams 10mo ago
      Rod Serling derogatorily coined the term "Soap Opera" because those also pioneered the ad break, typically for products aimed at housewives, e.g. soap.
      - dotancohen 10mo ago
        What advertisements or other social unwanteds do these new operas promote? I propose Apathy Opera
      - DerekL 10mo ago
        The term soap opera dates to 1938. There’s no way that Rod Serling coined the term.
  - bayarearefugee 10mo ago
    Even as an older person, I prefer the new format, with the exception of the now common 2-3 year gaps between seasons. That part of it, while I know the reasons given for it, is becoming increasingly annoying/frustrating.
    - Fr0styMatt88 10mo ago
      I seem to remember that it was The X-Files that first pioneered the “every episode is a mini-movie” and it showed in the production at the time compared to other stuff. Could be mis-remembering though, when I think about early anthologies like Twilight Zone or Freddy’s Nightmares.
- XorNot 10mo ago
  Honestly what I don't get is how this even happened though: it's been I think 10 years with no progress on getting the volume of things to equal out, even with all the fancy software we have. Like I would've thought that 5.1 should be relatively easy to normalize, since the center speech channel is a big obvious "the audience _really_ needs to hear this" channel that should be easy to amplify up in any downmix....instead watching anything is still just riding the damn volume button.
  - sfn42 10mo ago
    I toyed with the idea of making some kind of app for this but while it may work on desktop it seems less viable for smart tvs which is what I primarily use. Though I have switched to mostly using Plex, so maybe I could look into doing something there.
    - pentaphobe 10mo ago
      I was toying with the same thing for a bit - the hope was if it worked well you could build it into a little unit (audio or HDMI eARC) Doesn't solve for single units but could help with people who use soundbars or amps Abandoned though - was basically just multiband compression and couldn't find a way to make it adaptable enough (some media always ended up sucking) Would be super interested to hear what you tried!
      - sfn42 10mo ago
        Never really tried anything. Just thought about it but I don't know the first thing about audio programming and like I said it doesn't seem viable for smart tvs anyway so I never did anything with it.
    - account42 10mo ago
      This is exactly the reason I avoid appliances like smart TV where you have no control over the software. With my PC (for which my big TV is just a dumb display) I can use mpv with ffmpeg's dynaudnorm filter.
  - 10mo ago
- pentaphobe 10mo ago
  There's been a lot of speculation/rationalisation around this already, but one I've not seen mentioned is the possibility of it being at least a little down to a kind of "don't look back" collective arrogance (in addition to real technical challenges) (This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR) Up until fairly recently both of these professions were pretty small, tight-knit, and learnt (at least partially) from previous generations in a kind of apprentice capacity Now we have vocational schools - which likely do a great job surfacing a bunch of stuff which was obscure, but miss some of the historical learning and "tricks of the trade" You come out with a bunch of skills but less experience, and then are thrust into the machine and have to churn out work (often with no senior mentorship) So you get the meme version of the craft: hone the skills of maximising loudness, impact, ear candy.. flashy stuff without substance ...and a massive overuse of the Wilhelm Scream :) [^1] [^1]: once an in joke for sound people, and kind of a game to obscure its presence. Now it's common knowledge and used everywhere, a wink to the audience rather than a secret wink to other engineers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream EDIT: egads, typing on a phone makes it far too easy to accidentally write a wall of text - sorry!
  - epolanski 10mo ago
    > This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR You reminded me of so many tv shows and movies that force me to lower all the roller shutters in my living room and I've got a very good tv otherwise I just don't see anything on the screen. And this is really age-of-content dependent with recent one set in dark environments being borderline impossible to enjoy without being in a very dark room.
  - m3047 10mo ago
    "everything's too dark": it could be temporizing or parallel construction, but my understanding is that "everything's too dark" originates from trying to optimize the color map to show off some detail that we obviously don't care about.
- typeofhuman 10mo ago
  Netflix records many shows simultaneously in the same building. This is why their shows are all so dark - to prevent light bleeding across sets. I wonder if this is also true for keeping the volume down.
  - typeofhuman 10mo ago
    Why the downvotes, HN?
    - jiggawatts 10mo ago
      Because it’s total nonsense. The darkness of shows has more to do with the mastering monitors having gotten so good that colorists don’t even notice if the dynamic range is just the bottom half or less. Their eyes adjust and they don’t see the posterisation because there isn’t any… until the signal is compressed and streamed. Not to mention that most viewers aren’t watching the content in a pitch black room on a $40K OLED that’s “special order” from Sony.
- tor825gl 10mo ago
  Have you got older recently?
  - Tempest1981 10mo ago
    Or fear of turning up the volume due to children sleeping nearby. Dynamic range seems higher "these days".
  - account42 10mo ago
    Why gaslight people like this?
- estimator7292 10mo ago
  It hasn't. We've been having these same problems for decades. There was a while scandal about cable TV channels winding down the volume of shows so ads could play even louder.
  - macNchz 10mo ago
    I remember this being a problem when we first bought a DVD player in like 1999.
- tensor 10mo ago
  Easy, you and all your friends are getting old.
  - account42 10mo ago
    Stop gaslighting people.
- mbreese 10mo ago
  I think a good chunk of it has to do with the TVs themselves. I don't have any extra sound system attached to my TV, so I'm working with whatever sound comes out of the TV itself. As TVs get thinner, speakers also get smaller, and focused downwards. So we're using tiny speakers that are pointed indirectly towards me. I could probably fix over half of the problems I have with TV audio with a decent sound bar, and a good one is a decent percentage of the cost of a brand new TV.
  - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > think a good chunk of it has to do with the TVs themselves I have a thin TV. I have to turn on subtitles for modern films. For older movies from the same streaming service, however, I can understand everything fine.
    - mbreese 10mo ago
      Silly question -- for the older movies, have you seen them before? If one of the arguments is that the people doing the sound mixing know the audio/words so they are oblivious to the difficulty that a new viewer will have understanding the words, it's also possible that a repeat viewer might also have similar biases with older media. I can think of half a dozen different other reasons why there's a difference between older and newer media. I don't think it's just one thing. I do think differences in thin TVs is one factor, but not the only one. I have a few different generations of LCDs at home. I generally can understand spoken words better on my oldest one. It's also the thickest, so it should have the largest speakers. But, I think another factor is the digital audio profiles. If you're mixing for just stereo (or even mono), you're probably going to get an easier to understand audio track. If you're mixing for surround-sound (and not listening on a 5.1 external receiver), the TV is going to have a more difficult time and the viewer is probably going to get a lower-quality audio track compared to a track mixed specifically for just two channels. But, at least I now have a project -- I'll pull an older movie from Netflix that I haven't seen to test my theory...
      - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
wil421 10mo ago
It was garbage before streaming services took off. Dark Knight Rises is one example. I can remember renting DVDs in the mid to late 2000s from Netflix and they had a similar issues.
- IlikeKitties 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lesuorac 10mo ago
    Eh, if you ask people what they want they'll say a faster horse. I can understand his point that you can go wild with visual effects in movies so he wants to experiment with sound. I do think his experiments are not successful though but you can't always pick winners. I just wish I could get the unedited movies for home and have black boxes to fix the resolution instead of getting an edited movie. I don't mind not being able to hear the words when I can read them plus it removes second screen temptations.
  - cindyllm 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - h2zizzle 10mo ago
    That interview is maddening. Of course people flinch more at bad sound versus bad imagery, they're completely different senses. Our hearing is deeper and more archaic, more directly connected to our emotional than language neural centers, and harder to shut off. Imagine someone being perplexed at people's "conservatism" with regard to smell. Pump an even slightly unpleasant odor into the theater and people walk out in droves. The tolerance for these types of risky moves definitely varies by sense.
dylan604 10mo ago
Look at any setup audio is being mixed on and tell me how many sound bars do you see there? How many flat panels with nothing more than the built in speakers being used? None. The speakers being used and the tricks the equipment do to make multichannel audio work with fewer speakers plays havoc on well mixed audio. Down mixing on consumer device is just never going to sound great
- jrmg 10mo ago
  There’s something to what you’re saying - but it’s also something of a spectrum. Our need to turn up the volume in dialog scenes and turn it back down again in action scenes (for both new and old content) got a lot less when we added a mid-range soundbar and sub to our mid-range TV (previously was using just the TV speakers). I’m not sure whether it’s sound separation - now we have a ‘more proper’ center channel - or that the ends of the spectrum - both bass and treble - are less muddy. Probably a combination of the two.
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    Audio has become a WTF situation for me. I grew up with speakers that had a driver for low ends some where in the 8"-12", a driver for the mids typically in the 4"-6", and then a third for the highs in various forms of a tweeter. These were all internally crossed over so that only a single cable was necessary. Now, we have "satellite" speakers that are smaller than the tweeter and are touted as being all that's necessary. Sound bars are also using speakers the size of an old tweeter just in an array with separation between left/right sides smaller than the width of the TV. Some how, we let the marketing people from places like Bose convince us that you can make the same sound from tiny speakers. Multichannel mixes used to also include a dedicated stereo mix for those mere mortals without dedicated surround setups. These were created in the same studio with mixing decisions made based on the content. Now, we just get downmixes made by some math equation on a chip that has no concept of what the content is and just applies rules.
    - jrmg 10mo ago
      Bit of a tangent, but another WTF for me has been the mainstream return of mono audio for music (HomePods, Echos, many Bluetooth speakers etc.), after decades of everything being at least stereo.
killerstorm 10mo ago
Well, somehow, most of short-form content on YouTube doesn't have this problem. Perfectly clear dialogs. I think the main problem is that producers and audio people are stupid, pompous wankers. And I guess it doesn't help that some people go to cinema for vibrations and don't care about the content.
olyjohn 10mo ago
That may be a part of it, but I think for a lot of people the problem is how surround sound movies are processed. Voice comes through the center channel. Music tends to come out of multiple speakers, and so do a lot of explosions and sound effects. Most people don't have multi-channel setups at home. So you get everything coming out of 2 speakers or a sound bar. What that means, is that you get 4+ channels of music and sound effects mixed into 2 channels. So it ends up drowning out the single voice channel. When I play movies through Kodi, I generally go into the audio settings and turn up the center channel. This fixes the issue every time for me.

snakeboy 10mo ago

Makes sense, but how does this explain the fact that this problem seems recent, or at least to have worsened recently ?

KeplerBoy 10mo ago
TV shows changed completely in the streaming age it seems. These days they really are just super long movies with glacial pacing to keep users subscribed.
- sfn42 10mo ago
  As opposed to the House model where every episode is exactly the same with some superficial differences? I like the long movie format, lots of good shows to watch. Movies feel too short to properly tell a story. It's just like a few highlights hastily shown and then it's over.
  - KeplerBoy 10mo ago
    Sure, it's completely different from procedural comedic shows like House and there's some great shows to watch! Still, sometimes it feels like the writers weren't granted enough time to write a shorter script. Brevity isn't exactly incentivized by the business model.
  - mnky9800n 10mo ago
    I feel like there are plenty of examples of movies that tell a good story. I think the reason people like long form television over movies is a movie requires an emotional commitment that it will end. But there’s always another episode of television.
    - account42 10mo ago
      The flip side is that with most serialized television stories not even the writers know where the story will go so most arcs end up being brushed under the rug while the viewers are distracted with new promises that ultimately end up being hot air.
  - atq2119 10mo ago
    A lot of this is personal preference, but I still feel like the most memorable shows tend to be the ones that have a bit of both. Season-long stories, but also episodes that can stand on their own. In a show like Stranger Things, almost none of the episodes are individually memorable or watchable on their own. They depend too much on the surrounding episodes. Compare to e.g. Strange New Worlds, which tells large stories over the course of a season, but each episode is also a self-contained story. Which in turn allows for more variety and an overall richer experience, since you can have individual episodes experiment with wacky deviations from the norm of the show. Not all of those experiments will land for everybody (musical episodes tend to be quite divisive, for example), but there is a density to the experience that a lot of modern TV lacks.
    - devilbunny 10mo ago
      The original Law & Order did a masterful job of this. Each episode (with very few exceptions) is self-contained, but deeper themes and character development run through them in long (often multi-season) arcs to reward the long-term viewer. But there was rarely more than one episode per season that was solely for the long-term viewer.
- VBprogrammer 10mo ago
  You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone points it out? It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang theory, House and Scrubs I very rarely caught two episodes consecutively (and when I did they were on some release schedule so you'd forgotten half of the plot by next week). But they are all practically self contained with only the thread of a longer term narrative being woven between them. It's doubtful that any of these netflix series you could catch one random episode and feel comfortable that you understand what's going on. Perhaps worse is the recent trend for mini-series which are almost exactly how you describe - just a film without half of it being left on the cutting room floor.
  - mcv 10mo ago
    It's a different medium, and it's intentional. And not even new either. The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus did the same thing decades ago. Apparently they were successful enough that everybody does it now.
  - simonjgreen 10mo ago
    I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new. Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence. What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice. Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural. So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.
- vjk800 10mo ago
  I'm fine with this. I always wished regular movies were much longer. I wish lord of the rings movies included all the songs and poems and characters from the book and lasted like 7 hours each.
  - account42 10mo ago
    I would be fine with it of the stories were fully developed before the first episode is released. Unfortunately this usually isn't the case and instead you end up with lots of "cool" story arcs that ultimately go nowhere satisfying.
- dotancohen 10mo ago
  We used to call that a soap opera. Maybe today we should call it a couch opera.
  - chuckadams 10mo ago
    Rod Serling derogatorily coined the term "Soap Opera" because those also pioneered the ad break, typically for products aimed at housewives, e.g. soap.
    - dotancohen 10mo ago
      What advertisements or other social unwanteds do these new operas promote? I propose Apathy Opera
    - DerekL 10mo ago
      The term soap opera dates to 1938. There’s no way that Rod Serling coined the term.
- bayarearefugee 10mo ago
  Even as an older person, I prefer the new format, with the exception of the now common 2-3 year gaps between seasons. That part of it, while I know the reasons given for it, is becoming increasingly annoying/frustrating.
  - Fr0styMatt88 10mo ago
    I seem to remember that it was The X-Files that first pioneered the “every episode is a mini-movie” and it showed in the production at the time compared to other stuff. Could be mis-remembering though, when I think about early anthologies like Twilight Zone or Freddy’s Nightmares.
XorNot 10mo ago
Honestly what I don't get is how this even happened though: it's been I think 10 years with no progress on getting the volume of things to equal out, even with all the fancy software we have. Like I would've thought that 5.1 should be relatively easy to normalize, since the center speech channel is a big obvious "the audience _really_ needs to hear this" channel that should be easy to amplify up in any downmix....instead watching anything is still just riding the damn volume button.
- sfn42 10mo ago
  I toyed with the idea of making some kind of app for this but while it may work on desktop it seems less viable for smart tvs which is what I primarily use. Though I have switched to mostly using Plex, so maybe I could look into doing something there.
  - pentaphobe 10mo ago
    I was toying with the same thing for a bit - the hope was if it worked well you could build it into a little unit (audio or HDMI eARC) Doesn't solve for single units but could help with people who use soundbars or amps Abandoned though - was basically just multiband compression and couldn't find a way to make it adaptable enough (some media always ended up sucking) Would be super interested to hear what you tried!
    - sfn42 10mo ago
      Never really tried anything. Just thought about it but I don't know the first thing about audio programming and like I said it doesn't seem viable for smart tvs anyway so I never did anything with it.
  - account42 10mo ago
    This is exactly the reason I avoid appliances like smart TV where you have no control over the software. With my PC (for which my big TV is just a dumb display) I can use mpv with ffmpeg's dynaudnorm filter.
- 10mo ago
pentaphobe 10mo ago
There's been a lot of speculation/rationalisation around this already, but one I've not seen mentioned is the possibility of it being at least a little down to a kind of "don't look back" collective arrogance (in addition to real technical challenges) (This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR) Up until fairly recently both of these professions were pretty small, tight-knit, and learnt (at least partially) from previous generations in a kind of apprentice capacity Now we have vocational schools - which likely do a great job surfacing a bunch of stuff which was obscure, but miss some of the historical learning and "tricks of the trade" You come out with a bunch of skills but less experience, and then are thrust into the machine and have to churn out work (often with no senior mentorship) So you get the meme version of the craft: hone the skills of maximising loudness, impact, ear candy.. flashy stuff without substance ...and a massive overuse of the Wilhelm Scream :) [^1] [^1]: once an in joke for sound people, and kind of a game to obscure its presence. Now it's common knowledge and used everywhere, a wink to the audience rather than a secret wink to other engineers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream EDIT: egads, typing on a phone makes it far too easy to accidentally write a wall of text - sorry!
- epolanski 10mo ago
  > This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR You reminded me of so many tv shows and movies that force me to lower all the roller shutters in my living room and I've got a very good tv otherwise I just don't see anything on the screen. And this is really age-of-content dependent with recent one set in dark environments being borderline impossible to enjoy without being in a very dark room.
- m3047 10mo ago
  "everything's too dark": it could be temporizing or parallel construction, but my understanding is that "everything's too dark" originates from trying to optimize the color map to show off some detail that we obviously don't care about.
typeofhuman 10mo ago
Netflix records many shows simultaneously in the same building. This is why their shows are all so dark - to prevent light bleeding across sets. I wonder if this is also true for keeping the volume down.
- typeofhuman 10mo ago
  Why the downvotes, HN?
  - jiggawatts 10mo ago
    Because it’s total nonsense. The darkness of shows has more to do with the mastering monitors having gotten so good that colorists don’t even notice if the dynamic range is just the bottom half or less. Their eyes adjust and they don’t see the posterisation because there isn’t any… until the signal is compressed and streamed. Not to mention that most viewers aren’t watching the content in a pitch black room on a $40K OLED that’s “special order” from Sony.
tor825gl 10mo ago
Have you got older recently?
- Tempest1981 10mo ago
  Or fear of turning up the volume due to children sleeping nearby. Dynamic range seems higher "these days".
- account42 10mo ago
  Why gaslight people like this?
estimator7292 10mo ago
It hasn't. We've been having these same problems for decades. There was a while scandal about cable TV channels winding down the volume of shows so ads could play even louder.
- macNchz 10mo ago
  I remember this being a problem when we first bought a DVD player in like 1999.
tensor 10mo ago
Easy, you and all your friends are getting old.
- account42 10mo ago
  Stop gaslighting people.
mbreese 10mo ago
I think a good chunk of it has to do with the TVs themselves. I don't have any extra sound system attached to my TV, so I'm working with whatever sound comes out of the TV itself. As TVs get thinner, speakers also get smaller, and focused downwards. So we're using tiny speakers that are pointed indirectly towards me. I could probably fix over half of the problems I have with TV audio with a decent sound bar, and a good one is a decent percentage of the cost of a brand new TV.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > think a good chunk of it has to do with the TVs themselves I have a thin TV. I have to turn on subtitles for modern films. For older movies from the same streaming service, however, I can understand everything fine.
  - mbreese 10mo ago
    Silly question -- for the older movies, have you seen them before? If one of the arguments is that the people doing the sound mixing know the audio/words so they are oblivious to the difficulty that a new viewer will have understanding the words, it's also possible that a repeat viewer might also have similar biases with older media. I can think of half a dozen different other reasons why there's a difference between older and newer media. I don't think it's just one thing. I do think differences in thin TVs is one factor, but not the only one. I have a few different generations of LCDs at home. I generally can understand spoken words better on my oldest one. It's also the thickest, so it should have the largest speakers. But, I think another factor is the digital audio profiles. If you're mixing for just stereo (or even mono), you're probably going to get an easier to understand audio track. If you're mixing for surround-sound (and not listening on a 5.1 external receiver), the TV is going to have a more difficult time and the viewer is probably going to get a lower-quality audio track compared to a track mixed specifically for just two channels. But, at least I now have a project -- I'll pull an older movie from Netflix that I haven't seen to test my theory...
    - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago

wil421 10mo ago

It was garbage before streaming services took off. Dark Knight Rises is one example. I can remember renting DVDs in the mid to late 2000s from Netflix and they had a similar issues.

IlikeKitties 10mo ago
[flagged]
- lesuorac 10mo ago
  Eh, if you ask people what they want they'll say a faster horse. I can understand his point that you can go wild with visual effects in movies so he wants to experiment with sound. I do think his experiments are not successful though but you can't always pick winners. I just wish I could get the unedited movies for home and have black boxes to fix the resolution instead of getting an edited movie. I don't mind not being able to hear the words when I can read them plus it removes second screen temptations.
- cindyllm 10mo ago
  [dead]
- h2zizzle 10mo ago
  That interview is maddening. Of course people flinch more at bad sound versus bad imagery, they're completely different senses. Our hearing is deeper and more archaic, more directly connected to our emotional than language neural centers, and harder to shut off. Imagine someone being perplexed at people's "conservatism" with regard to smell. Pump an even slightly unpleasant odor into the theater and people walk out in droves. The tolerance for these types of risky moves definitely varies by sense.

dylan604 10mo ago

Look at any setup audio is being mixed on and tell me how many sound bars do you see there? How many flat panels with nothing more than the built in speakers being used? None. The speakers being used and the tricks the equipment do to make multichannel audio work with fewer speakers plays havoc on well mixed audio. Down mixing on consumer device is just never going to sound great

jrmg 10mo ago
There’s something to what you’re saying - but it’s also something of a spectrum. Our need to turn up the volume in dialog scenes and turn it back down again in action scenes (for both new and old content) got a lot less when we added a mid-range soundbar and sub to our mid-range TV (previously was using just the TV speakers). I’m not sure whether it’s sound separation - now we have a ‘more proper’ center channel - or that the ends of the spectrum - both bass and treble - are less muddy. Probably a combination of the two.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  Audio has become a WTF situation for me. I grew up with speakers that had a driver for low ends some where in the 8"-12", a driver for the mids typically in the 4"-6", and then a third for the highs in various forms of a tweeter. These were all internally crossed over so that only a single cable was necessary. Now, we have "satellite" speakers that are smaller than the tweeter and are touted as being all that's necessary. Sound bars are also using speakers the size of an old tweeter just in an array with separation between left/right sides smaller than the width of the TV. Some how, we let the marketing people from places like Bose convince us that you can make the same sound from tiny speakers. Multichannel mixes used to also include a dedicated stereo mix for those mere mortals without dedicated surround setups. These were created in the same studio with mixing decisions made based on the content. Now, we just get downmixes made by some math equation on a chip that has no concept of what the content is and just applies rules.
  - jrmg 10mo ago
    Bit of a tangent, but another WTF for me has been the mainstream return of mono audio for music (HomePods, Echos, many Bluetooth speakers etc.), after decades of everything being at least stereo.

killerstorm 10mo ago

Well, somehow, most of short-form content on YouTube doesn't have this problem. Perfectly clear dialogs. I think the main problem is that producers and audio people are stupid, pompous wankers. And I guess it doesn't help that some people go to cinema for vibrations and don't care about the content.

olyjohn 10mo ago

That may be a part of it, but I think for a lot of people the problem is how surround sound movies are processed. Voice comes through the center channel. Music tends to come out of multiple speakers, and so do a lot of explosions and sound effects. Most people don't have multi-channel setups at home. So you get everything coming out of 2 speakers or a sound bar. What that means, is that you get 4+ channels of music and sound effects mixed into 2 channels. So it ends up drowning out the single voice channel. When I play movies through Kodi, I generally go into the audio settings and turn up the center channel. This fixes the issue every time for me.