this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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The movies are made to be played on fancy, calibrated, Dolby atmos speakers in the theater and when you play at home, they don’t compensate for it. Ideally they would make 2 versions, one for theaters and one for homes
Unless you're watching Tenet, in which case the audio sucks no matter how good your setup is.
Seriously. Saw that in the cinema and couldn't hear a word.
But could you feel the words?
Watch using windows 10 computer, right click on sound in task bar, go to “sounds”, click on “playback”, double click on your output, go to “enhancements” and enable “loudness equalization”
It’s a MIRACLE. You can hear voices AND explosions don’t ruin your ears!
I loved that for horror games, you can hear the quiet cues without getting deafened by jump scares
"Please adjust your brightness so this shape is barely visible."
Nah, I'm cranking that way up. I get that there's an art, but I'd rather not be straining my eyes and ears.
Horror games and movies it’s PERFECT for. Music is the only time it REALLY falters. Some games are all messed up when it’s on, but for horror stuff it’s perfect.
My podcast program I use, Overcast, has something called Voice Boost. It does the same thing and it makes podcasts listenable with my car’s crazy sound system and sub (I am not shilling, I haven’t paid for it and I should but I never buy phone programs… even though I probably should I know I suck)
In part due to this, it has also become trendy and normalised to have bassy dialogue and lots of environmental noise, because that's the expected "epic movie" feel.
So it's almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy that movies will sound this way, regardless of the anticipated audio hardware.
I don't know whether this is the case today, but my understanding is that while movies don't, sadly, ship with the voice track separate, it is apparently surprisingly common to have the voice track that's mixed in be in mono. That means that with some clever processing, it's possible to mostly-isolate the voice from background sound.
I'd bet that fancier processing could do a better job, and searching turns up stuff like https://vocalremover.org/ .
If one can isolate the voice, then one can boost its volume relative to other audio.
Voice is a single source of audio (e.g. mono) so it's typically recorded with mono mics. There can be multiple of them (lav on the body, boom over the frame is the usual) but both sources are mono and will indeed be mixed right down the middle unless they're trying to make the viewer understand the location of the person speaking (for example imagine you're watching the main character from behind while they're in their room using the computer, then you hear their mom talk to them off camera, the voice is coming from a side and then the next shot you see the mom was located on that side, stuff like that).
Another method home sound systems use is to boost the EQ where voice is found (somewhere in the middle), or to apply compression to reduce the dynamic range, for example Sonos offers both these options in their home theater line, but they call them "speech enhancement" and "night mode" respectively.
Relevant Tom Scott video about how sound is mixed and why it makes movie dialogue "quiet" and advertising "loud"
I hear that excuse a lot. Then you go tho a theatre and you can't hear even less, because it's the same but louder.
Yes but do you go to the IMAX theather?
I went to see a film with my mate just last week at the pictures, and I ended up needing the foreign subtitles, so after it had finished I turned to him and said "could you hear a fucking word any of them were saying?" he said "I was going to say that!" This was the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_We_Start_From so there are parts where I assume you're supposed to be seeing things through her eyes and she's all discombobulated, but then why have subtitles if that's the case?
Feels like even in theaters half the time the dialog is too quiet, and the explosions are definitely too loud