Secret i learned on my raspberry pi running stereo speakers on Kodi is you can set a seperate volume for the dialogue channel so i just bumped it up like 14 decibels and now it matches the action fairly well. You can set it from the audio settings inside the movie and its called something like center channel downmix i cant remember exactly
Center channel downmix boost or something is the name. Iirc the phenomenon with quiet dialogue is due to most streaming content being delivered with surround audio. The shitty cheap video players used by the streaming services will do a cheap flat downmix to stereo which results in the center channel being too low when split into two mono channels for playback on stereo speakers compared to if it would be played on a dedicated center speaker. This is due to maths or something.
Back in the day dvd and even vhs movies had proper stereo mixes where the center channel would be boosted to audible levels.
Tl;dr: just pirate shit and use a proper video player instead of the cheapass players used by netflix, disney, etc.
That’s why subtitles became so popular in the recent times
Yeah it’s bad… It’s gotten to the point that I have unironically said “Wait! Where are my subtitles? I can’t hear without my subtitles!”
You said that watching a video or in a real life conversation?
yes
As a HoH person I secretly love this trend and hope it never dies
Haha, I’m glad somebody can benefit
Christopher Nolan
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH
The problem is that he masters his audio to top of the line theaters, so it sounds muddy on anything other than that. Very snobby.
I’ve read his sound mix is shit on top of the line IMAX too. Plenty of complaints since the days of The Dark Knight, He is just high on his own supply and can’t admit that he is shit at sound mixing dialogue. That or some contractor lied to him when they built whatever he mixes on.
I genuinely think he’s suffered hearing damage at some point during The Dark Knight Rises, and can no longer tell.
He specifically declines to have it mixed well on stereo because he doesn’t think we should be watching his movies with anything but the most expensive speakers
Sounds great if you’re watching on Wandows with Loudness Equalization!
Me and dad saw Oppenheimer in the cinema, the sound was almost unbearable at times…
I hate Nolan. As long as he hates me for having normal speakers, I’m gonna hate him for being an elitist prick
no , it’s just that almost all streaming services think you have dolby atmos surround sound
I have it, still need subtitles because mumbling is cool yo
Classic schooled actors with theater experience are being replaced by young actors using basic conversational speech and volume. More natural but not that easy to understand.
Dude that shit is recorded on microphones and levels can be adjusted with mixers.
Hmm, no, that one is on snob directors and pretentious sound engineers.
“Back in my day, people talked more clearly!”
No grandpa, you’re just going deaf
No, there’s definitely an element of not speaking clearly.
Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hardy as examples. Chris Nolan gets shit on for his terrible sound mixing, but him picking actors who mumble is the main issue.
Put on a movie from 1980 vs one from 2020. The voice clarity is night and day.
Atmos won’t save you from shitty sound mixes, I have a pretty nice speaker setup and still have to turn on captions if I want to hear a conversation without my neighbors calling the cops during the next action sequence.
Not just that, they assume you have an IMAX Dolby system installed in your theater sized living room, that everyone obviously has. Bad mixes are inexcusable and sound mixing snobbism is a symptom of the pompous pretentiousness that is the rotten core of Hollywood. Yes, Hollywood, most foreign films with DTS have perfectly good and serviceable mixes that sound nice in both Stereo and Surround…
I do.
I still have subs on.
I hate it.
Windows has a great feature called Loudness Equalization, which you can enable on about every sound device in the properties.
It lowers the volume on loud sounds and increases on soft sounds.
Hell yeah PREACH brotha!
My partner and I use it for watching ANYTHING. Turn it off for music and games, and on for any possible watching thing. It’s MAGIC.
I’ll take it a step further and recommend K-Lite Codec Pack, it lets you set up MPC-HC with that and the option to enable center boost for 5.1 audio on 2.0 setups
I’ll scope it out! I love VLC but I use MPC-HC when I use SVP to smooth animation up to 60FPS. People hate on smoothing but it works soooooo much better with a decent video card than with a 4000USD Samsung TV hahaha. Get yo artifacts outta here
Quick edit: I have a 2.1 setup, I assume that’s fine still?
Yeah, 2.1 doesn’t have center either (it’s the real reason dialogue is quiet and background is loud. 5.1 expects SL-L-C-R-SR and sub (the .1) C plays the “dialogue” track normally.
I already fucking struggle with understanding English since it’s my second language, and with this new shit sound, it’s now fucking worse. I used to be able to do without subtitles most of the time, but now I can’t watch shit without it.
Same. I can’t watch English movies on a TV because I just don’t understand it… But then with headphones on everything is perfect.
Every damn time! As someone who is not a video editor or sound engineer, isn’t it pretty easy to equalize all the sound?
It is and they used to.
There’s something called dynamic range, which is essentially the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds. With a low dynamic range explosions and whispers are just as loud as each other.
There has been a recent trend for filmmakers to want a high dynamic range. This makes explosions, car crashes, and gunshots feel extra impactful. The problem is that that means other things become more quiet by comparison. Those “other things” include dialogue.
This leads to people not in a movie theatre or with a home audio setup that costs more than my car not being able to hear a goddamned word.
I fucking hate modern movies.
This. They really need to start including both low dynamic range AND high dynamic range audio options in home/streaming releases of movies, and TV should exclusively be LDR if they can’t simulcast the the different audio signals.
HDR audio sounds amazing and is totally worth it when you have the right audio equipment, so it shouldn’t stop existing entirely, but it’s bullshit that people that don’t have that equipment get an even worse experience than LDR as a result.
They already give you the option of choosing between stereo or 5.1, I don’t see why a low dynamic audio mix would be any different on the technical side.
Then again, a new mix would cost more money.
But the ✨art✨!
Generic MCU Movie #4195643
I learned something today! yaaaay!
How recent is that trend ? Because I definitely agree that modern movies’ mixing usually sucks ass for a non-theater setup, but I recently watched some 70’s James bond movie and it was actually much worse than what I’m used to. Like, if I setup the TV volume so the gunshots/explosion and the musics didn’t blow up my eardrums, dialogues were basically unintelligible 80% of the time
Not only the eight audio equipment, I want to be able to watch something and not wake up the neighbors up/downstairs!
I know Christopher Nolan is the worst for it, for a few reasons, apparently the IMAX cameras cause it, too. So, however long they’ve been around
On Windows, right click the sound icon, go into sound options, playback, double click on your default playback device, and go to the Enhancements tab.
LOUDNESS EQUALIZATION
is fucking awesome and more people should be aware of it. It’s baked into Windows 10!
Does that work if using VLC?
Edit - For W10, right click the sound icon and choose Open Sound Settings
Under Choose Your Output Device, click Device Properties
On the right side of the screen, click Additional Device Properties
You’ll find the enhancements tab there
If you are running that VLC on Windows, yes!
It is a setting on the sound device, which VLC uses.
Indeed! Like the other poster says, it’s ALL THE SOUNDS.
Turn it off for games and music*, but I turn it on for EVERYTHING else. It makes things bearable to watch! IT’S MAGIC
vlc has a compressor which is what “loudness equalization” uses.
They are EQ for 5.1 and the voice goes into the center channel. In a proper system the center channel is bigger than the satellites so you get clear dialog, but if you try to output 5.1 into two channels everything is squeezed together
Even with a 5.1.2 setup new movies and series sound equalization sucks
Ok it can’t just be me. It feels like at a certain point sound levels got messed up. When I watch older stuff it’s fine the new stuff I feel like I am skipping backwards to catch what they said.
This has driven me crazy for a long time too. It really feels like this picture and takes something away from any enjoyment.
It isn’t just you. Vox has a good video on it.
What an obnoxious conclusion they have - we need to buy better speakers. I have good speakers. Old things sound great, but new shows sound like crap. This is their problem to fix, not ours.
I completely agree, it’s ridiculous. There are settings on both my TV and streaming devices to try to combat this “problem”.
This should be illegal. I’m so tired of having to turn the TV up to hear the dialogue and then all the sudden the loudest noise you ever heard in your life. Then you turn it down … But here’s the next dialogue where you have to turn it back up again.
It really ruins the experience for me personally
This is why I turn on the audio normalization on my TV. It makes the explosions sound super weird but it’s impossible to watch movies with kids sleeping otherwise. The mixing is so bad.
The mixing isn’t for your home. Which it obviously should be.
Watching TV is also shit. When an ad break comes, I have to mute the sound or turn down the volume, regardless of normalization. That should be illegal in my opinion but it’s the status quo.
That’s why I love Star Trek. I never have trouble understanding dialogue.
Older TV shows generally have a more even audio mix, because they were mixed for clear dialogue on TV speakers. Nowadays even TV shows have movie theater mixes, despite the fact that no one will ever see these shows in the cinema. I think TV execs just assume way more people have a Dolby Atmos system in their living room than they do in reality. It’s pretty stupid.
why not provide two mix-downs one for regular people and one for idio… I mean those tv execs?
I personally like high dynamic range. Most receivers, and I’m guessing most smart TVs, have some form of dynamic range compression if you don’t. Bad quality, “realistic” voice recordings are a different issue. Having a center channel speaker also helps a lot.
Most TVs seem to default to playing the surround audio track, which is a terrible idea when you only have stereo speakers, but I guess the TVs do it in case you decide to hook up a multi speaker system mid movie?? Choosing the down mixed stereo audio instead, makes for a much better experience for most people.
Center channel speaker FTW
I am on a gnu+linux (it’s an operating system like windows or iOS) and I use the pulseeffects app it has all sorts of soundeffects that you can use on your audio.
I just use the compressor to even out the volume throughout. Especially useful on youtube.
ok rms
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I have tinnitus and I have a hard time hearing low volume audio … so yes subtitles are a requirement now.
The funny part to that is if I decide to watch some dumb action flick … I set the sound for the explosions and I really don’t care if I can hear the dialogue because I know it will be stupid
I’m here to preach Loudness Equalization. If you’re watching on Windows, enable it for SURE.
(I’m also a tinnitus boi)
Yeah I have ‘em on by default now
