cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/mrlovenstein/p/1660117/volume
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/nonpolitical_comics/p/1657114/mr-lovenstein-volume
[Mr Lovenstein] Volume
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It’s very weird how many pro audio people knowingly fail at their core job in this way
Maybe we should have more anti audio people? Go back to silent movies and show?
I WISH people would stay silent.
I will make a silent movie that isn’t actually silent. It’s just that the characters prefer not to talk
We are kind of on our way.
Half the time when I look up how to repair my dishwasher, the best video guide turns out to also be an intentional ASMR video to maximize attention.
(Okay, not really half, but that it happens at all is hilarious.)
How often are you fixing your dishwasher??
Anytime I want to listen to some ASMR, now, of course.
As an autistic with a hypersensitivity to sound, I support this cause, as a someone surrounded by people love to interrupt unless they hear a sound coming from whom they’re interrupting, I need to have SOME noise in the background and if it’s not fitting the TV, it breaks the immersion :(
Maybe we should get into the field. there’s obviously a low bar.
I always wondered this is it like a TV hardware thing or sound mixing or what
Most movies are mixed for a theater surround sound system. Remixing them for tv speakers is usually not worth the effort. Dialogue usually sits on the center channel while effects and music are spread across left, right and surround channels. A tv with stereo speakers can‘t do much except mix all of that together and that makes it hard to hear the quieter parts.
If you watch a lot of movies, I recommend a soundbar or even better a 5.1 system. It’s expensive but it mostly solves those mixing problems.
Will you please stop this rumour already? Most of the video I watch in my living room have 2ch audio. If anything it is still the guy who mixed the audio who’s at fault.
And I have a Yamaha 5.1 AV receiver as well. Watching new movies with original surround sound sucks all the same.
What you are describing is what is supposed to happen. What actually happens is that big film studios ignore the center channel altogether. Instead choosing to mix the voice in 3D because cinema and IMAX and Dolby, etc. which honestly sounds extraordinary in those sound system. It is mostly because they are desperate to propose something that actually brings a competitive edge to theaters against home TVs and streaming. Instead of, you know, making good films. But that’s beside the point.
What ends up happening is that your system’s codecs and down mixers do what they are told they are supposed to do. Mix all channels together into stereo, with a tiny boost to the center channel on both sides. Easy, that should bring forward the dialogue, whoops! there’s no dialogue in the center channel, it is all mushed all over the place over the other 4 channels and drowned out by the audio FX.
This is the reason some egregiously poorly dialogue mixed movies like Tenet and The Dark Knight Rises actually also sounded bad in mid to lower tier theaters. Those theaters were calibrated for exactly the way it was supposed to sound, with a strong center channel for dialogue and what is directly in front of the camera. But the audio isn’t there, it is dispersed to a side in the other two speakers (this is done automatically now in mixing software, which doesn’t help). The movie came with the flaw, and even if you have a good 5.1 channel audio at home, you can check for yourself, the dialogue is also hard to hear on those movies. Because it was shit from the beginning unless you hear it in an IMAX theater or have access to one of those 3D field Dolby Atmos 64 speaker systems that Nolan mixes on.
From what I heard it can be due to the audio mix used. Most content is set to a 5.1 mix or higher, and the majority of people still just use their 2.0 tv speakers. Sometimes you can pick the audio on some services and some may have a 2.0 option but i think its rare these days.
It isn’t mixed for home theatre setups is the thing.
But you can easily enable Loudness Equalization in Windows to increase low volume sounds and decrease high volume sounds.
TBF this always ends up with a lot of misplaced blame on the consumer
TV manufacturers decided/figured out long ago that Joe public cares more about a screen being thin, at time of purchase, than it having any semblance of audio quality. And they assume anyone who cares about audio will buy a set of speakers or (increasingly) a sound bar anyway, so they just need the bare minimum included.
This has gotten to the absurd point now where the speakers included in your average TV aren’t much better than a particularly loud phone speaker.
It’s basically impossible to get something that sounds even audible on those speakers, without doing what adverts do and compressing the shit out of the signal, which has the bonus of sounding loud and bad for everyone, there’s no bringing the detail back that was squashed out. Movie studios aren’t going to mix a movie that sounds bad on a system designed remotely properly (e.g. a cinema or reviewer’s TV), so we’re in the current situation.
The unfortunate situation today is you basically need some kind of separate speaker(s) with a TV because the manufacturers all have cheaped out across the board and don’t include anything good enough any more. The consumer shouldn’t be expected to know this and have to pay extra, the TV should come with speakers capable of producing audio properly.
I don’t even understand why they bother to include speakers in high-end TVs at all. Who’s going to buy an >80” TV and then only have stereo sound. For movies sound is at least as important for the experience as the picture quality. No built in speaker system is ever going be good enough, it’s simple physics.
So’s the room. Few people have a good enough room.
How much do you need to spend on a sound bar for something decently better, how much difference does it even make with a fairly cheap one?
Honestly you shouldn’t need to break the bank at all to be better than the built in speakers in most cases. I don’t want to say definitively because I’m sure there’s some basically scam products out there, but pretty much any sound bar will be an upgrade in 99% of cases.
A quick search shows a number of well known brands with offerings under £100, and one from a company I don’t recognise that apparently seems to have a number of positive reviews and available for £40
You’ll obviously get a further improvement if you go above the budget level, but that’s definitely not to say you can’t get a decent improvement over not having one at all.
Its just so hard to know what something will be like and I dont want to spend a lot of money for minimal improvement. While display specs are far easier to read.
Subtitles!
What did you say? Was it important?
[EXTREMELY LOUD NOISE]
ᵗᵘʳⁿˢ ˢᵘᵇᵗⁱᵗˡᵉˢ ᵈᵒʷⁿ
Ah yes, so I can be constantly distracted by reading instead of enjoying the acting and cinematography.
And then suddenly an advert at a volume loud enough to ablate the skin right off your face
Adblock
When someone left the TV on max volume and I load up Netflix whilst everyone is in bed.
I can feel this in my bones…I love how the animation never matches the sound though. The tada is always unexpected
Large dynamic range is a good thing, in audio and video. There are a number of ways to reduce dynamic range, if you really need to. Expanding dynamic range after capture is possible, too, but more fraught.
Shannon information theory gives us ways to perfectly reconstruct the lower range version from an expanded range version, but it also guarantees that reconstructing the higher range version from a reduced range version cannot be perfectly accurate across all inputs. (Assuming a fixed output range capability.)
Large dynamic range is a good thing, in audio and video.
a good thing for accurately reproducing the original signal.
But many people watching a show at home would like to just watch the damn movie without anything being particularly loud or resorting to subtitles. Decent range compression achieves that. Applying information theory to a Sunday night movie is stupid.
I’m also here to support dynamic range. I don’t want the volume “normalized”, I want loud louds and quiet quiets.
A lot of people live in apartments or have kids. While I enjoy being able to listen to loud explosions and quiet whispers, it can make movie watching experiences miserable.
Get a decent pair of headphones then.
Then how does anyone else enjoy it
You’ve gotta compromise somewhere dude. Sound quality, neighbors’ opinions of you, cost, solitude, something but there is no perfect answer here.
But there is. Having an audio range that isn’t ridiculous, that allows you to hear whispers and not get your ear blown out by the louds. Unfortunately many movies don’t do this, and for some reason you would rather compromise on someone else’s comfort than even consider this?
There is a perfect answer. Don’t watch movies with shitty sound mixing.
I used to mix audio for my garage band’s albums in the 2000s. It’s not that hard to get effective dynamic range without setting the quiet parts to barely audible and the loud parts to red lining the db meter. It’s obnoxious.
If I ever meet the guy who mixed Malignant, I’m going to “accidentally” spill my coffee onto to his mixing station. I couldn’t watch past the first scene. The mix was downright mean. That movie still pisses me off.
I remember one movie I tried watching that was exceptionally bad in this department. I want to say it was Interstellar from 2014? I gave up not long into it because it was just torture to watch.
Tenet?
Not familiar with that word?
Sorry, I should have written an actual sentence haha, but if you don’t know the word it’s probably not that movie.
I meant to convey something like “Tenet could be the movie you’re thinking of. I know a lot of people were complaining about the audio mix when it came out.”
Cheers!
It’s a movie
Dune comes to mind.
Common complaint about Christopher Nolan films, of which interstellar is one
I’m just happy the Apple TV has a “reduce loud sounds” setting. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely helped! I imagine the Nvidia Shield might have similar?
It is nutty the skill-gap that has opened up for audio engineers since talkies existed.
There’s already a solution to this. Limiters / compressors. TVs should have them built in as software with easy to use controls. Whenever I watch movies via VLC I turn the compressor on.
Trying to watch Sons of Anarchy in bed is too much like this.
settings: anything but movie settings
Modern filmmaking. I had this issue with Minority Report many years ago alredy. Now I mostly use headphones - so this isn’t as pronounced, but it’s still an issue
User error. Either use proper audio equipment like speakers, or under the tv settings turn audio dynamic range to low.
This is why I use earphones.
