this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”
I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.
But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.
Thank you. I thought I was old man yelling at clouds over this. Drives me crazy. The worst is when the sound editor thinks some dumb pop song really slaps and turns the volume WAY UP and drowns out everything else.
And OMG the low talkers. Low talking and dimly-lit scenes are all the rage these days. I think part of it is Galaxy Brain people in the streaming biz thinking this is how they save time and money.
Man, dimly-lit scenes have been a pet peeve of mine for years. Every time Law & Order is on, I can't help yelling "turn a light on!" at the screen. Maybe they'd be able to solve the murder faster if they could actually see shit.
No joke, I know a guy that works on the backgrounds in Law & Order and he was talking about how half the time you can’t even see what they’ve done lmao.
This made me laugh, I can imagine the ghost of Richard Belzer yelling at them.
That's highly individual. I prefer people speaking in vaguely normal tones instead of low key yelling, and whispers actually being, you know, whispers. I have always had exceptionally good hearing though.
Doesn’t it also have to do with how the sound is encoded and delivered? Most voice is on 5.1 is designed to go center speaker, so if your system lacks a center speaker and you have it set to home audio, instead of L/R it’s gonna be muted.
I don't think missing channels get muted, they just get shared into what's available. A 5.1 soundtrack played on a 2.1 system is going to share Centre between L and R, and put SL onto L and SR onto R. I have an old surround sound system that can't decode the new codecs that Disney plus etc use, but the Chromecast knows this so just sends it out a 2 channel boring signal. Dialogue is fine because it just goes to the two speakers equally, rather than be cut out. If your system is set up to output to 5.1 speakers but you just haven't plugged in the centre speaker, then that's a different thing and you would miss stuff, same as if you didn't plug in the front left speaker.
When I change my reciever to 2.1 I lose all commentary on sports, since those are exclusively center channel. While researching it I found out about this other potential issue, kinda interesting actually.
Some receivers are smarter, some are dumb, so you need to make sure the APP, the TV, the Receiver, and sound bar (if used) all have the same settings, or strange things can happen, like one thinking it’s receiving 5.1, even though it’s not. Or vice versa.
Interesting, fair enough, that makes sense. So your receiver was getting a 5.1 signal, but it really did just ignore half the channels when you set it to output 2.1.
That's not the problem I think most people here are complaining about though, which is sound mixing / dynamic range / editing making speech too quiet, rather than having the wrong settings.
I think it’s a portion of it, since depending on the mixing and the setting of the amp/reciever it could be muting the wrong frequencies since they disagree. If the audio is quiet I can change my sound field, or the speaker settings, and it can usually fix the audio, while making something else worse.
So I think the problem is people using generic settings and not fine tuning their system, and all the different potential sources with different setting and encodings make it impossible. So it’s either fix it for each source, or find a generic “okay” solution.
I saw a video that blamed some of it on advances in microphone technology. Actors used to speak directly into a mic but now sets have a bunch of tiny microphones hidden everywhere to pick up sounds.
https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8?si=z939mJ1sCY7vkfB3
Literally why I don't bother going to a concert unless I'm extremely familiar with their songs. Every time they sing something new I'm bored out of my mind because everything comes out like the teacher in Peanuts.
Taylor Swift is the best though
Except for the ticket price. 😬
It's true, I have switched to headphones multiple times cause I had trouble understanding the dialogue.