Can't Hear What Actors Are Saying on TV? It's Not You, Probably (wsj.com) 181
Some people turn on closed captions because they like how it helps them understand the plotlines of shows and movies, and multitask in front of the tube. Others turn them on because they can't hear what actors are saying. That doesn't always mean they are hard of hearing. From a report: Muddled audio is the top reason why more people are watching video with on-screen text, according to a May survey commissioned by language-teaching app Preply. As more video-production studios embrace advanced audio formats for at-home content, not every device can keep up. Plenty of viewers can't keep up, either.
"If you have people talking or shouting during the adventure scenes, the explode-y sounds are way higher than the dialogue," said Melanie Brooks, a 43-year-old professional musician in Boston. Catching some of the lines in her favorite fantasy and adventure TV series is hard without captions, she added. People tend to blame their flat-screen TVs for bad sound. The tube TVs of decades past had front-facing speakers that sent audio toward you, while new, super-thin models have speakers that are behind the screen or point downward, bouncing sound away from you. But your TV is just one of the culprits. The rest of the problem lies within virtually every other step of the audio process, from a studio's production choices to the device used to watch the content, said Richard Nevens, senior director of audio-hardware product management at Avid Technology, which specializes in audio- and video-editing tools.
Sound mixers combine all the sound in the video, including dialogue, music and background noises, into the audio we hear when we watch movies and shows. The professionals have advanced audio capabilities at their disposal, but they might not translate clearly on devices that aren't built to support state-of-the-art audio, Mr. Nevens said. For this reason, a movie designed to sound great in a giant theater might not sound the same on your smartphone -- or your TV.
"If you have people talking or shouting during the adventure scenes, the explode-y sounds are way higher than the dialogue," said Melanie Brooks, a 43-year-old professional musician in Boston. Catching some of the lines in her favorite fantasy and adventure TV series is hard without captions, she added. People tend to blame their flat-screen TVs for bad sound. The tube TVs of decades past had front-facing speakers that sent audio toward you, while new, super-thin models have speakers that are behind the screen or point downward, bouncing sound away from you. But your TV is just one of the culprits. The rest of the problem lies within virtually every other step of the audio process, from a studio's production choices to the device used to watch the content, said Richard Nevens, senior director of audio-hardware product management at Avid Technology, which specializes in audio- and video-editing tools.
Sound mixers combine all the sound in the video, including dialogue, music and background noises, into the audio we hear when we watch movies and shows. The professionals have advanced audio capabilities at their disposal, but they might not translate clearly on devices that aren't built to support state-of-the-art audio, Mr. Nevens said. For this reason, a movie designed to sound great in a giant theater might not sound the same on your smartphone -- or your TV.
Realism (Score:5, Funny)
When there's an action scene and an explosion, all the audience should hear for the next 5 minutes is EEEEEEE.
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I have my center channel on +3 volume and my left and right as -1. It seemed to really fix that issue. I get that a flat-screen's built in speakers cant really do that. I hate those things. I use a receiver and surround sound system for my two most-used TVs. One in my living room has proper tower speakers and 6 surrounds (9.1), while in my bedroom, I put a 5.1 satellite / subwoofer system with a receiver as well. Cleans up the intelligibility quite a lot.
That's kind of an unsophisticated version of what AppleTV's "Reduce Loud Sounds" feature does.
Without obtrusive "pumping", that Function nicely and unobtrusively negates the need to constantly "gain-ride" the volume (pretty unsatisfying with remote controls) on "those" kinds of Programs; while increasing the Center-Channel info (even with a bog-standard Stereo playback). I think it uses "Lookahead", because I never catch it messing around. But it isn't "infinite compression"; there are still plenty of quiet
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I have my center channel on +3 volume and my left and right as -1.
Kodi exposes these settings in the downmixing options, so you can have dialogue audio that is actually intelligible even on a standard two-speaker setup. Yet again, piracy provides a superior user experience.
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Re:Realism (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually in the process of building an audio compressor for my TV audio so that I don't have to have my ears ringing during the "action" sequences just in order to make out the dialog for the rest of the movie.
The reality is that just because you *have* 120dB of dynamic range doesn't mean you have to use it all!
There's nothing wrong with compressing the dynamic range to make viewing a more "comfortable" experience.
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I'm actually in the process of building an audio compressor for my TV audio so that I don't have to have my ears ringing during the "action" sequences just in order to make out the dialog for the rest of the movie.
Why are you building one? Any equipment certified by Dolby includes one already.
Re:Realism (Score:5, Interesting)
I think gunshots are around 160dB or so, which is why you need to wear ear protectors. A silencer will cut it down to 120dB or so, which is still loud (the silencers you hear on TV and movies are "Hollywood Brand" and don't exist), which allow you to shoot without needing to wear ear protectors (but you probably want earplugs still).
Each bit of recording is around 6dB or so, so a 16-bit CD recording has around 96dB of dynamic range. Even using a 24-bit recording, you have 144dB of dynamic range, and that's still not enough to represent a gunshot accurately!
The average living room has around 40-50 dB of dynamic range - go too low and it'd drowned out by background noise, go too high and you're too loud.
Anyways, the point of dynamic range is to add punch when necessary - you have dialog and normal sounds at normal levels, and when you have a gunshot, for that brief few milliseconds, it can be loud which adds to the scene. Of course, if you have a scene full of gunshots, then you probably want to attenuate them because no one wants to listen to that for more than a few seconds as it loses its impact.
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Same in a FPS game, but you'll find that people tend to turn the voice com way up and the ratatatata of their guns down. Why? Because that's what they want to hear.
Realism is fine, but if you're looking for realism in a movie, the average action movie would last 5 minutes, exactly to the first action scene where the hero dies.
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Same in a FPS game, but you'll find that people tend to turn the voice com way up and the ratatatata of their guns down. Why? Because that's what they want to hear.
Realism is fine, but if you're looking for realism in a movie, the average action movie would last 5 minutes, exactly to the first action scene where the hero dies.
Doesn't help when the game is telling you the objectives you can't hear and doesn't give objective markers. Halo is guilty of this once or twice at least.
Power cable (Score:2)
Who (Score:2)
in other words (Score:3)
movie audio is mixed to be listened to in a 5.1 (or more) surround sound system. you're supposed to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue. the explosions and car horns are loud? that's the point. it's dynamic range.
it does, however, suck. because most of the time I'm not "sitting down and watching" a movie at the center spot of my home theater. because I don't have one.
but it's funny, because we've been complaining for years about music being "too loud" and "lacking dynamic range" ("Loudness wars") because it's mixed for radio or the lowest common denominator. But movies are mixed for "better than your onboard speakers" dynamic range, and we complain too.
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I actually just solved this by using headphones.
I don't really have room for a receiver (let alone the speakers for it), or the time to actually sit down and watch movies or shows often enough.
Re: in other words (Score:2)
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Of course, the simplest solution without spending yet more money, is to turn on subtitles. Works great for watching British TV too ("Now going live to Cardiff for some on the spot reporting ").
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I would turn on simultaneous output on PulseAudio and both of us plug our headphones in and adjust the volume to each of our tastes.
Re:in other words (Score:5, Interesting)
As the family AV nerd I've dealt with a few of these "can't hear dialogue" complaints, and poor mixing of the center channel is always the culprit.
TVs should add an option to boost the center channel when mixing from 5.1 to 2.0. Until then, I always recommend them a 3-channel soundbar to fix the issue.
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They should just add a third speaker. It would cost very little.
Re:in other words (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a 3-channel sound bar, and it hasn't fixed the issue. A big part of it is that actors are trying to sound realistic, and so mumble & slur like real life rather than enunciating clearly like you would need in order to hear clearly from the TV.
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I've certainly heard this one too... that actors once focused on articulating their words really clearly, but that this has fallen out of favour/is considered less important these days (maybe for realism).
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I've been compensating the mid channel for years now.
My theory is that when mixing down from 5.1 to 2.0 the side channels just get added to the front pair which give about 6dB increase in the side information in the stereo mix, compared to the center.
What also helps (if you have that option) is to mix less of the back channels into the 2.0 mix.
I use a combination of these. A little mid channel boost and a little back channels cut.
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Fuck all that. Surround sound is a gimmick IMHO. You have two ears so two speakers are fine. Quad sound was trying to be a thing in the late 70s and it never took off. My two sound channels are run through a Behringer compressor. Nothing is louder than I allow it to be.
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If you spend a lot on speakers then two give great results. But you can get pretty amazingly good results with a box of Sony shit if you place the speakers intelligently and just do the basic speaker position configuration. You're not going to impress any audiophiles with those dinky little speakers, or anything with such embarrassing pedigree, but it will sound OK and you will be able to hear everything because you will have a roughly appropriate speaker for each channel. Just don't turn the sub up too muc
Re: in other words (Score:2)
Re:in other words (Score:5, Insightful)
You have two ears that hear directionally. If the two speakers are mounted on your ears, then great. Otherwise you need at least a 3rd speaker for center channel dialogue so that it sounds like it's coming from the center of the screen. And then a sub if you want better sound on the low end. Rear surrounds are almost never used in actual content anyway. For every 2 hour movie, there's maybe a total of 30 seconds of audio going through the rear speakers outside of maybe ambient fill.
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I don’t care which direction the dialogue comes from. It’s a flat 2d screen anyhow. All I care is that dialogue is audible and loud things don’t disturb my ears.
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If you are using the speakers built into the TV, no problem. If you're using speakers on either side of a room, you have to sit in the dead center for sound to seem to come from the screen itself. Every other seat in the room requires a center channel to get that. Sitting off to one side and the sound coming from way off to one side is very annoying.
The dialogue not being audible is still going to be a bad downmix on the part of the TV.
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Fuck all that. Surround sound is a gimmick IMHO. You have two ears so two speakers are fine. Quad sound was trying to be a thing in the late 70s and it never took off. My two sound channels are run through a Behringer compressor. Nothing is louder than I allow it to be.
Quadriphonic failed for a couple of reasons:
1. Multiple (more than 4!) major encoding-schemes; all incompatible to a greater or lesser extent.
2. High cost for formats with decent channel-seperation.
Neither of which have anything to do with number of ears.
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i have four ears you insensitive clod
Apologies; but it was actually the Archie Bunker Poster that was the duo auris bigot.
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I have 7.1 at home. I'm still riding the volume and have closed captions on.
Movie audio is also mixed to have the center channel speakers behind the screen.
Directionality (Score:3)
movie audio is mixed to be listened to in a 5.1 (or more) surround sound system.
Which is great if you have a 5.1 surround sound system. However, if all you have is basic stereo when the background sounds are too loud it is as if the characters started making car horn sounds themselves in the middle of a conversation. In real life, we use directionality to filter out loud background noise and basic stereo - and sometimes even 5.1 surround - does not always reproduce that very well.
Dynamic range abuse (Score:3, Interesting)
It isn't so much that the equipment can't keep as the artsy mentality of the sound people. They mix sound levels to replicate realism and they should do that with the sound effects... for some reason they haven't figured out they should NOT do that with the dialogue. Yes, there is also the factor of the audio being cranked up a few too many notches under theater standards but that can be mitigated with a center channel boost and turning down the base a bit.
You should never have to strain to hear the dialogue, be it a whisper, normal speech, or yelling. I don't want to compress the dynamic range, I want the dialogue mixed just like it would be in a music video... in every scene of every movie and preserve the full dynamic range of the effects. TYVM, g'day.
Re:Dynamic range abuse (Score:5, Interesting)
well actually the dialogue is supposed to come from the center channel. in good mixes you have pretty much all of the dialog. in 7.1 systems you even have 3 separate channels for dialog.
some systems allow you to adjust levels individually, so you can dial down your "effect" channels, and leave only the dialog channels up.
but it's a hassle to set up, and TVs that accept inputs like this and downmix them, except for the highest end ones, don't have the fine grained control to do this.
Re:Dynamic range abuse (Score:5, Informative)
In addition to the mixing, I find that actors no longer enunciate clearly. They, or their directors, would rather be "realistic" than understood. Well, they have the script in hand, so maybe they don't understand the problem.
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Exactly. There was even another slashdot story about this [slashdot.org] a year ago. Directors want the dialog to sound "realistic", which ends up meaning mumbled and hard to understand. Because people are sometimes hard to understand in real life, you know? So they think that's the ideal to strive for.
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Exactly. There was even another slashdot story about this [slashdot.org] a year ago. Directors want the dialog to sound "realistic", which ends up meaning mumbled and hard to understand. Because people are sometimes hard to understand in real life, you know? So they think that's the ideal to strive for.
My uninformed opinion is that directors are trying to make art, when they should be trying to tell stories.
They Say It's Muddled Because It's Muddled (Score:2)
Ok, I can get why it might sound bad on a phone or a TV with rear facing speakers. But on a system with an acoustically transparent screen and the three high fidelity front speakers behind the screen? And plenty of movies and shows do not have the problem. Just like with the "loudness wars" in audio, I suspect the problem is the humans in charge of mixing and mastering. I wish they'd just try harder.
And yes, guilty here of turning on the closed captions so we know what they're saying.
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Shows meant for TV tend to work fine. Movies put onto TV are when things start sounding wrong because it's not remastered for generic TVs and assume you have speakers and such. I used to have a simplistic stereo connecting to a TV which worked fine for this purpose, but I haven't used that in a couple decades due to lack of space. Subtitles solved the problems without having to crank the volume so that the neighbors were pissed at me.
It's the people, not the tech (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how none of the solutions include things like...
telling your editor the dialog is more important than foley.
asking your editor for both 2.0 and 5.1 mixes.
getting a better editor.
Instead, let's blame the tech and give viewers a bunch of useless things to try.
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I like how none of the solutions include things like... telling your editor the dialog is more important than foley. asking your editor for both 2.0 and 5.1 mixes. getting a better editor.
Instead, let's blame the tech and give viewers a bunch of useless things to try.
There is a dearth of talent in the entertainment industry today, and they do not take telling. Seriously.
As a rather deaf person, I do all of my listening through headphones. I have a really nice sound system in my living room, but any sound level that I can hear pisses the wife off.
At this point - even with headphones in the living room, the leakage annoys her, so if I actually listen to audio, it's in my office, with full coverage headphones, and the door shut.Otherwise, it's closed captions.
Accents (Score:2)
Are we sure it's not everyone's earbuds? (Score:2)
It doesn't help that like the music industry's over-driving and clipping sound waves into loud sausages, movie sound mixers/engineers are going too far with "louder is better" over clean dialogue and quality. But with millions of Americans all wearing earbuds for hours/day, pumping in loud music, audio books, etc., it's gotta be having an effect on our ability to hear and decode what we're hearing (above and beyond tinnitus issues) that we haven't scientifically quantified yet.
No sound engineers (Score:2)
They just rely on the automatic gain, if everybody stops talking, you hear the micro gain going up, you suddenly hear the birds outside, the traffic and as soon as somebody says something, it abruptly goes away.
Sound sucks, nowadays.
Glad it's not just me (Score:2)
Re:Glad it's not just me (Score:5, Funny)
Of course the added bonus of subtitles is things like "(ominous music)" or "(horse nickers)".
Gotta admit though, Horses in pants are pretty cute.
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or "yadda yadda [indistinguishable]" when even I with my sub-par hearing (just ask my wife) can tell that it's another "yadda".
Foreign languages (Score:5, Interesting)
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should that be "obligationis universalis"?
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You actually need to run these with subtitles since modern German actors tend to mumble their lines (it is supposed to be more authentic than good diction that used to be the norm decades ago). German voice actors, on the other hand, are excellent and this creates a huge contrast between foreign movies and TV shows that are dubbed and the domestic ones that aren't.
Youtube rentals does this (Score:2)
When the sound goes quiet the audio cuts out completely. So it cuts out quiet dialogue and quiet background music. I think it is trying to save bandwidth even though I have a 5G connection.
center channel needs to be louder / apps need an b (Score:2)
center channel needs to be louder / apps need an boost / volume setting for just the center.
Use VLC media player (Score:2)
Possible causes (Score:2)
1. for some movies, the idiot in charge deliberately makes the dialogue unintelligible because that adds "realism".
2. TV speakers stink. A 3 cm driver in a shallow plastic enclosure will never sound good. I resorted to never using the speakers in my TV, using my home theater 5.1 with full-size speakers all the time instead.
3. With 5.1 you can turn up the dialog by increasing the volume of the center speaker only.
4. Home theater systems often offer audio compression, to reduce the dynamic range from 'if you
It's not just tech. It's actors, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ask any older-generation actor and they will always tell you that modern actors don't pay as much attention to being heard anymore. While tech can amplify the volume of specific sounds, it can't replace the actor mumbling in the first place. If we also add the fact that the pool of actors' accents became much broader these days, some of which are truly mind-boggling and incomprehensible, you will understand why it all leads to an audiological disaster.
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It's an acting thing. Stage actors learn to enunciate while projecting so that the back row can hear and understand. This does sound a bit unrealistic, but it's a necessity for the audience. So you get some acting noobs who insist on using their method who inevitably just mumble and slur for realism. It's sort of like Hugh Jackman defending the awful music and singing in Les Miserable, a style that also ruined Cats (ie, rhythm is optional to allow actors to emote more, resulting in a musical performance
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Realism requires not speaking like a theater actor. It sounds fake.
Modern horror movies are some of the worst offende (Score:2)
It's not. It's shitty production. (Score:4, Insightful)
"My farts are silent, too, doctor" (Score:2)
Breathy, subdued voices... drives me batty. (Score:2)
Admittedly I destroyed large swathes of my haring recording music in my apartments with big headphones for a few decades... but recent shows really double down on quiet/loud... Netflix shows are really bad. "Shadow and Bone", "Sandman", "1899"... it's frustrating. But yes... it's partly me, my bad hearing, and my upper-lower class surround setup.
"Sandman"... well, that's okay. Episode 4 was so godawful I'll never return to it...
Dr. Who TV show blasts the music (Score:3)
I cannot count the episodes I watch where I have to turn on closed captions because some idiotic composer decided his music should rise to a crescendo at the key plot moment, thereby drowning out the actor's voices.
TV's should have two audio settings - one for dialogue and one for all the other crap directors and composers put into the show.
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The composer didn't decide that, that's literally in the job description. It's on the heads of the people who mix it, not the people that played it. If they were told to peak at frame 2456, they'll peak at frame 2456 because that's what the job requires.
Not just sound. Editors assume amazing TV setups (Score:5, Interesting)
I am convinced that editors seem to think that most people watch huge TVs with surround sound setups.
I find that, often, when watching a drama, one of the characters reads a note, or looks at a screen that we, the audience, are also supposed to read. But they give the audience 1/2 second to read something written in cursive, or is far too small to read, unless you have a massive TV screen.
My eyesight isn't perfect, like many viewers, but it's not that bad and I am watching on a 45" screen, which isn't huge, but I sit less than 12' from it. I should be able to read anything that is important for the plot, but the editors simply don't consider this important.
Then, when watching foreign language files with subtitles, the editors have got so lazy that, far too often, the subtitles are white on a white background, or black on a very dark background.
If I am watching a drama, the plot is the most important part, not the visual or audio effects, but today's class of editors don't seem to think this.
Today's video editors suck!
Don't blame the tech. (Score:3)
The excuse that the audio wasn't mixed for home audio equipment without a center speaker is also trash. There should be an alternate audio track in stereo just for this purpose, if there is not this is also lazy production.
Two things at work here (Score:4, Informative)
Two things at work here:
1. The older generation of actors were trained differently. My piano teacher called this out for me. The old guard studied this thing called "Diction" which apparently the new guard can't be assed to learn.
2. People who don't / can't / won't put in the effort to have a solid, well-thought-out sound system for whatever they pass off as a home cine. Most people -- if they bother at all -- just get a "sound bar" or leave the "TV" as it came. If they do have a "5.1" system the speakers will be everywhere except where they need to be, from either ignorance, lazyness, the need to placate the spousal unit, or all three. The properly-set-up home cine is a rarity. I count more than a few nerds as friends, and other than myself and another one, the rest just throw the speakers wherever it's convenient, don't eq, don't do anything else, and then bitch endlessly when the result is sub-par.
3. Solution: Don't bother with home cine unless you're willing to 100% commit and do it properly. Or use headphones.
4. solution 2 -- pick the shittiest soundtrack on the disk / device. My apple TV can "reduce difference between loud and quiet" -- that's compression. Use it, if you absolutely don't care about how the movie's supposed to sound. This is the "Muggle" settting, for 99% of people out there.
I'm long past any of this. Well-mastered blu-ray / dvd gets a setting of -14db on my receiver. Regular anime gets -30. Well-mixed anime gets -24. Anything that doesn't sound well at these two points was mixed wrong.
In my own personal case, when I moved from an apartment to my current home, the same kit in the new room sounded horrid. I was hearing the guitars twice, for example. What had happened was the new room was nearly square, and the ringing reflections were everywhere. Some judicious application of drapes and acoustic foam tiles made it right. Took a week or so of experimenting. Do you think most people do this? Hell no. They just flat-out don't care, and then expect to get results.
The room the hi-fi is in can make or break the sound. But most people don't even consider that possibility.
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I don't want a home cine. I just want to hook up my TV and watch movies on it like we always did in the 1980's and 1990's. I don't want to have to do advanced research to be able to hear. My dad and my father-in-law really don't want to have to do research.
The results most people are looking for is not theater quality surround sound.
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Odds are that your current TV's internal speakers are worse than your old TV's was, especially if it had a front mounted speaker as so many did. So you really have to have at least a sound bar. Sadly, most of them seem to want to pretend to be surround, and are predictably bad at it.
I see a lot of wireless rear channel stuff at thrift stores, so I presume it's getting cheaper. It seems like that makes surround reasonably convenient.
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You gotta remember that we're dealing with the white-ear-bud generation, who were shocked at the "fidelity" of shitty Beats headphones.
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The old guard studied this thing called "Diction" which apparently the new guard can't be assed to learn.
Moses supposes his toeses are roses
But Moses supposes erroneously
For Moses he knowses his toeses aren't roses
as Moses supposes his toeses to be.
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My workaround for properly mixed audio: (Most) of the dialogue comes from the center(front) channel.
Solution: Increase center speaker's level by 6-10 dB.
I would actually prefer with all these multichannel setups if I could do settings like in video game audio. You know: SFX volume, Speech volume, Music volume. That way I wouldn't need to adjust volumes of individual channels...
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I would actually prefer with all these multichannel setups if I could do settings like in video game audio. You know: SFX volume, Speech volume, Music volume. That way I wouldn't need to adjust volumes of individual channels...
Something like Atmos could probably eventually do this. In addition to the standard positional 10 channels, there are 118 addressable sound objects, whose positions in 3D space are handled by the metadata and the receiver translates it to your own specific speaker layout.
Re:Two things at work here (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a television at home, NOT a home cinema. I shouldn't have to get a sound bar today because it wasn't necessary a few decades ago. I'm not listening to rare Miles Davis recording sessions, I'm listening to the damned TV! My Fair Lady sounds great on my TV, I can understand every word even the accents, yet Walking Dead is mumbling gibberish.
See, I told you I wasn't going deaf! (Score:2)
Opinion. (Score:5, Interesting)
I just watched Short Circuit (1986) on my big flat screen with no subs and could hear just fine.
It's not the speakers. It's not my hearing loss. It's the audio mix.
We use it for dialects... (Score:2)
We have turned on subtitles for tough dialects, things like Derry Girls. Fun program, damn hard to understand what they are saying.
Also i have found the subtitles capture a lot of subtle dialogue i would have missed like what the person on the radio or tv was saying in the background.
13 year olds (Score:2)
All the producers on TV are 13 because the Executives think that this means their output will be relevant. This is why all the presenters shout with gushing enthusiasm and all drama is overlayed with maximum volume Boss scene music from their favourite first person shooter. Basically you need to swap them out for boomers with wrecked hearing from 80's power ballads and the intelligibility will be fixed overnight.Could someone reverse engineer one of those Karaoke boxes to do the opposite of stripping the vo
Cool (Score:2)
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This is a problem too, but far less pervasive than the audio issue. At least most TVs include a control to turn up the brightness. Most do NOT include a control to increase the volume of only the center audio channel.
Sony HT-A9 (Score:2)
Control! (Score:2)
Give viewers control. Long ago there should've been two or three tracks individually adjustable at the TV. Dialogue, background music, and sound effects. Default settings, fine, but give the viewer control. I realize "content" producers hate the idea of consumers having control over anything.
It's been that way for decades (Score:2)
It is nice to see a study/ poll backing up what we've already known for decades. Turn the audio up on your tv to be able to hear the movie / tv show and then frantically reach for the remote when the commercials come blasting out of the speakers.
My TCL tv has a voice setting (Score:2)
I turned it on and it became much easier to hear voices.
I imagine many modern tv's (not just TCL) have such a setting.
A feature to look for.
Here's how it is for 99% of "tv viewers" (Score:3)
https://video.disney.com/watch... [disney.com]
Every time I watch this I'm keenly reminded that most people just flat-out don't care about sound or picture. And that's ok. It's just like everything else. Most people Don't Care.
They want their pictures to look like Ansel Adams took them, but won't wake up at 3 am to be at the hilltop for sunrise at 6. and won't put in the study time on composition, lighting etc. But they still want their snapshots too look spectacular. Won't happen.
They want their movies to sound great but only have a tiny-ass little speaker to do it with. Won't happen unless a) man up and get headphones or b) go completely mental and build essentially a scale model of a real cine.
I'm so sick of what the 99% want. It won't come to them unless they put in the effort! Why don't people get that? This is true just about on any topic I care to mention! Why am I not a concert-level pianist? Because I'm a lazy sod who's on /. right now instead of putting literally every waking minute in front of the piano. Duh!
Imagine if 99% of everyone were computer experts. Most of us in /. would be unemployed.
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No offense, but your opinion is dripping with astounding arrogance. I'm sorry.
A simple re-reading of this discussion makes it obvious to anyone who wants to hear that people are frustrated not because they don't get the perfect, audiophile, spectacular or great sounds. They want the basics. They want to get the same thing they have always gotten since decades with middle- and even low-class consumer devices, including TVs. An intelligible speech. Intelligible speech from consumer electronics isn't a luxury,
Duplicate story from a year ago (Score:2)
We needs multiple sound channels (Score:2)
I've been wanting 3 sound tracks for a while: Dialogue, Effects, and Music. I'd like to be able to generally turn down effects, and turn up dialogue.
Alternatively they should have an extra language option for the audio to listen to: Geezer where the dialogue is set higher and with less dynamic range.
Much worse problem over cable TV (Score:2)
Poor Speaker Quality (Score:2)
new, super-thin models have speakers that are behind the screen or point downward, bouncing sound away from you.
Besides poor speaker placement (a consequence of the large screen dictating the dimensions), the audio amplifiers and speakers in many flat screen sets have poor frequency response and distort at high sound levels. The thin set profiles don't leave enough room for a good speaker, especially not when part cost is a big consideration. It's worse when they don't provide any audio output connections
Re:For this reason (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember some (most? All?) DVDs had Stereo and 5.1 tracks. Even though your DVD player is fully capable of downmixing 5.1 to stereo, the mix in the 2.0 was "better" for your regular TV speakers. It had less dynamic range and was limited in sub-bass.
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Movies probably still get mixed more for the theatre rather than for the home screen
Why can't they do both?
Mix for the theater for distribution to theaters, and mix for the home screen for streaming and DVDs.
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Why? You only notice the shitty audio after you bought the DVD, so why bother?
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Because it costs more.
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Even the cheapest home TV has 5.1 decoding these days - the least they can do is add a crappy center channel to the speaker set instead of downmixing to stereo.
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I personally wonder how much of this has to do with lots of people being apartment dwellers. There's only so loud I'm willing to go because I don't want to disturb my neighbors. I don't have anything resembling a statistic for it but I have buddies who have mentioned something similar.
One thing I miss about pre-digital TV was extra effort was made sure the audience didn't miss anything due to fuzzy TV signals.