Amazon Introduces New Feature To Make Dialogue In Its TV Shows Intelligible (arstechnica.com) 121
Amazon has introduced a new feature to Prime Video called Dialogue Boost. It's intended to isolate dialogue and make it louder relative to other sounds in streaming videos on the service. Ars Technica reports: Amazon describes how it works in a blog post: "Dialogue Boost analyzes the original audio in a movie or series and intelligently identifies points where dialogue may be hard to hear above background music and effects. Then, speech patterns are isolated and audio is enhanced to make the dialogue clearer. This AI-based approach delivers a targeted enhancement to portions of spoken dialogue, instead of a general amplification at the center channel in a home theater system."
Not all content will be eligible for the dialogue boost feature, though -- at least not yet. Amazon says it "has initially launched on select Amazon Originals worldwide" like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Big Sick. While this is partly an accessibility feature for people who are hard of hearing, Amazon is also responding to a widespread complaint among viewers. A 2022 survey found that 50 percent of 1,260 American viewers "watch content with subtitles most of the time," many of them citing "muddled audio" and saying that it's more difficult to understand dialogue in movies and TV shows than it used to be. [...] The company hasn't announced when the feature will expand to more content. But we wouldn't be surprised to see rapid expansion -- not just from Amazon, but from other streamers offering similar features, too.
Not all content will be eligible for the dialogue boost feature, though -- at least not yet. Amazon says it "has initially launched on select Amazon Originals worldwide" like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Big Sick. While this is partly an accessibility feature for people who are hard of hearing, Amazon is also responding to a widespread complaint among viewers. A 2022 survey found that 50 percent of 1,260 American viewers "watch content with subtitles most of the time," many of them citing "muddled audio" and saying that it's more difficult to understand dialogue in movies and TV shows than it used to be. [...] The company hasn't announced when the feature will expand to more content. But we wouldn't be surprised to see rapid expansion -- not just from Amazon, but from other streamers offering similar features, too.
I know a cheaper way (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't hire mumblers.
Re:I know a cheaper way (Score:4, Insightful)
It shouldn't matter whether the actors mumble , the sound man should mic them up properly and set the levels properly then in post prod speech should always be mixed at a higher level than background effects. Clearly this isn't happening in a lot of productions these days.
Re:I know a cheaper way (Score:5, Insightful)
It has always mattered if the actors mumble. Boosting the volume of the mumbling only gets you so far because the single is bunk at the source.
But yet it's not (entirely) the actor's fault. Ultimately it's the director's responsibility. They should direct against this in the first place, and should it happen anyway either retake the scene or get it fixed it in post with ADR. Even if they didn't notice on the set it should be clearly seen as a problem in the dailies. The fact they're consistently missing all these checks and opportunities just tells me the directors aren't simply dropping the ball...but they WANT the mumble, they're DIRECTING the actors to mumble, they consider this to be a FEATURE rather than a bug.
They're wrong. And stupid. But that's Hollywood. Mumbling dialog is a fad that hopefully doesn't last long.
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To blame the actor is simple thinking.
The picture and action and sound passes by many eye and ears, the director even has a boss and still, mistakes get made. This is business and a job and they get so much time and money to do it and that's it. George Lucas, said, I paraphrase unironically: Movies are abandoned[, not released.] Maybe it isn't worth the time to get a good sound designer. Maybe there's some dysfunction on the set. Countless factors play in.
Because of this, I personally also think it'
Re:I know a cheaper way (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact they're consistently missing all these checks and opportunities just tells me the directors aren't simply dropping the ball...but they WANT the mumble, they're DIRECTING the actors to mumble, they consider this to be a FEATURE rather than a bug.
They're wrong. And stupid. But that's Hollywood. Mumbling dialog is a fad that hopefully doesn't last long.
I think this might be explained by gross incompetence as well.
We aren't going to look back at this time as a high point in cinema. We have the bad sound, the inability of writers to follow the basic rules of storytelling, embarrassingly clumsy attempts to inject politics into movies, even though we know how to do that without it being so obvious and clumsy.
Even things like lighting are a train wreck in today's cinematic world.
There are rules of good storytelling, and rules of good cinema. We can break them in places to create a jarring effect, but as my Photography professor noted. "Break the rules at times. But use them like spice. Don't use them as the main course. But most importunately know what the rules are first, otherwise you look stupid and random. The present crop looks like they don't know the rules.
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Mumbling dialog is a fad that hopefully doesn't last long.
Well, there's an actor I cannot stand in my country because he mumbles all his lines. I can never understand a single word he says, and yet he's been famous for 3 or 4 decades. So there's clearly a market for it. Can't even remember his name.
Re: I know a cheaper way (Score:2)
Make them all speak Transatlantic again. Just think of it, Spiderman sounding like Katherine Hepburn!
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99.999% of the time it is re-recorded in post, in a nice quiet iso booth with a mic right in front of the actor's face.
Do you have a reference for this?
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It shouldn't matter whether the actors mumble...
A loud mumbler, is hardly more effective than a quiet one.
...the sound man should mic them up properly and set the levels properly then in post prod speech should always be mixed at a higher level than background effects. Clearly this isn't happening in a lot of productions these days.
I certainly see your point, but proper enunciation for clarity does matter, as every professional speaker can attest. Clearly that education isn't happening these days either.
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It's not the actors' fault. It's the directors'. They want dialogue to sound more realistic. That means people don't speak as clearly as they traditionally have on TV. It's a bad idea for obvious reasons. There's a sweet spot in between realistic and theater (as on a stage) and lots of modern programming has shot right past it. It's easy to make a TV show look and sound realistic, shoot on location with practical audio. The art is in making it more than realistic.
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If the viewers of a movie can't understand what's being said, then the character being spoken to wouldn't be able to either. That's only realistic if it's part of the story - ie the character doesn't hear properly and misinterprets, or asks the first character to repeat himself.
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If the viewers of a movie can't understand what's being said, then the character being spoken to wouldn't be able to either.
I disagree. You're at a different point, and you also don't have as much practice as they do at interpreting the other party's mumbling. Anyway like I said, the art is in making it seem realistic while also making it intelligible. And since it's commercial art, it's meant to be apprehensible (WTAF that's not in the Firefox dictionary by default? How ironic) by the widest possible audience.
Re:I know a cheaper way (Score:4, Interesting)
"It's easy to make a TV show look and sound realistic, shoot on location with practical audio. The art is in making it more than realistic."
The worst show I ever saw with 'auto-sound' was 'The Americans'.
Each time somebody shut up, the microphone gain went slowly up until you heard the birds outside and the crew moving, then somebody said something and abruptly the gain does down and the birds shut-up, it made me crazy and I'm not a sound guy.
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Compressors are usually used on the dialogue track to apply gain and even out the volumes of the voices. They are "auto" in the sense that they adjust gain dynamically based on thresholds. Usually the thresholds are set high enough so they don't do what you describe.
These are usually directional mics mounted with vibration isolation and held at close range to the actors. Unfortunately, directional works both ways. Things that are exactly directly behind the microphone (birds in the sky) can get picked u
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Pretty much every movie trailer in a nutshell. Trailers aren't made by the same people as those who made the movie, and are absolutely bottom-tier quality.
One of the worse examples ever was the Star Trek: Picard trailer. I couldn't watch the whole thing because the music went up to 13 every time someone stopped talking. Apparently, going to 11 wasn't good enough!
The new Super Mario Brothers movie trailer did the same thing, blasting highly-compressed "epic" music to boot. Totally tainted my view of the
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It's not the actors' fault. It's the directors'. They want dialogue to sound more realistic. That means people don't speak as clearly as they traditionally have on TV. It's a bad idea for obvious reasons.
Right. It is a bad idea. All the more reason people should be questioning the "professional" directors who choose to warp a product that tends to rely on the tenants of professional speaking instead of streaming providers having to literally create anti-director technology to compensate.
If a habitual mumbler showed up to acting school, that would be the first problem they would address. So directors are sending quite the mixed message there too.
The art is in making it more than realistic.
All entertainment is considered a form of art. If this theo
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Producers seem to think we enjoy having our ears blasted at irregular intervals. Often they will have a quiet part, followed by a super loud party scene or battle.
Even if the actors are properly recorded and mixed, the viewer often can't hear them because they turned down the loud parts and now it's another quiet part.
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Re: I know a cheaper way (Score:2)
A lot of time we don't even want to watch the movie, we just don't have anything better to do.
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It shouldn't matter whether the actors mumble , the sound man should mic them up properly and set the levels properly then in post prod speech should always be mixed at a higher level than background effects. Clearly this isn't happening in a lot of productions these days.
Exactly. My biggest issue is that the sound effects are mixed way too high compared to the voice. The Foley effects are almost universally overdone today, with the footsteps or crinkling of a bag or clothing "swish" being just as loud or louder than the voice.
And then there is the dynamic range overuse. I suppose a big kaboom right after the actors are whispering might be good in a few places, but not through the entire movie.
Full disclaimer - I'm pretty deaf, and it turns out that my noggin processes
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Back in the olden days nearly all dialog in TV shows and movies was dubbed in a sound studio after filming. Makes for an enjoyable watching experience when the dialog is crisp, and clear, yet still natural sounding.
I'm not sure why this practice ended. Perhaps production folks and actors don't want to go to all that work now? Or maybe the studio doesn't want to spend the money (poor CEOs are barely scraping by as it is).
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That's not needed for crisp sound. A directional mic on an isolated boom can get very close to the actors. Often the dialogue track itself is crisp and clear and has no other sounds in it. Other tracks are layered in at the post production stage, including background sounds like birds and so on.
ADR is still extremely common. But doesn't always sound natural due to imperfect matching of the acoustics of the on-screen location. You don't usually dub the entire movie, though.
not enough (Score:2)
that's still not enough
Dialog needs to be on it's own track, and standard television interfaces need to be able adjust the relative volume of dialog and everything else.
hawk
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Dialogue is pretty much the only thing in the center channels on a standard 5.1 track - which these days even most TV is distributed as 5.1. A very limited number of TVs have options to adjust the mixing of the center channel but it does exist.
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There was some really lousy at-home post-production done during COVID. A very noticeable drop in production quality due to people working with poorly isolated setups with not so good speakers.
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No, it is.
It was only a few decades ago where you only had one mic and everyone had to enunciate well in order to be heard by that one boom mic. If it seems like all the actors seem to face some invisible hanging object, it's because they
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Came here to say they might as well call this Anti-Nolan Mode
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Don't hire mumblers.
Wish that was the only case, but I've seen Amazon movies where all the audio was just way quite compared to ambient noise.
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That's 3/4 of Hollywood actors.
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"That's 3/4 of Hollywood actors."
Yes, the days when they had a 1st price from school for diction, before stating actor's school, are long gone.
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Yeah, just make shows properly in the first place, like they did for literally 100 years and then you don't need features to make up for your lack of sound direction.
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It's not merely mumblers, it's bad sound during recording, and probably saving money in post production by going "Meh, we don't need to re-record that bit of dialogue." One gets the feeling that producers are definitely scrimping on post-production costs. Even the best set can have sound problems, but in general if it's deemed a good take, you just have the actors re-record their lines. Let's be honest, everything about modern film and TV production absolutely sucks as compared to even 20 years ago. It's pr
Good, it's about time. (Score:3)
I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around: directors, actors, dialog/sound editors, etc, but the issue is very real and has been infecting content more and more for years. It's really annoying and stupid to have to stop, rewind, throw CC on, and rewatch a scene because some possibly critical bit of dialog was mumbled into nonsense.
A feature like this could be a great pushback against artist's inane "artistic license" choice. It's like they forgot what medium they're working in or what they're doing it for.
Re:Good, it's about time. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around: directors, actors, dialog/sound editors, etc, but the issue is very real and has been infecting content more and more for years. It's really annoying and stupid to have to stop, rewind, throw CC on, and rewatch a scene because some possibly critical bit of dialog was mumbled into nonsense.
It's awful. I thought my hearing was going for a bit until I watched some old TV and foreign TV. Turns out modern sound is shite.
I don't know if it's incompetence or just a giant fuck you middle finger to anyone who isn't watching on a home cinema with a giant speaker system, but it's annoying as fuck. For what it's worth, I don't think it's the actors. The high levels of "atmospheric" background noise are definitely a huge part of the problem.
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It's definitely incompetence, of the intellectual sort. Thinking that what you want is so much realism that it's as confusing as real life is idiotic.
They're not designing the audio for big stereo systems, they're designing it for sound bars, because that's what most people have in their homes now.
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They're not designing the audio for big stereo systems, they're designing it for sound bars, because that's what most people have in their homes now.
Are they though? The stuff sounds muddy and crap through a sound bar. I was assuming they're ignoring what most people have and going for what they like.
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Re: Good, it's about time. (Score:2)
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"I don't know if it's incompetence or just a giant fuck you middle finger to anyone who isn't watching on a home cinema with a giant speaker system, "
The giant speaker system doesn't help, garbage in to garbage out still applies, I think the directors think they are being artsy.
Microphones are smaller and better than ever, so there is no excuse for bad sound other than the directors think it's trendy.
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True... but I suspect it's designed to sound intelligible on a big ass-system with loads of speakers so the dialogue is largely separated from the other sounds. Mostly I suspect this because in the cinema I have much less trouble hearing stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I am not defending them, that is not an excuse. If you're making sound for a cinema, the fine, go nuts. If you're expecting people to watch it at home, it's lazy and stupid to mix it for a cinema.
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"I don't know if it's incompetence or just a giant fuck you middle finger to anyone who isn't watching on a home cinema with a giant speaker system, "
The giant speaker system doesn't help, garbage in to garbage out still applies, I think the directors think they are being artsy.
I don't think so. The audio is mixed for a theater sound system. If you have a similar-quality sound system at home, you'll also hear the dialogue just fine.
Note that I don't think this is a good reason to stream stuff mixed for a theater. They should mix it appropriately for streaming. Which, kinda, is what Amazon is doing with this.
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It's awful. I thought my hearing was going for a bit until I watched some old TV and foreign TV. Turns out modern sound is shite.
I don't know if it's incompetence or just a giant fuck you middle finger to anyone who isn't watching on a home cinema with a giant speaker system, but it's annoying as fuck. For what it's worth, I don't think it's the actors. The high levels of "atmospheric" background noise are definitely a huge part of the problem.
It's a whole storm of issues. Incompetence is a big part. Certainly on my home theater system, it's still an issue. I can't even use it to watch movies if the SO is at home. She has very good hearing. That background atmospheric noise is too loud as you note, and the overuse of dynamic range is rampant. To hear the low sound levels of the voice, then have the house shake with the loud stuff makes my Theater system useable only when I'm alone.
If the sound is done right, we don't even notice it. We immerse
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To hear the low sound levels of the voice, then have the house shake with the loud stuff makes my Theater system useable only when I'm alone.
Yeah... I've encountered that. Overdrive the volume to the dialogue is audible, and the it saturates. MPlayer has an option to auto-scale the audio which is pretty neat and works well. Except with all the shitty proprietary streaming systems with shitty DRM don't work with MPlayer.
Yet again I'd get a better product if I pirated it. But the only people the studios actu
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But the only people the studios actually interact with are paying customers so those are the only people they can punish.
Wait...What? Oh - Well played - well played indeed!
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It's awful. I thought my hearing was going for a bit until I watched some old TV and foreign TV. Turns out modern sound is shite.
I just finished watching Season 3 of Picard. After toggling subtitles a half-dozen times during the first episode, I just left them on for the other nine. It's been a problem for a while, but lately it's been getting ridiculous! ... although I did notice in the final episode the speech levels and clarity went up significantly. I am pretty sure it was a deliberate choice, but I don't want to give away why if people haven't seen it yet.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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surround systems are seemingly being supplanted by 2.1 sound bars (for whatever reason i don't know? maybe we're just getting dumbed down to the point where connecting all those cables is just too much or home ownership becoming too expensive, and apartments lack the space?)
but you're spot on, this is 100% the problem center speakers are supposed to solve.
Earplug Warning: Commercial ahead. (Score:2)
Amazon has introduced a new feature to Prime Video called Dialogue Boost. It's intended to isolate dialogue and make it louder relative to other sounds in streaming videos on the service...
Fantastic. If commercial volume changes were only annoying to you before, well they're now going to be FUCKING ANNOYING at you in the near future.
And for the record, this fix for "muddled audio" coming from a streaming service pimping products from dozens of content creators, is quite the steamroller approach. Every sound engineer rolling their eyes is more looking at those who seemingly cannot do their job well. (If not all content suffers from this, the problem is hardly the streaming provider.)
Amazon says it "has initially launched on select Amazon Originals worldwide" like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Big Sick.
Well, I
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Do you get ads on Prime Video?
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Nope!
Definitely had me chuckling a bit when I read their post.
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Every show seems to be prepended with an ad these days, not just on Amazon. They are ads for other shows, but they are ads all the same.
Not just me! (Score:4, Insightful)
Holy shit, I'm not the only one turning on cc, wow, it's a mumbling plague!
I even had my hearing checked last year as part of a general physical because I thought I might be going deaf or something because I didn't used to have a problem understanding dialog.
Stop fucking mumbling and the problem will magically go away. Jfc
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Holy shit, I'm not the only one turning on cc, wow, it's a mumbling plague!
I even had my hearing checked last year as part of a general physical because I thought I might be going deaf or something because I didn't used to have a problem understanding dialog.
Stop fucking mumbling and the problem will magically go away. Jfc
This. I mean what the actual hell did this crop of nincompoops study in school? Perhaps today's Stars are to precious to take direction? The whole experience is a train wreck. We have all these tools that can create incredible quality, yet sound and voices plain stink.
I can watch an older movie, say something from the 1950's, and understand the voices - and I have some serious hearing issues.
But today's offerings appear to have all the finesse and quality of a couple fifth graders creating a movie on
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I really wanted to enjoy The Expanse, but had to stop watching it for this reason. Even with subtitles WHY ARE THEY MUMBLING AT LOW VOLUME?
I use subtitles for just about everything. I know what you mean. Using subtitles keeps the viewer from enjoying the video portion. Or you are watching the video and miss the subtitle.
Shameful confession - I watch some Science channel stuff. If a very attractive commentator lady comes on, I miss what she said about half of the time. If I didn't have to use the subtitles, I could enjoy the narrative along with the view 8^(
Soap Opera Effect (Score:3)
The feature sounds like a good idea in theory. Prime especially seems to have that problem, sometimes you have to turn the sound way up to hear the dialog. Still, the TV frame interpolation (also known as soap opera effect) also sort of sounded like a no-brainer back in the day, but a lot of people ended up not liking it. I myself watched an old film on someone else's TV with this thing on and it just didn't look right. Maybe some dialog is meant to be difficult to hear.
I don't know if it's technically possible for this thing to be togglable for users, but if it is, that would be nice. I personally prefer to have subtitles. As an added bonus, it allows hearing impaired people to watch the shows.
Re: Soap Opera Effect (Score:2)
Actually a better solution already exists: MPEG-H (I could say AC-4 too but I fucking hate dealing with Dolby; Fraunhofer are much better to work with.). This would put the dialogue in its own stream and the user can control the volume or leave it as the director intended.
Re: Soap Opera Effect (Score:2)
It would be nice to be able to control the music track separately, too, for the small minority of us who don't like music.
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These modern audio codecs can mix stuff all kinds of ways, if the content creator wants to give you control.
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It would be nice to be able to control the music track separately, too, for the small minority of us who don't like music.
Or for those of us who like it too much. There are times when I'm semi-passively listening to a TV show while doing something musical (e.g. composing). I would love to be able to guarantee that music won't suddenly start playing on TV while doing so, because one can't easily listen to music while listening to music.
Anti-loudness wars (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Anti-loudness wars (Score:3)
And then we'll have the new hotness: no dialog and just a player piano track...wait.
A better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hire writers, to make the dialogue more intelligent.
True, dat. Maybe they know how bad the dialogue is!
Spatial hearing and downmixing parameters (Score:5, Informative)
I see no one is bringing up spatial hearing and downmixing. Most movies and recent series are recorded for 5.1 channels or more, but most TV setups do not have 5.1 speakers. In many cases, a single stereo (2.0) TV is used; sometimes, with a sound bar that tries to emulate the 5.1 configuration, but actually using less speakers.
With a 5.1 setup, the voice typically comes from the central speaker and other sounds from different speakers. Unless you suffer from spatial hearing loss [wikipedia.org], your ears will allow you to identify each sound independently. This helps understanding the voice and telling it apart from the noise, but only with the proper sound setup.
When you play the movie in a setup without 5.1 speakers, the TV must downmix the sound channels to play them in the 2.0 speaker setup. This setup will no longer allow you to differentiate the voice from the noise (sound effects) thanks to spatial hearing. Therefore, the downmix process SHOULD increase the voice (FC, Front Central channel) level before downmix, to compensate for the loss of spatial hearing benefit. Note also that the sound effects typically have a much higher dynamic range than the voice, so SNR varies significantly particularly when you sum them.
However, most systems do not take this into account, and simply add up the different channels (possibly with a sqrt(2) factor for side channels), which results in the problem that we have today. One solution is to reencode the audio track considering the setup where you will play it; FFMpeg has a nice documentation [ffmpeg.org] and there is a good explanation here [superuser.com] regarding the levels of each channel. I have previously re-encoded downloaded movies with a special boost to the FC channel (such as suggested here [doom9.org], for example) and the sound on a simple TV is much, much clearer.
So, the problem is not only actor mumbling; it is also that most people do not employ the complete sound setup for which the movie sound track is designed, and the downmixing process does not properly take it into account. Amazon seems to be simply adding extra sound tracks with the proper mixing (i.e. specific audio mixing parameters for ffmpeg), but they are solving a real problem.
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Exactly!
Try changing to stereo from any other mix when many things are in surround or 5.1 and almost nothing has a 2nd audio mix available. My old TV would make the center speaker too weak and you only need to unplug the center speaker to see that almost all dialog is put on center (and a bit on the left or right.)
Add in the mixers' hear the voices over and over creating a bias in the mixers' understanding of the dialog plus their natural hearing loss from their profession making the lows too loud (like at
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The speakers in TVs are already crap. It's about time they just put a third one in. Sound bars with only two channels is also pretty sad for what they want to charge. A better fix is to truly just add that 3rd speaker. It's not like TVs are mono anymore. At one point, stereo became a selling point. Most people don't need all 5.1 channels. But 3 is a huge improvement over 2 and avoids 98% of the downmixing problems.
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The speakers in TVs are already crap. It's about time they just put a third one in. Sound bars with only two channels is also pretty sad for what they want to charge. A better fix is to truly just add that 3rd speaker. It's not like TVs are mono anymore. At one point, stereo became a selling point. Most people don't need all 5.1 channels. But 3 is a huge improvement over 2 and avoids 98% of the downmixing problems.
I'd argue that TVs without separate standalone speakers are still effectively mono, or very nearly so. Unless you're sitting way too close to the TV, the angular difference between speakers is too small to fully perceive the stereo separation. Adding a third speaker that is even closer won't really help. Ideally, you should have a single speaker in the TV, with two satellite speakers that are between 22.5 and 30 degrees away from the center channel [auralex.com] as seen the main listener's position. That is almost gu
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When you play the movie in a setup without 5.1 speakers, the TV must downmix the sound channels to play them in the 2.0 speaker setup.
I would argue that the need for this step right here is the problem. Your TV should never downmix audio down to stereo. Downmixing 7.1 to 5.1 might be okay, or upmixing in the reverse direction, but if you have a stereo TV with stereo speakers, it should be playing a stereo mix. Part of a sound engineer's job is competently creating a stereo mix so that the dialog is intelligible.
If the sound engineers aren't producing a separate stereo mix, or if the mix isn't good enough, or if the content provider ser
Theater Experience (Score:2)
So... (Score:3)
So they admit that all their existing content was substandard?
Refund time?
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They can't control the audio output systems and room configurations of every single household.
I have a simple Roku soundbar, nothing fancy, and it is situated within 10' of the couch in a small room with wood floors and a window behind. I never have problems hearing dialog even at low volume, probably because of all the hard surfaces.
Picard vs. Janeway (Score:4, Interesting)
Something happened to TV writers between the 80's and late 90's.
The stories and dialogue got so bad that they had the actors try to speak "dramatically" to make up for it.
Here's a news flash "Realist School" - a Starship Captain doesn't whisper her command orders so you can barely hear what's going on.
More Susan Ivanova, less Katherine Janeway.
Maybe the writers watched B5 and just gave up.
I know TV isn't real - go back to the Stage and a good story will still garner Suspension of Disbelief.
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A lot of actors speak unrealistically loudly too, even in otherwise quiet scenes.
If you want realistic, a character will use volume appropriate to the circumstances and proximity of the person they're talking to. If the microphone is positioned properly (ie near the character they're talking to) then the dialog should be easily understandable to the viewer if it would be understandable to the character in the scenario being shown.
If the viewer is unable to understand then neither would the other characters,
now how about video? (Score:5, Informative)
So yeah, we have an algorithm that can reprocess audio and make one able to hear the dialog better (mind you, I think that some of this is the problem of most TV mixing for surround first, and having poor 7.1 -> 2.0 conversion - in other words, the real flaw is the sound mixing engineers suck because they are unconcerned that most people have sound systems that cost less than $100).
Now can they do something about the total lack of visual dynamic contrast (aka, "why is it always so dark").?
I mean really, GoT was so poorly lit I totally missed the starbucks cup. And here I wish I could say "well, we lit it for being seen in a movie theater at 30-70ft", but even theater goers are saying they can't see what the hell is going on half the time, too.
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It's overdue that TVs added a 3rd channel as standard. We went from mono to stereo a LONG time ago.
Now can they do something about the total lack of visual dynamic contrast (aka, "why is it always so dark").?
With a good TV this simply isn't a problem. Even most cheap TVs if it's calibrated well. But TVs are shipped with the brightness and contrast both cranked too high because it looks better in the brightly lit retail store.
Re: now how about video? (Score:2)
I hooe they kept the cup so they can sell it to some obsessed fanboy for $$$.
Surround Effect (Score:3)
Trying to watch a show or film on a TV with two tiny speakers is not a good experience. As TVs have gotten flatter, and screens larger, there is less room for decent speakers. Even cheap 2.0 or 2.1 kits are not much better because they lack a center channel. Good soundbars are better, but a true 3.0 or 3.1 system makes a huge difference in dialogue intelligibility.
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Well I should be more specific. An MTM design is fine if you turn it on its side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Here
Now sync the sound to the video (Score:2)
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Rolled my own (Score:3)
Picked up a cheap Behringer compressor https://www.behringer.com/prod... [behringer.com] and installed it between the DAC on the optical out of my tv and my amplifier. Now nothing is louder than I allow it to be.
Compressor/Limiter for TV sets (Score:2)
Instead, can we get television and set top box manufacturers to install a compressor/limiter on the audio outs so that when I set the volume level for a tv show the commercials don't blow past it and blast my eardrums? because commercials suck.
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Have you never heard of dynamic range compression? TVs have this. I mean, I simply skip commercials or don't watch from providers with commercials usually. But the options are there.
The problem is that it wrecks the audio for the show too. Though it probably makes dialogue easier to hear.
I suspect that I understand the problem (Score:2)
Sound mixers hear the stuff many times during production and know what the actors are saying. When they mix a whispering actor and a loud background sound on a great sound system, they falsely believe the mix is fine. When a viewer hears it for the first time, they get confused
Re: I suspect that I understand the problem (Score:2)
This phenomenon is known as being bad at one's job.
Ads, too? (Score:2)
So, they're using the same tech that they use to make ads louder when they come on?
not hard of hearing (Score:2)
The problem is that Amazon's offerings are hard of watching, so i don't watch them.
Back in the day they used to dub over dialog (Score:2)
Because filmmakers knew that audio recorded on set was going to be shit.
At some point between the 1980s ans 2010s that wasn't necessary because microphone and sound processing technology got to the point where audio on set was good and the audio engineers worked hard to keep it that way.
But apparently the new crop of kids doing film and tv these days think it's all magic and pay no attention to it, meaning that instead of making intelligible dialog, they punt to the streamers to fix it in software later dow
What, (Score:2)
They're going to hire better writers?
Borked fold down and or DRC (Score:2)
Personally we never have issues with audio at home. Yet sometimes while away with friends or family watching the same exact content I'll notice half the time you can't make out what is being said and turning up the volume only makes parts of it too loud without doing anything to address dialogues.
I've long had a feeling the problem is partially sound people who insist upon unrealistic dynamic range and the rest is borked audio gear that does not properly fold down multi-channel audio and or has wonky DRC t
Netflix Menu Is Full Blast (Score:2)
PSAMS (Score:2)
"Problem Starts At Mixing Station"
or maybe
PSATD
"Problem Starts At The Director"
For having characters hold conversations while bombs are exploding nearby.
Re: (Score:2)
Take a look at RX10's feature set [izotope.com] and see what it can do with speech, for instance. Great stuff.