I find British shows to be the worst. first you have the difference in sound volume between dialogue and the accompanying music (very quiet dialogue and then REALLY loud music). I feel that the differences in levels are more pronounced than here in the US. But then on top of that (Caution: extreme generalization ahead) the fact that all the dialogue is MUMBLED. Keep the remote in hand. To the OP, that article really helped me understand the phenomenon, Thanx
I think it's just a simple case of manipulation on the part of the movie companies. If you have to strain to understand dialogue, it gives the appearance that what's being said is meaningful and worth your attention. And then the exaggerated impact of explosions and tire screeching car chases helps enhance the illusion of excitement.
There's often attempts at "obfuscation" in movies. If on occasions a scene is supposed to be dramatic, but in the editing it doesn't come across as dramatic as they would wish, they just ramp up the background music, so it effectively becomes "foreground music." It must fool some.
I haven't seen a theatrical film since the Harry Potter series, and even then I had a really rough time understanding anyone younger than Hagrid.
Not criticizing the messenger here…but that’s like 12 minutes of rationalizing and excuses. Drums on audio recordings don’t sound remotely like real live drums (because they would ridiculously overpower other instruments at times) yet…they still sound recognizable and lively and BALANCED with some compression and proper mixing. The problem is simple. Audible dialogue has been pushed way down the list of priorities by Hollywood, Inc…consumers be damned. If and when it gets moved up the list of priorities, the pendulum will shift. This will likely happen when somebody figures it out and a movie becomes a huge blockbuster (success breeds imitation) AND/OR people simply stop giving as much of their hard earned income to not hear dialogue (it doesn’t require the spigot be turned off, but just slow down the trickle enough) along with polling numbers which show this is why. It’s funny how music suffers from too little dynamic range in post-production while the visual medium suffers from the opposite.
For most BD, DVD, movies, TV shows, etc that are in stereo or surround I set my TV's audio to Clear Voice. Background noises, music, audience noise all sound louder than dialogue without Clear Voice turned on. And people's enunciation has gotten terrible.
Last night I watched the Godzilla that had so much action taking place in virtual darkness that I said I needed subtitles to show me what the heck was going on!
Licorice Pizza is one modern movie with very intelligible dialogue. An excellent sounding and looking classic is one of the proper restorations of The Third Man. The restored How The West Was Won, perfect.
Glad to have found this thread. I thought it was aging ears except the fluctuations didn't make sense--I always have the remote in hand so I don't get blasted out of nowhere.
A director on a commentary track for a classic Doctor Who story (I don't recall which one, sorry) lamented the current practice, saying it's done intentionally to make the viewer feel perpetually behind so that they're always trying to catch up, and hence always engaged.
I love it, let’s add some subtitles to explain the murky visuals. “Man enters room, opens door…” Too many movies are a dark, mumbling mess…
There used to be a system just like that for people with bad eyesight. A narrator overvoice would literally say the kind of thing you just did, I think it was SAP (Secondary Audio Program)
The accompanying video actually made a lot of valuable points. From my perspective, one of the largest factors is the lack of adhered to standards or specs. Rarely is the process transparent anymore, the sound mixers experience of seeing & hearing her film in the theater illustrated this precisely. The fact that the deliverables end up on so many different platforms only compounds this problem. Television is no different. Most modern day editors have no idea the purpose of bars & tone. This lack of consistency is most certainly a contributing factor.
I have to watch everything with subtitles because voices through my TV speaker are usually half the volume of the sound FX and music. I figured it just must be an incredibly lame audio-editing trend or that nothing is mixed for the TV speaker anymore and I'm being manipulated into buying a multiple speaker set-up. Drives me crazy.
From Harper's Index, February 2023: Percentage of Americans who watch shows or movies with subtitles on "most of the time": 1/2 Of Gen Zers who do: 7/10 Food for thought. Perhaps it's simply the case that for most shows, the audio isn't mixed well (and there's no graphic EQ adjustment, at least on my set.) I often find myself going through wildly varying volume changes, depending on the specific show being watched. I wonder if the audio for many shows is mixed principally for the benefit of 5.1 sound, and not mono (the way many of us are still known to listen to our TV sets.) Or if the audio people are emphasizing a direct feed through headphones over ambient sound. Or if the newbie engineers are simply forgetting that human hearing partakes of the Fletcher-Munson effect, and that at "ordinary bedroom apartment levels" a bit of a boost at each end of the audible frequency spectrum can help, even for speech.
Heh, that's like the inverse of compensating for the Fletcher-Munson effect. And it makes sense for speech, as it did for analog telephones. It seems that as a result, the audio comes in more clearly on many of the old movies than on most of the new productions. Although I think I notice the audio problem more with new TV series than with video releases of newly released films.
Well this is my thought - that maybe many of us are watching streams which have embedded 5.1 embedded audio tracks, but we have stereo setups so there's some downmixing/transcoding going on which is overemphasising the loud boom-boom sound-effect tracks and not the speech. As for cinemas, the few times 've been in recent years the sound quality was so dreadful that I could barely even hear the explosions over the distortion.
