I use a Sony sound bar. For everything other than music concerts, I set it on "Voice" and "Night" which reduces excessive base.
And there should be average TV sets, with their built in speakers, with switchable sound bars for real world reference monitoring. Especially for home video mixes (and all movies should have a home video mix tailored to average needs as a selectable option, with more easily audible dialogue).
The problem can be during the editing stage. Those watching the scenes probably know the script, so that the dialogue in places, which for the viewer is hard to understand, doesn't occur to them as they are aware of what is being said.
Weird because it still seems to suit singing - as well as the spoken word - with audio only hi-fidelity recordings...
The mic'ing is better for singers, professional vocalists. Much better. And some of the quality will be lost if you're listening to them on some cheezy internal speaker array on a television. (Whereas a tube radio with a decent-sized speaker can reproducee vocals pretty well.) The ultimate in lo-fi has always been telephone receivers. Is a cellphone sound reproduction quality any better than a landline? I think it's worse, most of the time. Is the midrange exaggerated to emphasize the midrange octaves- speech tones- in both cases? I think so.
Baloney. The mic’ing may be better for music - MAY be better (and often not) - but that has nothing whatsoever to do with why modern movie/tv dialogue is hard to hear. The size of the soundbar speakers has NOTHING to do with why modern movie/tv dialogue is hard to hear - you can’t hear it on any system. And I have no idea what old telephone recievers possibly being better than cellphones (although both may boost the midrange) has to do with TV/movie dialogue…
The segment in the video about Christopher Nolan was illuminating. He wants people to see his films in the cinema with the dolby atmosphere multiple speaker effect, without much thought beyond that. It struck me as [I'm being charitable here] a pretty undemocratic attitude. Where I live, there is one cinema that is equipped that way and it's a bit of a hike to get to. It brought to mind how Motown mixed their tracks so they popped even on the tinniest transistor radio. Maybe the punters who like his films don't care, but to me a film is enhanced by the soundscape. We don't need a lot of dialogue in a film, but make what's there audible for Pete's sake.
I didn't say that the problem resided entirely in the home sound reproduction system. I just made note of the notion that there might be a better EQ, and better mic'ing, on some movies than in others. I just watched Argentina 1985 on Amazon Prime the other night, and the sound quality of that was quite good, markedly better than most of the movies I've viewed/heard on that platform. Which leads me to believe that whoever was responsible for the audio knew what they were doing, and that a lot of other folks doing final production and audio mixing on films, documentaries, series episodes, etc. do not.
Finnish people have been complaining for at least two decades that dialogue is hard to understand in Finnish movies, looks like Hollywood has finally caught up with us! I rarely watch new movies as there's so many old movies to watch, but I've heard this complaint from my Finnish friends too. Even though I understand English pretty much perfectly, I always use English subtitles, as I'm used to it.
I'd had a hard time with modern dialog for a number of years n0w - and we'd switched on the captions for a lot of shows and movies we watched. I noticed that favorite old TV shows and movies were sounding just fine, so I suspected the sound editors and actors were deliberately messing it up with louder ambient sounds and actors who mumble/whisper. My system is a Sony 1080 TV of 60 inches; an A/V receiver from Sony with 5.1 capabilities; a pair of Bose bookshelf large speakers for the main left/right, and a decent sized Sony center channel speaker. So, essentially I was using a 5.1 amplifier set to do 3.0 sound. The center channel speaker has two mid-sized midrange cones with a horn-type tweeter in the center. As I said, on older stuff this setup sounded fine, but newer product sounded muddy and muffled, particularly centered dialog. I experimented with a different JBL center speaker. It was about the same. Went back to the Sony. For a time, I tried setting the amplifier to reduce the left/right channels by 2 or 4db, or raising the center channel by 2 or 4db. It helped a little, but not enough. Recently I hit upon some settings that I'd not messed with at all. The receiver had settings for the "size" of the speakers, small or large. I'd always had the center speaker set to large, as it wasn't much smaller than the bookshelf Bose speakers. So as a lark I tried setting the center speaker size to small. At the same time, I saw a setting for crossover frequency (note that I have no subwoofer). It was set to 120hz and I set it to 80hz. Somehow with these two things changed, the dialog is now much more intelligible. I no longer need to turn on the caption text to watch the great bulk of stuff we watch on network TV, Paramount+, and or Amazon Prime. The old stuff is still sounding brighter to me. If I put on an old TIME TUNNEL or THE PRISONER or MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, the dialog is clear and bright. High frequencies are loud and clear. Newer stuff is still a bit muffled-sounding in comparison, but at least if I concentrate on it, I can understand what's being said 95% of the time. There are still some mumbly actors who I'll never understand... [Edit to add: I used to do 5.0 when I lived up north. It was fine but the house down here doesn't lend itself to that kind of setup, and hearing gunshots and explosions coming from behind the couch are no longer all that necessary.]
One of my worst experiences was trying to watch Peaky Blinders. It was hard enough for me to understand the lingo but not being able to hear it well was a major bummer. Ended up giving up on what appeared to me would probably be a great show.
Why movie dialogue is getting harder to hear.... | Page 5 | Steve Hoffman Music Forums This post was also relevant.
Lots of perceptive comments in this thread. As an ex-dubbing mixer I can endorse the generally accurate conviction that the sound team does what the director demands. And, of course, he also approves the performances. Sound people, if allowed to, will record dialogue very well and dubbing mixers, if allowed to, will create a workable balance. But everything wrong is the director's responsibility, from accepting mumbling to insisting on FX & music heavy balances. I'm also experienced as a location recordist and have been known to protest when working in a noisy environment and the actor is so quiet that standing two feet away without headphones I can't hear him or her at all. If the director is 'happy with the performance' that's how it stays. My sympathy goes out to the audience who suffer the difficulties of hearing and the sound people whose professional abilities are over ridden.
Regarding this problem it has occurred to me that in the real world, hearing is intentional. We focus on whomever we are dealing with, and can tune out extraneous noise. Film makers often seem to try and defeat this with microphones picking up and exaggerating the noise of coat being taken off...
Interstingly this article completely misses ADR - rerecording of dialogue in a studio during post. It is a normal process during filming and sometimes it is even cheaper to quickly shoot, use the recorded sound as a reference and re-record the dialogue in a controlled environment. Walter Murch tells an anecdote that Marlon Brando was mumbling because he new that he would need to re-record his dialogue often - so if his dialogue was altered, there would be lesser problems to keep it in sync. I once edited a B-Movie where 80% of the dialogue was re-recorded - it was simply cheaper to use this method instead to keep the studio / filming location quiet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCpQ8vR_ok But of course the actor`s schedule needs to be adjusted to this - get back to a sound booth after 16 weeks for a five days session...
I admit I have hearing loss, but my wife( who does not) and I watched "The VVitch" last weekend. The dialogue is in Old English, we could not understand anything when we first started watching, I turned on the subtitles. That fixed it.
I used to think it was the platform on which I was watching something and how my sound receiver processed it, but I've learned that that's not it. When I first got a Roku stick to watch CBS All Access for STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, I found the dialog really hard to understand. But now - same Roku - same TV - same A/V receiver - and I watch an old STAR TREK or an older show like MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - and the dialog is crystal clear. Same is true with the re-installed CRIMINAL MINDS. The new series this past season had OK, but still muffled dialog, yet an old episode on the same Roku sounds crystal clear. This has to be some kind of ploy - and fad - in modern filmmaking, like the orange and teal, the shaky-cam, wider-than-16:9 ratios, and now muffled dialog.
Good to know as I thought it was just me. I use captions on most all modern movies....and even some TV shows.
There was a UK TV show called `Broadchurch`that was very popular, and featured David Tennent, a Scotsman who speaks very softly and quietly, so that you had to really strain to hear what was being said, but the main problem was the music used to dramatist the plot was this awful `PLINKY-PLONKY` piano that was deafeningly LOUD! In the end I had to give up on the show because that piano on my surround system was driving me nuts.
