Comment by Kiro
7 months ago
> since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting
I find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I've never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?
Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it's music where it's done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I'm out. Not sure why exactly, but it's very jarring.
For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.
If you have mpv+yt-dlp set up you can fix this with an audio filter to mix to mono.
Somewhat related, I've used
to fix videos which are annoyingly mirrored to avoid copyright. You could also bind these options to keys in mpv to use on the fly. Some videos will only mirror some parts of their footage.
Another fun one I bind in input.conf
Lets me rotate the video. I sometimes also just open a web image in mpv and rotate it like that to avoid tilting my head.
I also have these binds for unbalanced audio, mainly used with 5.1 audio to sound better on headphones or stereo speakers, and the \ bind one seems to make normal stuff slightly louder also, so sometimes I hit it when I don't wanna turn up my speaker knob for one video.
That's super complicated lol. Why not use the browser extension or accessibility feature?
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What are these tools? That sounds super useful for the most annoying YouTube flaws I run into
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As someone with minor but noticeable hearing issues, the reason it's so jarring is because our brain's audio processing center depends on both ears for understanding human speech.
If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
>> Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.
I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.
Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)
"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over."
This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...
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There's a small YouTube creator who has uploaded videos with the narration hard panned. I told him about it in the comments, he went "hmm that's weird", then uploaded more videos with the same issue.
I don't watch that channel any more.
I totally agree, I will not watch a video with any issues like these.
However, I also hate knowing that I'm hearing mono audio where stereo could be used. 99% of the videos I watch don't have panning issues, so to just turn off ALL stereo seems like such overkill to me...
In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it (differences in timing and volume inform your brain on the sound source location). Exception being if it's something really quiet right next to one ear, but that's relatively rare.
So when things are mixed "improperly" (it's subjective), it's very distracting to me. I don't need to force mono everywhere, but it's very common in amateurish channels, and surprisingly also in movies and TV shows. Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side. Like, somebody speaking to the left of the camera, and it comes 100% on the left channel and 0% on the right one. It's so unnatural and annoying to me.
> Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side.
I find this genuinely baffling; I lived for nearly a decade as a bachelor in a basement apartment where I had a big TV setup, but out of respect for my upstairs landlord listened to nearly everything on wireless stereo headphones, and I can’t recall ever experiencing this.
Me neither, I also only use my headphones. I've only had to use mono mode on amateur youtube videos where one of the audio channels is just missing. It has never been an issue on big productions.
Perhaps they're using a weird media player?
>In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it
Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.
Is it really possible that there's no driver that is capable of doing this in Windows? Did you look into this?
I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?
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