Comment by pupppet
11 hours ago
The fact that I have to turn on closed captioning to understand anything tells me these producers have no idea what we want and shouldn’t be telling us what settings to use.
11 hours ago
The fact that I have to turn on closed captioning to understand anything tells me these producers have no idea what we want and shouldn’t be telling us what settings to use.
One problem is that the people mixing the audio already know what is being said:
Top-down processing
(or more specifically, top-down auditory perception)
This refers to perception being driven by prior knowledge, expectations, and context rather than purely by sensory input. When you already know the dialog, your brain projects that knowledge onto the sound and experiences it as “clear.”
Look at any setup audio is being mixed on and tell me how many sound bars do you see there? How many flat panels with nothing more than the built in speakers being used? None. The speakers being used and the tricks the equipment do to make multichannel audio work with fewer speakers plays havoc on well mixed audio. Down mixing on consumer device is just never going to sound great
There’s something to what you’re saying - but it’s also something of a spectrum.
Our need to turn up the volume in dialog scenes and turn it back down again in action scenes(for both new and old content) got a lot less when we added a mid-range soundbar and sub to our mid-range TV (previously was using just the TV speakers). I’m not sure whether it’s sound separation - now we have a ‘more proper’ center channel - or that the ends of he spectrum - both bass and treble - are less muddy. Probably a combination of the two.
Makes sense, but how does this explain the fact that this problem seems recent, or at least to have worsened recently ?
TV shows changed completely in the streaming age it seems. These days they really are just super long movies with glacial pacing to keep users subscribed.
34 replies →
Have you got older recently?
1 reply →
There's been a lot of speculation/rationalisation around this already, but one I've not seen mentioned is the possibility of it being at least a little down to a kind of "don't look back" collective arrogance (in addition to real technical challenges)
(This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR)
Up until fairly recently both of these professions were pretty small, tight-knit, and learnt (at least partially) from previous generations in a kind of apprentice capacity
Now we have vocational schools - which likely do a great job surfacing a bunch of stuff which was obscure, but miss some of the historical learning and "tricks of the trade"
You come out with a bunch of skills but less experience, and then are thrust into the machine and have to churn out work (often with no senior mentorship)
So you get the meme version of the craft: hone the skills of maximising loudness, impact, ear candy.. flashy stuff without substance
...and a massive overuse of the Wilhelm Scream :) [^1]
[^1]: once an in joke for sound people, and kind of a game to obscure its presence. Now it's common knowledge and used everywhere, a wink to the audience rather than a secret wink to other engineers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream
EDIT: egads, typing on a phone makes it far too easy to accidentally write a wall of text - sorry!
1 reply →
Honestly what I don't get is how this even happened though: it's been I think 10 years with no progress on getting the volume of things to equal out, even with all the fancy software we have. Like I would've thought that 5.1 should be relatively easy to normalize, since the center speech channel is a big obvious "the audience _really_ needs to hear this" channel that should be easy to amplify up in any downmix....instead watching anything is still just riding the damn volume button.
8 replies →
Netflix records many shows simultaneously in the same building. This is why their shows are all so dark - to prevent light bleeding across sets. I wonder if this is also true for keeping the volume down.
It was garbage before streaming services took off. Dark Knight Rises is one example. I can remember renting DVDs in the mid to late 2000s from Netflix and they had a similar issues.
Dark Knight is an edge case because Christopher Nolan is a special kind of retarded when it comes to mixing his movies. He literally refuses to accept that people want to understand what characters are saying. [0]
But here's the thing: Most movies are mixed for 5.1 or more surround setups, where the front middle speaker has most of the dialog. Just boost that speaker either via setting or in a stereo/virtual surround by a significant amount and add some volume compression and you get something that's reasonable on a home theater setup.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-listen...
2 replies →
English is my second language and I always though my lack of understanding was a skill issue.
Then I noticed that native speakers also complain.
Then I started to watch YouTube channels, live TV and old movies, and I found out I could understand almost everything! (depending on the dialect)
When even native speakers can't properly enjoy modern movies and TV shows, you know that something is very wrong...
The problem is that a lot of content today is mixed so that effects like explosions and gunshots are LOUD, whispers are quiet, and dialog is normal.
It only works if you're watching in a room that's acoustically quiet, like a professional recording studio. Once your heater / air conditioner or other appliance turns on, it drowns out everything but the loudest parts of the mix.
Otherwise, the problem is that you probably don't want to listen to ear-splitting gunshots and explosions, then turn it down to a normal volume, only to make the dialog and whispers unintelligible. I hit this problem a lot watching TV after the kids go to bed.
Yes, seems like both audio and video are following a High Dynamic Range trend.
As much as I enjoy deafeningly bright explosions in the movie theater, it's almost never appropriate in the casual living room.
I recently bought a new TV, Bravia 8ii, which was supposedly not bright enough according to reviewers. In it's professional setting, it's way to bright at night, and being an OLED watching HDR content the difference between the brightest and darkest is simply too much, and there seems to be no way to turn it down without compromising the whole brightness curve.
The sound mixing does seem to have gotten much worse over time.
But also, people in old movies often enunciated very clearly as a stylistic choice. The Transatlantic accent—sounds a bit unnatural but you can follow the plot.
In older movies and TV shows the actors would also speak loudly. There’s a lot of mumbling and whispering in shows today.
1 reply →
Not just old movies. Anything until mid-2000s or 2010s.
To be fair, the diction in modern movies is different than the diction in all other examples you mentioned. YouTube and live TV is very articulate, and old movies are theater-like in style.
Can we go back to articulate movies and shows? And to crappier microphones where actors had to speak rather than whisper? Thanks.
English is my native language and I always watch with captions on. It is ridiculous :)
I "upgraded" from a 10 year old 1080p Vizio to a 4K LG and the sound is the worst part of the experience. It was very basic and consistent with our old TV but now it's all over the place. It's now a mangled mess of audio that's hard to understand.
I had the same issue, turn on the enhanced dialogue option. This makes the EQ not muffle the voices and have them almost legible. I say almost because modern mixing assume a center channel for voices that no TV have.
The TV makers all want to sell you an overpriced soundbar too.
Perhaps a mixing issue on your end? Multi-channel audio has the dialog track separated. So you can increase the volume of the dialog if you want. Unfortunately I think there is variability in hardware (and software players) in how to down-mix, which sometimes results in background music in the surround channels drowning out the dialog in the centre channel.
> Multi-channel audio has the dialog track separated. So you can increase the volume of the dialog if you want
Are you talking about the center channel on an X.1 setup or something else? My Denon AVR certainly doesn't have a dedicated setting for dialog, but I can turn up the center channel which yields variable results for improved audio clarity. Note that DVDs and Blurays from 10+ years ago are easily intelligible without any of this futzing.
It's reasonable for the 5.1 mix to have louder atmosphere and be more dependent on directionality for the viewer to pick the dialog out of the center channel. However, all media should also be supplying a stereo mix where the dialog is appropriately boosted.
My PS4 Slim was not capable of this at the device level. An individual app could choose to expose the choice of audio format, but many do not :(
Is there a way to do this in vlc? I run into this problem constantly - especially when 5.1 audio gets down mixed to my stereo setup.
Sometimes it's because the original mix was for theater surround sound and lower mixes were generated via software.
It's an issue even in theaters and is the main reason I prefer to watch new releases at home on DVD (Dune I saw in the theater, Dune 2 I watched at home.)
The dialogue in Dune and Dune part 2 was very clear in theater.
I think it isn't a mixing issue, it's an acting issue.
It's the obsession with accents, mixed with the native speakers' conviction that vowels are the most important part.
Older movies tended to use some kind of unplaceable ("mid atlantic") accent, that could be easily understood.
But modern actors try to imitate accents and almost always focus on the vowels. Most native speakers seem to be convinced that vowels are the most important part of English, but I think it isn't true. Sure, English has a huge number of vowels, but they are almost completely redundant. It's hard to find cases where vowels really matter for comprehension, which is why they may vary so much across accents without impeding communication. So what the actors do is that they focus on the vowels, but slur the consonants, and you are pretty much completely lost without the consonants.
>Most native speakers seem to be convinced that vowels are the most important part of English
As a native English speaker studying Spanish, my impression is that English cares about the consonants and Spanish is way more about the vowels. YMMV
The Mid-Atlantic accent has fallen out of favor since at least the latter part of the 50s. The issue with hard to understand dialog is a much more recent phenomenon.
I have a 5.1 surround setup and by default I have to give the center a boost in volume. But still you get the movie where surround (sound effects) is loud and the center (dialog) is low.
Apple TV (the box) has an Enhance Dialogue option built-in. Even that plus a pair of Apple-native HomePods on full volume didn’t help me hear wtf was going on in parts of Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) on Disney. If two of the biggest companies on the planet can’t get this right, I don’t know who can.
What do you mean? Like you can't hear the spoken dialogue?
I have the same sound issues with a lot of stuff, my current theory at this point is that TVs have gotten bigger and we're further away from them but speakers have stayed kinda shitty... but things are being mixed by people using headphones or otherwise good sound equipment
it's very funny how when watching a movie on my macbook pro it's better for me to just use HDMI for the video to my TV but keep on using my MBP speaker for the audio, since the speakers are just much better.
If anything I'd say speakers have only gotten shittier as screens have thinned out. And it used to be fairly common for people to have dedicated speakers, but not anymore.
Just anecdotally, I can tell speaker tech has progressed slowly. Stepping in a car from 20 years ago sound... pretty good, actually.
I agree that speaker tech has progressed slowly, but cars from 20 years ago? Most car audio systems from every era have sounded kinda mediocre at best.
IMO, half the issue with audio is that stereo systems used to be a kind of status symbol, and you used to see more tower speakers or big cabinets at friends' houses. We had good speakers 20 years ago and good speakers today, but sound bars aren't good.
1 reply →
A high end amp+speaker system from 50 years ago will still sound good. The tradeoffs back then were size, price, and power consumption. Same as now.
Lower spec speakers have become good enough, and DSP has improved to the point that tiny speakers can now output mediocre/acceptable sound. The effect of this is that the midrange market is kind of gone, replaced with neat but still worse products such as soundbars (for AV use) or even portable speakers instead of hi-fi systems.
On the high end, I think amplified multi-way speakers with active crossovers are much more common now thanks to advances in Class-D amplifiers.
1 reply →
Speakers haven't gotten a lot cheaper either. Almost every other kind of technology has fallen in price a lot. A good (single) speaker, though, costs a few hundred euros, which is the same it has pretty much always costed. You'd think that the scales of manufacturing the (good) speakers would bring the costs down, but apparently this hasn't happened for whatever reason.
I have a relatively high end speaker setup (Focal Chora bookshelves and a Rotel stereo receiver all connected to the PC and AppleTV via optical cable) and I suffer from the muffled dialogue situation. I end up with subtitles, and I thought I was going deaf.
Sure, but it's the job of whoever is mastering the audio to take such constraints into account.
Bass is the only thing that counts.
Doesn't matter if it makes vocals part of the backgroud at all times.
1 reply →
It is a well known issue: https://zvox.com/blogs/news/why-can-t-i-hear-dialogue-on-tv-...
I don't find the source anymore but I think that I saw that it was even a kind of small conspiracy on tv streaming so that you set your speakers louder and then the advertisement time arrive you will hear them louder than your movie.
Officially it is just that they switch to a better encoding for ads (like mpeg2 to MPEG-4 for DVB) but unofficially for the money as always...
I feel like the Occam's Razor explanation would be that way TVs are advertised makes it really easy to understand picture quality and far less so to understand audio. In stores, they'll be next to a bunch of others playing the same thing such that really only visual differences will stand out. The specs that will stand out online will be things like the resolution, brightness, color accuracy, etc.
1 reply →
> I don't find the source anymore but I think that I saw that it was even a kind of small conspiracy on tv streaming so that you set your speakers louder and then the advertisement time arrive you will hear them louder than your movie.
It's not just that. It's obsession with "cinematic" mixing where dialogues are not only quieter that they could, to make any explosion and other effects be much louder than them, but also not enough above background effects.
This all work in cinema where you have good quality speakers playing much louder than how most people have at home.
But at home you just end up with muddled dialogue that's too quiet.
I think the issue is dynamic range rather than a minor conspiracy.
Film makers want to preserve dynamic range so they can render sounds both subtle and with a lot of punch, preserving detail, whereas ads just want to be heard as much as possible.
Ads will compress sound so it sounds uniform, colorless and as clear and loud as possible for a given volume.
1 reply →
I don't understand how your inability to understand dialog negates a producer giving appropriate instructions on visual settings? The post was good advice, and your train of thought feels like some sort of fallacy.
To be a bit more helpful, what are you using to listen to the show? There are dozens of ways to hear the audio. Are you listening through the TV speakers, a properly set up center channel speaker, a Kindle Fire tablet, or something else? Providing those details would assist us in actually helping you.
Americans also seem to believe that their accent, which generally sounds awful to other speakers, is somehow natural and easy to understand for everyone.
I turn on closed captions for most American films, but I find that I rarely need them for British ones.
What a weird comment. I think that probably most Americans, like most people of any nationality, could give two shits if people elsewhere find their accent hard to understand, or “awful”.
Hollywood movies specifically target a global audience and not just a domestic one.
The US is only at most 30% of Hollywood revenue.
Never had an issue with Stranger Things. Maybe you're using the internal speakers?
I watch YouTube with internal TV speakers and I understand everything, even muddled accents. I cannot understand a single TV show or movie with the same speakers. Something tells me it's about the source material, not the device.
Well of course, YouTube is someone sitting in front of the camera with no background noise and speaking calmly.
In a movie the characters may be far away (so it needs to sound like that, not like a podcast), running, exhausted, with a plethora of background noises and so on.
A YouTube video is likely a single track of audio or a very minimal amount. A movie mixed for Dolby Atmos is designed for multiple speakers. Now, they will create compromised mixes for something like a stereo setup, and a good set of bookshelf speakers will be able to create a phantom center channel. However, having a dedicated center channel speaker will do a much better job. And using the TV's built in speakers will do a very poor job. Professional mixing is a different beast than most YouTube videos, and accordingly, the sound is mixed quite different.
1 reply →
I agree. There are absolutely tons of movies and TV series with indecipherable dialogue, but Stranger Things isn't among them.
> Maybe you're using the internal speakers?
Which is just another drama that should not be on consumers shoulders.
Every time I visit friends with newer TV than mine I am floored by how bad their speakers are. Even the same brand and price-range. Plus the "AI sound" settings (often on by default) are really bad.
I'd love to swap my old tv as it shows it's age, but spending a lot of money on a new one that can't play a show correctly is ridiculous.
Just buy a decent external surround sound system, has nothing to do with the TV and will last a long long time.
There are a couple of models with good sound. I got a Philips OLED910 a short while ago and that sound system surprised me.
I turned it off though and use an external Atmos receiver and speakers.
I am floored that people really expect integrated TV speakers to be good.
12 replies →
Most people do, I reckon.
Its why captions have become so popular.
Conspriacy theory ... TVs have bad sound so you're compelled to by a soundbar for $$$
I've certainly had the experience of hard to hear dialog but I think (could be wrong) that that's only really happened with listening through the TV speakers. Since I live in an apartment, 99% of the time I'm listening with headphones and haven't noticed that issue in a long time.
I don't think the bad sound is necessarily deliberate, its more of a casualty of TV's becoming so very thin there's not enough room for a decent cavity inside.
I had a 720p Sony Bravia from around 2006 and it was chunky. It had nice large drivers and a big resonance chamber, it absolutely did not need a sound bar and was very capable of filling a room on its own.
Soundbars are usually a marginal improvement and the main selling point is the compact size, IMO. I would only get a soundbar if I was really constrained on space.
Engineering tradeoffs--when you make speakers smaller, you have to sacrifice something else. This applies to both soundbars and the built-in speakers.
Nah, it's just smaller space that's available. Big CRT had space for half decent one, superflat panel doesn't.
I assume that TVs have bad sound because better speakers just don't fit into their form factor.
Like all conspiracy theories, this seems rooted in a severe lack of education. How exactly do you expect a thin tiny strip to produce any sort of good sound? It's basic physics. It's impossible for a modern tv to produce good sound in any capacity.
It's easier to believe in conspiracy than do a few minutes of research to discover that you need a good quality sound system to have good quality sound.
The problem is multi-faceted. There was a YouTube video from a few years ago that explains this[1]. But, I kind of empathise with you; I and some friends also have this issue sometimes when watching things.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
The Nolan school of mixing audio.
Sounds like you are just using internal speakers.
They are notorious for bad vocal range audio.
I have a decent surround sound and had no issues at all.
As mentioned elsewhere: no problem with youtube videos (even with hard accents like scottish) but a world of pain for tv shows and movies. On the same TV.
Oh, and the youtube videos don't have the infamous mixing issues of "voices too low, explosions too high".
It's the source material, not the device. Stop accusing TV speakers, they are ok-tier.
You do realize that "voices too low, explosions too high" is because of the audio mixing in the movies and how it sounds on shitty integrated speakers right?
When you have a good setup those same movies sound incredible, Nolan films are a perfect example.
1 reply →
Is there any way to connect just a center speaker to the TV?
I want to get a 3.0 setup with minimal changes to the equipment.
Soundbars are a good option, but spend some time reading reviews as there is a huge gap between the cheaper ones and good quality that will actually make a difference.
My brother has 2 of the apple speakers in stereo mode and they sound pretty good imo.
Nothing beats true surround sound though.
3 replies →
I'm listening to a majority of video content in my stereo headphones on PC. They are good and quality of every source is good. Everything sounds fine except for some movie and some TV shows specifically. And those are atrocious in clarity.
Regarding internal speakers, I have listened to several cheap to medium TVs on internal speakers, and yes on some models the sound was bad. But it doesn't matter, because the most mangled frequencies are high and low, and that's not the voice ones. When I listen on the TV with meh internal speakers I can clearly understand without any distortion voices in the normal TV programming, in sports TV, in old TV shows and old movies. The only offenders again are some of he new content.
So no, it's not the internal speakers who are at fault, at all.
I'm not a speaker sales person, believe whatever you want.
3 replies →
This is the way
The specific suggestions they made are good in this case though, they want people to turn off the soap-opera-effect filters.
I had the same thing with Severance (last show I watched, I don't watch many) but I'm deaf, so thought it was just that. Seemed like every other line of dialogue was actually a whisper, though. Is this how things are now?
Our tv’s sound is garbage and I was forced to buy a soundbar and got a Sonos one. Night mode seems to crush down the sound track. Loud bits are quieter and quiet bits are louder.
Voice boost makes the dialogue louder.
Everyone in the house loves these two settings and can tell when they are off.
One big cause of this is the multi-channel audio track when all you have is stereo speakers. All of the dialog that should be going into the center speaker just fades away, when do you actually have a center the dialog usually isn't anywhere near as quiet.
Depending on what you're using there could be settings like stereo downmix or voice boost that can help. Or see if the media you're watching lets you pick a stereo track instead of 5.1
We've been mixing vocals and voices in stereo since forever and that was never a problem for clarity. The whole point of the center channel is to avoid the phantom center channel collapse that happens on stereo content when listening off center. It is purely an imaging problem, not a clarity one.
Also, in consumer setups with a center channel speaker it is rather common for it to have a botched speaker design and be of a much poorer quality than the front speakers and actually have a deleterious effect to dialog clarity.
It's a clarity problem too. Stereo speakers always have comb filtering because of the different path lengths from each ear to the two speakers. It's mitigated somewhat by room reflections (ideally diffuse reflections), but the only way to avoid it entirely is by using headphones.
Try listening to some mono pink noise on a stereo loudspeaker setup, first hard-panned to a single speaker, and then centered. The effect is especially obvious when you move your head.
Welp we had no issues in ye ol days. When DVD releases were expected to be played on crappy TVs. Now everything is a theatre mix with 7.1 or atmos and whatnot.
Yes we know how to mix for stereo. But do we still pay attention to how we do?
Your speakers are probably garbage.
This is a gross simplification. It can be part of the explanation, but not the whole one, not even the most important.
It mostly boils down to filmmaker choices:
1. Conscious and purposeful. Like choosing "immersion" instead of "clarity". Yeah, nothing speaks "immersion" than being forced to put subtitles on...
2. Not purposeful. Don't atttibute to malice what can be explained by incompetency... Bad downmixing (from Atmos to lesser formats like 2.0). Even if they do that, they are not using the technology ordinary consumers have. I mean, the most glaring example is the way the text/titles/credits size on screen have been shrinking to the point of having difficulties reading them. Heck, often I have difficulties with text size on by FullHD TV, just because the editing was done on some kind of fancy 4k+ display standing 1m from the editor. Imagine how garbage it looks on 720 or ordinary 480!
For the recent example check the size (and the font used) of the movie title in the Alien Isolation movie and compare it to the movies made in the 80-90s. It's ridiculous!
There are many good youtube videos that explain the problem in more details.
https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8
https://youtu.be/wHYkEfIEhO4
Well, first, audio and video are different things.
Second, I'm 55. There ARE programs I turn on the captioning for, but it's not universal at all. Generally, it's things with accents.
We absolutely do not need the captions at our house for STRANGER THINGS.
Using some cheap studio monitors for my center channel helped quite a bit. It ain't perfect, I still use CC for many things, but the flat mid channel response does help with speech.
This is probably the sound settings on your TV. Turn off Clear Voice or the equivalent, disable Smart Surround, which ignores 2.0 streams and badly downmuxes 5.1 streams, and finally, check your speaker config on the TV - they’re often set to Showroom by default, which kills voice but boosts music and sfx, and there should also be options for wall proximity, which do matter, and will make the sound a muddy mess if set incorrectly.
Kinda silly that you have to turn off a setting called "Clear Voice" to hear the voices clearly
For an interesting example that goes in the opposite direction, I've noticed that big YouTube creators like MrBeast optimize their audio to sound as clear as possible on smartphone speakers, but if you listen to their content with headphones it's rather atrocious.
My personal theory of the case is that mid-band hearing loss is more common than people want to admit and tends to go undiagnosed until old age.
Its simpler than that.
Flatscreen TV's have shitty speakers.
Just did a hearing test last week, still in the very good range.
The sound is mud, we've just become accustomed.
Mid band hearing is the last to go, unless there's lot of loud noise damage.
There's a things called 'hidden hearing loss' in which the ability to pause midband sounds specifically in complex/noisy situations degrades. This is missed by standard tests, which only look for ability to hear a given frequency in otherwise silent conditions.
https://www.audiology.org/consumers-and-patients/hearing-and...