Comment by tuetuopay
14 hours ago
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.
I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of clearly hearing a character who has something important to say.
In the real life, I can underastand exhausted people or dialog in a kitchen full of background noise.
If we cant do the same in the movie, sound is just badly mixed. It is not the story setup and it is not "realistic".
> In the real life, I can underastand exhausted people or dialog in a kitchen full of background noise.
Because in real life you don't listen through an internal TV speaker, duh.
That would be true, except even in calm scenes in movies it's an issue. Unless I turn the volume high enough, in which case music and sfx become neighbor-waking loud. To be clear: I'm not talking about scenes where characters speak over an explosion. The overall mix does not allow having the same volume for all scenes of the movie, pick your poison: wake the neighbors or don't understand dialogues.
Somehow youtube videos don't have this issue. Go figure /s
It's the same idea, a narrated youtube video is meant to have the same volume throughout, while a movie is meant to have quiet and loud parts.
The problem, as you say, is that if you don't want to have loud parts, you lower the volume so that loud is not loud anymore, and then the quiet but audible parts become inaudibly quiet.
I consider this to be a separate issue to the lack of clarity of internal speakers, and a bit harder to solve because it stems from the paper thin walls common in the US and other places.
You can usually use audio compression to fix this if you can't play the movie at the volume level it's meant to be played.
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YouTube very likely has only a 2.0 stereo mix, TV shows and movies are mostly multichannel. Something tells me it's about the source material being a poor fit for your setup.
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.
As someone with a dedicated center speaker, people doing audio mixing do not effectively use it. I even have it manually boosted. Sometimes it's 10% better than without one, but nowhere near enough to make a real difference.
Yup, I definitely do agree those are wildly different beasts. But the end result is, the professional mixing is less enjoyable than amateur-ish youtube mixing. Which is a shame, really. Mixing is a craft that is getting ruined (imho) by the direction to perform theatrical mixes (where having building-shaking sfx is not an issue) or atmos mixes (leaving no budget/time for plain stereo mixes).
The crux of the issue IMHO is the theatrical mixes. Yes I can tune the TV volume way up and hear the dialogue pretty well. In exchange, any music or sfx is guaranteed to wake the neighbors (I live in a flat, so neighbors are on the other side of the wall/floor/ceiling).