By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
HoloDust 3 days ago
Edit Thread
curl-6 said:
HoloDust said:

As someone who actually does this for living (I'm re-recording sound mixer), you're not wrong...per se. It is not as bad for theatrical movies, but it is somewhat present in TV shows.

Actors do mumble a lot more than they used to, which combined with the lot of TV directors/producers having delusion they're making theatrical release (which they're not) instead of something that's intended for TV (which has neither dynamic nor frequency response of theater), leads to exactly what you're complaining about. Add to that HDTV standards, that are way, way more tolerant to loudness dynamic range than SD standards of the past were and you have exactly what you're describing.

That said, as someone who both mixes and watches a lot of scripted shows, while I occasionally do tend to run across some that are not well done, I must say that I don't have a problem with intelligibility of dialogue, but I mostly watch shows that are on major streaming services, and they are (mostly) free of such problems.

Interesting to hear from someone who works on this stuff; thanks for the input.

OdinHades said:

It really is a mess. When I'm watching a somewhat new movie, I am constantly adjusting the volume. I don't have such problems when watching something from the 90s.

Yeah it's a constant struggle with most new stuff for me; either the voices are too low, or if turn it up to hear them better then the music and sound effects are way too loud to the point of being uncomfortable.

Conversely, I'm currently watching an episode of Lost from like 2004 and it's crystal clear by comparison.

Yeah, that's dynamic range of HDTV, and especially streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon have very lax sound dynamics range propositions. I've ran into few shows that are mixed like that, and if you're not listening them in home theater environment (or with some heavy auto level feature turned on), they are quite problematic. That said, this is rarely sound mixer's fault - we always warn person in charge what will happen, and they more often than not don't listen.

Back in SD days not only dynamics were much lower, but we were actually mixing for CRT speakers - that's why you can find dialogue from the olden era to sound significantly more boosted in 2-4KHz range than in HD era, since central speakers "don't like" that range (actually, listening surround mix on stereo speaker setup dips that range significantly compared to dialogue coming from center speaker in surround mix). So, what happens is if you mix only for surround, with center speaker in mind, once it's downmixed to stereo at your home it looses some of its intelligibility due to pure physics (audio masking of human head) - that is if your sound setup doesn't compensate for that, or if you are not using accompanying stereo mix that (in most cases) already has that compensation in itself.

Lost is sort of a middle ground between old and new - its dialogue is mostly treated as if it was for SD, and on occasions is painful to watch on modern audio home theater setups, since it's one of the noisiest dialogues of all mega-hit TV shows in last 25 years, due to production issues with locations they were shooting at and (at that time) lack of advanced background reduction hardware/plugins that are available now.