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Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

As someone living in the city with a lot of neighbors, I mostly have the problem with high dynamic range. I hate it so much and you cannot deactivate it in most streaming media. I get that it is effect-full, but either I need subtitles or I blast my neighbors to insanity. Ever watched a Youtube video and then switched to Netflix and you couldn't hear anything? That is because the amplitude is set to very low for them to have a buffer with which they suddenly blast you out of the window in case anything happens.

That sound guys aren't even allowed to utter criticism of director or risk career speaks volumes about the industry.

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It’s not even just the neighbors. Sometimes (almost always) I don’t want ear-splitting explosions just to be able to barely hear dialog.

Yeah, it's always immediately frustrating when you realize it's "one of those movies" where I'm going to have to ride the volume the entire time.

The nice side-effect from that constant volume changing is that the volume display covers the subtitles, which means I can neither hear nor even read the subtitles the dialogue >:(

Yeah, I really wished home video releases had a separate professional surround mix with a much lower dynamic range between normal dialog and the loudest sounds. Dynamic range compression works, but it's often heavy-handed and very noticeable (especially on an Apple TV).

I think cinema mixes are conventionally around 30 dB between dialog and the loudest sounds, which works great in the cinema (both because there is less ambient sound, and because you expect really loud sounds in the cinema), but is pretty extreme at home if you don't have a proper "home theater" setup. That's like the difference between normal conversation and a lawn mower. If you're watching a movie at home and two characters are talking and then one of them starts their lawn mower, do you actually want it to be as loud as if you fired up a lawn mower in your living room? For sustained sounds I generally wouldn't want it much more than 10 dB above dialog (that's like running a washing machine) and for very peaky effects like gunshots 20 dB is probably pushing it for most people's living room setups.

>is pretty extreme at home if you don't have a proper "home theater" setup

I have a proper home theater setup and it seems worse.

With subs the walls shake. Try watching a movie at night with someone asleep in the next room.

It's so irritating, I wish they'd be sensible. It doesn't seem like anyone enjoys it, I can't work out why the directors don't want a movie to be an enjoyable experience for the viewer.

Every comment that I've seen echoes the same sentiment. Nobody is springing to the defense of these ridiculous dynamics.

The “home theater enthusiast” community online definitely seems to enjoy it, they’re always chasing higher bandwidth and bit depth audio formats! Meanwhile I can tell the difference in video quality between a UHD Blu-ray and a high quality 4k stream (like Netflix) but there’s no way I could tell the difference in the surround sound tracks.

You're getting data compression mixed up with dynamics.

I'm talking about the difference between the volume level of the quiet dialog compared to the ridiculously loud explosions. This is an "artistic" choice by the director.

> I have a proper home theater setup and it seems worse.

> With subs the walls shake. Try watching a movie at night with someone asleep in the next room.

I mean that's the point of a subwoofer. If you want to have actual low frequency response you will feel it. Obviously this setup is not compatible wiht someone trying to sleep in the next room.

Yes but too much dynamics, ie I want to set a volume level where the explosions are just a little bit loud, and still be able to hear the dialog.

The way it is in most movies nowadays, if I set a volume level where I can hear the dialog, the explosions rattle the walls and shake the floor. It seems crazy. Why isn't the dialog louder?

Some receivers have a function to help. On my Onkyo, it's called Dynamic Volume. It's essentially just a compressor to turn quiet sounds to medium quiet and loud sounds to medium loud.

In my setup, I go one step further. I have a 'no subwoofer' activity on my Harmony hub that turns off a smart outlet switch to the sub and turns on Dynamic Volume. No more keeping my roommate up by watching movies late at night.

And not just receivers. When I had traditional cable TV, the cable box had a setting like that. Some TVs probably have it. Some streaming devices might as well, at least Roku's documentation (https://support.roku.com/article/226802507) says theirs have it.

Yeah but it just sucks having no bass... :-P

If you are on Linux, you can use JACK or PipeWire and simply insert a compressor (I use the one from Calf) into the route to your audio sink.

A limiter might work for the purpose even better.

Some receivers also have this function. On my Onkyo, it's called Dynamic Volume.

I use PulseEffects (for its equalizer), and it has a compressor too, among a myriad of other tools. NB I had to tweak its buffer settings to get the audio delay down to 40ms from the original 140ms.

Fyi, PulseEffects is now called EasyEffects.

Well, yes, but EasyEffects is a pipewire based thing. I didn't want to mess with my audio setup much, so I'm using PulseEffects, from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~mikhailnov/+archive/ubuntu/pulseeffec...

You can rebalance movie files with ffmpeg, but not a solution with streaming.

Funny how dynamic compression became all the range in music, but the opposite happened to movies.

Maybe you could inline some LADSPA compression filter with PulseAudio?

I recently struggled to find all of the channels in my DTS audio collection. Turns out that it many tracks the important bits were hiding in the front-left-center and right-left-center channels which the hardware decoder in the sound system send nowhere but I was able to find via software decoding.

Completely absurd to have to hack so hard on this stuff, even if I love the process!

Yes, I saw that in a sibling post but unfortunately streaming platforms don’t support Linux. For the explicit reason to keep control of such things.

I was really surprised to read that most movies have a different mix for streaming. Most of what I stream has such high dynamic range that it feels like a cinema mix to me. I can only imagine how bad it would be if we actually got the cinema mix.

I was surprised by that as well.

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