The sound mixes today are so far off a pleasant experience that the people who do make them should feel ashamed - How do many actually have a home cinema room with soundproofing and 20 speakers ?
Most people watch movies with a headset / a TV / 2.1 / 5.1 surround system and they may even be limited by other factors like neighbours and you know real life..
And the the voice levels is obnoxiously low and way (negatively) beyond what i would call a good experience.
It's not your hearing, it's the mix. Source: I'm a mastering engineer with a monitoring setup worth six figures and I use closed captions too.
Speakers in TVs used to be tailored to making speech intelligible. Nowadays it's... well whatever it is, it's not really meant to do anything. Not even the more high-end popular speaker systems are meant to do anything at all, really. They all just kinda sorta make whatever is coming out of them sound flashy and whooshy. That's another reason why movies are even more difficult to understand.
And let's be honest - a lot of it nowadays is just not _worth_ hearing... Staple tv shows form the 70s that fell into obscurity for being extremely pedestrian had better writing than nearly all big-budget movies nowadays. I remember when Pig came out recently, it was the only good movie during a span of maybe 3 months. That's how dire it is nowadays.
Edit: oh, and I forgot about the ubiquitous 5.1-to-stereo downmixing bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32883588
[0] https://longreads.com/2016/12/08/braaam-inception-hollywood-...
BTW, here's what the timbre of the "BRAM" sound is based on for the most part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886196
It's also a clear sign that it's not my ears, it's not my setup, it's the sound mix of modern movies.
Strange that article doesn’t talk about the tripod noise from the ‘05 War of the Worlds.
https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/09/sound-fear-room40-boss-la...
Listen to the V1 bomb sound in the clip on that page - there's no surprise they're being referred to in following works of fiction.
The Stuka had the scare sound siren and it had a much higher pitch.
The perfect example is Lord of the Rings vs The Rings of Power. I had no problems believing that Aragorn really lived in Middle Earth. But every single actor in Rings of Power feels like…an actor - just someone playing a part.
Maybe its the overuse of bad CGI, but so few of the worlds feel “lived in”.
Of course there is a lot of other stuff going on, but I do think that high fidelity really makes stuff hard. That combined with much more pressure to cut corners in post production (on top of more stuff needing to actually happen in post!) just makes it all fall apart.
Part of the problem when every story has to be the biggest thing ever, and a problem that other industries have hit (games in the PS3/PS4 generation).
Might be an issue that there isn’t a single person pushing the world, aesthetic, vibe and vision making the actors immersed in their roles. In the end getting all dressed up and standing against a green screen probably feels a bit silly without someone selling it to you.
I consider myself a fantasy and sci-fi nerd, binge read the Lord of The Rings, starting with the Hobbit, between Christmas Eve and when the first movie came out. Read the Simarilion. Loved the LotR triology. Like the Hobbit, ehich already strechted the source material a lot, but in a way that could be justified as a lead up to LotR. I did not manage to dare whatching the Amazon series, and propably never will. Thr LotR films, The Expense and the Star Wars series and first two triologies are the last movie ftanchises I still get immersion and suspenson of disbelieve from, I'm not taking any risks eith LotR.
That potentially gives you _decades_ to binge-read the books... how many depends on what do you consider "the first movie". :-)
Back in the day with CRTs and projection screens, the TV would be pretty big regardless. They didn't have to worry about bundling in some nice speakers with a TV, because hey the TV is going to be quite large and that cavity can be a nice resonance chamber if done right.
Now, all TVs need to be super thin which can be a nice thing don't get me wrong. But their packaging means their speakers are often very compromised. Sure, they're OK in a pinch, but even a cheap sound bar will often out perform most TV's built in speakers. So unless you're using the TV in a space where you just don't care about the sound quality, you'll get a lot out from having at least a sound bar or some other external speaker setup.
This basically adds more bass and treble as you lower the volume, due to the way the ear works - the Fletcher Munson curve.
This still won't help with the terrible excess dynamic range that current movies insist on doing though.
You'll still have to adjust the volume all the time, but it will make things sound much better at lower volumes.
aformat=channel_layouts=stereo, compand=0 0:1 1:-90/-900 -70/-70 -30/-9 0/-3:6:0:0:0Speech reproduction gets muddled by distortion and by masking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking ).
If you have one speaker reproducing both speech and other sound, this is what happens:
1. additional sound output means heightened distortion
2. when two sounds come from two places, our brains can separate them due to phase differences and spatial perception, so those two sounds mask each other less than if the same two sounds come out of a single speaker, even if it's perfect, with no distortion etc
3. the speaker is made for broad range reproduction and not voice reproduction, so it'll de-emphasize speech frequencies, which are exactly those frequencies that also make music sound like it's coming out of a cardboard box. ultimately the applied eq (equalizer) curve will create speech that's slightly muddy, like someone talking from behind a blanket.
4. sound bars use tiny transducers which are woefully underpowered compared to the SPL (sound pressure level) they're tasked with producing. This is done by using multi-band compression and limiting. This sometimes creates situations where the limiting might be recovering after a slightly louder sound, and the very next syllable will be muted.
However, having a dedicated speaker for the center channel is none the less way better than not having one at all. If that's all you can try, you can try your luck. But be aware that getting a cheap one will probably not get you where you want to be - you'll have to spend a pretty penny. At that point if you have the space you might want to get a 3.1 bookshelf speaker setup. They don't have to be very large to provide great value-for-space-used.
...was terrible, I wanted more screentime with that adorable pig...sorry Nic, you're in the shadow of a real star...
I don't know if it's just me but cinema has become really shit, unless you're into superhero movies. It's like nothing matters any more to executives and moviegoers of all ages than superheroes. Are we living in Idiocracy?
It’s actually difficult to even do now the community is so small.
I have decided it is the sequel to Color Out of Space, which was, by far, the best alpaca-themed rendition of an HP Lovecraft story at the time.
Also, the audio mix didn't really get in the way of that one for me.
(It probably still is the best, but I'd love to be corrected.)
Also, digital camera manufacturers should be feel ashamed for cameras providing photos that don't even fit on my monitor. My 24MP Sony camera outputs photo's at 6000x4000 pixel resolution! Who the hell has a monitor that big ? I can only see a small part of the photo at one time.
Oh way, no, that's absolutely crazy. Because maybe some people do have a monitor that high-res, or maybe they want to print it or edit it or.., or... And guess what, there is no need to have the photos be smaller to display them, you can simply use a viewer that scales them to fit on your display. There is absolutely no need to throw away that extra information and you might want it in the future.
Same goes for audio in a movie. If it doesn't fit the dynamic range suitable for your setup, then scale it to whatever you need it to be. You may not have a setup to enjoy that, but others might, and they shouldn't have to deal with sub-par mixes because other people don't know how to configure their playback equipment.