What they do instead is use their multi-thousand dollar speaker and room setup for mixing (because it is better!) but then check the end result on airpods, car stereos, etc.
Just test on the resolutions you care about, no need to cripple your development setup full time.
I read a forum where an engineer was working on a TV show would flip the show in his living room, bedroom, guest bedroom. Walking around the house making sure the sound was balanced everywhere, driving his wife insane.
It's not engineers making that decision it's Nolan overreaching "If you see it particularly in an IMAX theater, projected, it’s pretty remarkable". source -> https://www.indiewire.com/2020/11/christopher-nolan-director...
Not sure what his deal is. 'Nolan also admitted in a 2017 interview with IndieWire that his team decided “a couple of films ago that we weren’t going to mix films for substandard theaters,” adding, “We’re mixing for well-aligned, great theaters.”' source -> https://www.indiewire.com/2020/09/tenet-sound-mixing-backlas...
It's madness. Idk what Netflix's excuse is. Their spec sheet is 2600+ words. But I think the issue is this line "5.1 audio is required and 2.0 is optional." My best guess if you have 5 speakers and subwoofer it's fine. But if you're on cheap headphones or a laptop good luck.
Also sounded like shit when I saw it in a (non-imax, but "X-Treme audio" or whatever it was) cinema.
Guess I'd need to buy my own imax cinema to make it watchable.
Think I'll just pass and watch something from a competent director instead.
There was never a reason to get rid of that in favour of the current "one size fits none" approach, other than cheapness.
As for the rest it seems for me that cheaper (“non-smart”) HomePod style speakers are pretty prevalent at least in higher income countries
[1] https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/news/st...
The canonical shitty speakers that almost every studio used for years was the yamaha NS10.
They were used because of their limited frequency response and dynamic range. When mixing the engineer would switch between the good speakers and the Yamahas. The reason is if it sounds good on the bad speakers then it will sound good anywhere.
It’s not necessary to test mixes on every conceivable speaker, but a couple of different types should satisfy you that it’s in the pocket.
> Misunderstanding also tends to breed misinformation, which is often disseminated by well-meaning amateurs: those whose knowledge of a subject is sketchy are always prey to the intuitively plausible but utterly wrong explanation for one phenomenon or another.
Skrillex, an EDM producer who became popular about a decade ago, did approximately this. They were iPod headphones back then, not AirPods. Perhaps designing according to the vast majority of users is effective enough?
I kinda can see that this worked for him. Not sure if that transports well to other producers.
While I bet Bangarang was most listened to worldwide on that awful set of white Apple headphones everybody had.
I know Skrillex produces another "genre" of music, but Burial's is one of the seminal albums in the dubstep genre which Skrillex is part of.
(I've just learned the mid-heavy dubstep popularised by Skrillex & co. is called brostep)
And when it sounds like shit using airpods ship it anyways?
Same with icons where a high resolution pixel graphic can look horrible when scaled down to icon level vs an icon drawn in the resolution it would be shown at from the get go.
It reflects the problem with software development today as well.
Most of the time developers are using top end machines, massive displays with fast internet and build bloated things that work nice and 'fast enough' for them, but once they run on low/mid level laptop/phones are unusable.
In the 90s programmers didn't have that luxury, all hardware was the same so what they were programming on was what the end user would be on and since hardware was limited anyway every bit and cycle counted. That's why you get games like doom/quake that will run on 75mhz and 8mb of ram and be buttery smooth, whereas today something like flappy bird needs 512mb minimum!
A professional mix absolutely requires testing across multiple grades of devices. Whether or not someone soley produces on airpods is reslly personal preference, so long as they verify their mix with many types of gear before shipping. A good development shop should be testing across screen sizes and performance profiles for the same reasons.
But there’s much more to it than that. From the article, the author’s resolution is 1366×768. This was designed and tested for! The problem wasn’t that it was broken at that res, the problem was that it was incorrectly classified as a tablet-only resolution.
The issue here is their designers and developers being out of touch with their users, and using constrained hardware helps with that.
I mostly agree with you. However, the 90s was actually a period where computer hardware became rapidly obsolescent. The 486 to Pentium transition, for example, meant that lots of people had PCs far less powerful than the PCs used by games developers. Quake is a case in point. Quake came out in 1996 and would not have run on a typical PC bought only two or three years earlier. A few years after that, many games would only run acceptably on PCs with 3D graphics cards (which were by no means universal).