I imagine that can contribute. But then other videos don't have the problem. Old movies don't have the problem. Just this new shabby stuff. Does my sound setup know somehow?
> But then other videos don't have the problem.
They likely would if they were intended for playback on a cinema system and just flattened to mono or stereo.
Christopher Noland doesn't direct/produce movies thinking about how they'll look on a phone on netflix. And the sound engineer he hired doesn't care either.
How much time and money was dedicated to the sound engineering to convert that 20 speaker maybe 100 virtual channel system to your 2 speaker system? Then they need to do it for 2.1, 5.1, Atmos... Whatever else is the new thing these days.
And if you have 5.1 did you consider carefully the layout? Are there multipath effects you haven't dampened? Did you consider the path to each speaker relative to listener?
> Does my sound setup know somehow?
Well yes, kind of. Your TV if it is at all modern will do some processing to the audio. If it's connected to a 5.1 system it might just pass through a 5.1, what does it do with a stereo audio? Or 2.1? What if it gets 7.1 it must decide what to do likely you can control this in the settings.
Let's say you have a 5.1 setup at home. And your TV sends it stereo? What does it do then how does it make 6 channels from 2? The subwoofer is easy, relatively non-direction a low pass filter sends all low end to it and high pass to the regular speakers.
My TV has a decent "clear speech" setting which picks out speech boosts them and then suppresses no speech audio around them. Usually it works perfectly.
Playing stereo audio on a stereo system will work fine.
In the 90s cutting edge cinema.audio was 5.1 systems (cinema digital audio) before that 2.1. You own a 5.1 system you say.
Today cutting edge is systems like Dolby Atmos Cinema which is a 128 virtual, 64 real speaker system.
Are you really saying you can't grasp that cinemas have moved on in audio system since the 80s?
As long as the receiver has identified the positions of your speakers accurately (something receivers have been capable of with a small microphone since the early 00’s) it should place sounds appropriately.
Perhaps suddenly the very quiet speech the sound engineer carefully made space for in location and frequency is suddenly muddied?
Nolan himself has tried to make this argument, he's trying to invoke sub-bass frequencies, that his goal was never for movies to be understandable, and that it was an artistic choice that maybe the audience doesn't have to understand everything.
I'm all for artistic integrity and him being able to do whatever he wants, but I'm also ok with calling Nolan wrong on this one. I have no interest in seeing his films if audio clarity is not one of his goals in film-making. It breaks immersion (real life isn't unintelligible and mumbled), it isn't an enjoyable experience for me, and frankly I think is poor decision making on his part. I'm ok with calling Nolan wrong, hand-wavy artistic stuff aside.
So I looked one up
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-...
Interestingly in the case of Tenet the claim is that cinemas intentionally were playing the movie too quiet.
It brings up the usual issues of audio mixing and cinema and home is vastly different. But puts Tenet down to cinemas turning it down to avoid loud explosions.
So is this a case of cinemas turning down well mixed movies because movies are coming out too loud?
But really this is just the same problem over again. Sound engineer mixes audio intending for a high end cinema. Some cinemas plays it poorly, people watching at home have no chance to play it properly...
The sound engineer interviews in that article are interesting though, and they seem to be blaming Nolan and the mixing as well.
I also get wanting to turn them down. I've been in theaters so loud that my ears were ringing after the movie, or were actively hurting during certain scenes. The Dark Knight was one of those. It could also just be poor settings at the local cinema in that case as well though.
Given the vast majority of movies are understandable, I just wish Nolan would mix with that goal in mind given I would actually enjoy his movies most of the time if it just weren't for the muffled speech and sound.