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> "But what I want more than anything is a "compression" feature on the audio of movies. I mean I just want to hear what people are saying to each other without the neighbors calling the police when going into a scene with explosions and/or music."

This is due to the (misconfigured? buggy?) way that 5.1 surround audio sometimes gets mapped to 2-channel output. Dialogue in a film is usually carried on the centre channel, which in a proper cinema will be pretty powerful and loud set of speakers. Music and surround effects are carried on the other channels.

But for whatever reason, sometimes when down-mixing the centre channel comes through way too quiet and gets drowned out by the others. This seems to have gotten better in recent years (Apple TV, Netflix, etc are either good at down-mixing or the streams come with good 2-channel audio), but some TVs still make a mess of it.

Also in case it will help someone: OSMC/Kodi has a similar “downmix center mix level” option. Mine is always at -7db for 5.1 audio. Works like a charm most of the times

Or if you have a PS5, plug the controller into the console (must be wired, not BT) and then headphones into the controller. The virtual surround is surprisingly convincing and sounds quite natural and not headphoney.

No, it's due to bad mixes being trendy these days. Downmix issues are certainly a thing, but the real problem starts in Hollywood, with auteurs like Nolan that no sound professionals can say 'No' to.

With Nolan at least, he's acknowledged it was a deliberate "creative decision".

> “We made carefully considered creative decisions,” Nolan explained. “There are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is. It’s not that nobody has ever done these things before, but it’s a little unconventional for a Hollywood movie.”

Which just rephrases my point.

I'm not so sure that's the case. I have true 5.1 and I still have to have the center channel at a relative +7db minimum for the dialog to be as audible as I want it to be, compared to the rest of the audio.

Yeah, but that's probably because your centre channel is relatively smaller than on the cinema audio systems the 5.1 track was designed for. So setting it to +7dB at home is probably normal/expected.

After all, (Tenet aside) we don't experience these problems at actual cinemas, where the centre channel is a huge speaker stack behind the screen, and the surrounds are relatively small by comparison. But I agree that it's a common issue on on home setups.

If you've got a receiver, a lot of them have audio compression options. Not sure how well they work though, but they're there. I think some TVs have them too. A receiver should also let you increase the levels on the center speaker vs the others (maybe even if you only have a 'virtual' center where you don't have an actual center speaker and the audio goes to left and right). The center speaker gets mostly dialogue, so that can help a lot.

I have a Marantz receiver. They call this Dynamic EQ, and it seems to work quite well.

Ha, I thought I am weird for using subs while watching English stuff. Have small kids sleeping not so far, can't wake them up just because some idiotic sound mixer thought that some explosion/crash/something should shatter your windows and that's how everybody should experience given movie.

Older movies made so many things so much better. Sound 'friendliness' is definitely one of them.

Yeah, the blacks absolutely. Recently upgraded to a PS5 (for 4K discs) and a Samsung S95B. Some of the most impressive discs I own are well restored films from the b&w era. The dead blacks and (with HDR bright highlights) gives it a wonderful natural projected look. The quality is probably better than even the most pristine release print, since these days these sorts of restorations are fine by scanning the original camera negative, so several analog generations better than prints for projection.

Agreed on both counts. 4K OLED > 8k LCD and dialogue is so hard to understand I have to resort to voice enhancement options.

I only watch TV wearing headphones.

I just bought a new receiver after my old on was killed by lightning and I was very surprised to find that few receivers and virtually no inexpensive ones (< $500) can pair with Bluetooth headphones. They all support Bluetooth, but only as an audio source.

If you use your receiver to send to a Bluetooth device, it's not really doing its job of digital to analog conversion or amplification anymore, it's just acting as an audio relay. Most times the source that is plugged into your receiver can do the pairing to Bluetooth, so the receiver is sort of redundant. I admit it'd be a nice feature to have for occasions when you want it, though.

I'd like it in the receiver because Bluetooth introduces a delay that my receiver can compensate for and I can configure that in one place rather than in every source.

The positive of using the receiver is that the receiver is also usually the AV switch determining what device is actually active. Otherwise you're having to change what device you're paired with when you change inputs.

Also, I haven't been shopping for things like Blu-Ray players and Rokus/Fire TVs/other media boxes in a while, do things like that really do Bluetooth pairing?

> Blu-Ray players and Rokus/Fire TVs

I'm not sure if any of those do bluetooth pairing these days. In retrospect I probably shouldn't have said "most" sources will do the pairing themselves. Some will.

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, connecting Airpods to an Appletv is pretty flawless.

You're right. I've been thinking about picking one up because the software in my Sony TV is pretty bad and Sony stopped supporting it a couple of years ago (the TV is a 2019 model).

I'm probably going to buy one because the ethernet port in my TV recently failed and I had to switch it to WiFi. Streaming on the TV seems to be less reliable and an AppleTV would fix that as well.

It’s amusing that you want more dynamics to your visuals, but fewer dynamics to your audio…

Why the disconnect?

I want more dynamics on audio too. But it requires to keep my audio speaker volume settings loud.

I can easily isolate brightness pollution by closing door and sun shades. But isolating sound is difficult.

At this point, going to cinema is the only solution to enjoy high dynamics audio.

Well, the only affordable one.

https://smyth-research.com/ works pretty great

Speaking of affordable, Apple TV + Dolby Atmos movies + AirPods Pro 2 with spatial audio enabled is probably the consumer friendly way to go for dynamic surround sound that won't get you evicted.

Dolby atmos is trash.

You should additionally explain why you think it's "trash", so that your comment might have some value to people.

I recommend getting a used receiver from pre to early 2000s and getting some used passive speakers and a sub to go with it. I spent $100 on my setup and it sounds better than any sound bar and can be endlessly adjusted to match my room’s acoustics

Agree with this, lots of sound bars are crap and even the ones that aren't are very constrained by their form factor. Good speakers can actually make very dynamic audio be less annoying as well, by virtue of being less distorted. Same volume, more signal, less noise.

Yep and they are maintainable. I replaced the foams on the drivers and the tweeters when they gave out, $30 worth of parts and easy to do

The consequences of high dynamic range video are trivial to enclose within the bounds of one room in a way that high dynamic range audio is decidedly not trivial to enclose.

Hearing loss or damage is more of a challenge than vision issues as well. Wider dynamic range doesn't hinder visual understanding the same as it does audio.

Maybe they’re looking for contrast in a particular scene, eg bright beside dark. If a sequence as a whole is very loud, while a later sequence is quiet, they might have to drop the volume down because of the loud part, effectively compressing the range of the quiet part to the point that it is unintelligible.

They did lay out their reasoning pretty clearly... Audio goes beyond the room/home, video does not.

Vox had a good video on why dialog sounds terrible in movies/shows these days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8

It boils down to a combination of:

- Actors speaking naturally instead of projecting toward a microphone

- Smaller microphones

- Dynamic range - big explosions have to sound loud, so dialog gets pushed quieter

- Downmixing from Atmos to 7.1, 5.1, stereo, mono

- TV speakers have gotten smaller and mounted on the back due to thinner TV's (and also poor quality speakers on devices)

I guess the solution is to buy a surround sound system and hope it's good enough.

> I guess the solution is to buy a surround sound system and hope it's good enough.

Yet many people opt for a soundbar which has similar issues with the physics of thin/small speakers. I personally have a set of restored Bozak B-302As from 1958, big box speakers that are a solid meter cube, and they sound great :)

>> I guess the solution is to buy a surround sound system and hope it's good enough.

This made a huge difference for me. I went from TV > Sonos Beam > Sonos Beam + two surrounds. I've tested going back to just the Beam (I wanted to use the surrounds as stereo music speakers) but the huge decrease in my ability to understand dialog made me keep the surrounds. It's particularly problematic on TV shows where background music is used a lot. Having that come out of the surrounds and dialogue from the Beam made things so much better.

We can probably draw an analogy with frame rate: why do movie fans insist on 24 fps, when TV is 50/60 fps, and you could play your games at 240 fps if you really wanted to?... Because "more" is not always better.

Btw. I do actually prefer LESS contrast in video sometimes, just as I prefer a compressed dynamic range in audio. This has a lot to do with the environment I'm watching / listening in, and the quality of my screen and headphones or speakers.

And finally, using dynamic range to "enhance" the sound of detonations is just awfully childish. If you are watching a movie just because the detonations are loud in it, I would argue you are watching the wrong movie...

> We can probably draw an analogy with frame rate: why do movie fans insist on 24 fps, when TV is 50/60 fps, and you could play your games at 240 fps if you really wanted to?... Because "more" is not always better.

That seems to be more "they can get away with more at 24fps" and so using same techniques but just upping FPS results in more of it looking "fake" and I lot of "it doesn't look to movies I'm used to".

Also sometimes referred to as the Soap Opera effect as those shows tended to be shot video instead of film and end up with higher frame rates. Somehow we've associated that smooth motion with cheap and shallow content which turns people off to it.

play a podcast, drop the volume to 50% for few minutes then to 150%.

You'll understand right away