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jachee

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

Why the disconnect?

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

You'll understand right away

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