Sounds like you are just using internal speakers.
They are notorious for bad vocal range audio.
I have a decent surround sound and had no issues at all.
They are notorious for bad vocal range audio.
I have a decent surround sound and had no issues at all.
Oh, and the youtube videos don't have the infamous mixing issues of "voices too low, explosions too high".
It's the source material, not the device. Stop accusing TV speakers, they are ok-tier.
When you have a good setup those same movies sound incredible, Nolan films are a perfect example.
Yet I do live in a flat, in Paris, with neighbors on the same floor, on the floor above, and on the floor below. Thus I tune the volume to something that is acceptable in this context.
Or I should say, I spend the whole movie with the remote in my hand, tuning the volume up and down between voices and explosions.
Theatre mix is a bad home mix. It is valid for home cinema. Not for everyday living room.
Yes I could buy a receiver and manually EQ all channels and yadda yadda yadda. I live in an apartment. My 65" LG C2 TV is already ginormous by parisian flat standards. Ain't nobody got space for a dedicated receiver and speakers and whatnot. I tuned the audio, and some properly mixed movies actually sound great!
As an added bonus, I had troubles with "House of Guinness" recently both on my TV and with good headphones, where I also did the volume dance.
IMHO there's no care spent on the stereo mixes of current movies and TV shows. And to keep your example, Nolan shows are some of the most understandable and legible on my current setup :)
Another fact is, I have no trouble with YouTube videos in many languages and style, or with video games. You know, stuff that care about legibility in the home.
For current movies, some of the most legible are "children" oriented movies: I watched the Dragons set and it was trouble-free.
I want to get a 3.0 setup with minimal changes to the equipment.
My brother has 2 of the apple speakers in stereo mode and they sound pretty good imo.
Nothing beats true surround sound though.
Regarding internal speakers, I have listened to several cheap to medium TVs on internal speakers, and yes on some models the sound was bad. But it doesn't matter, because the most mangled frequencies are high and low, and that's not the voice ones. When I listen on the TV with meh internal speakers I can clearly understand without any distortion voices in the normal TV programming, in sports TV, in old TV shows and old movies. The only offenders again are some of he new content.
So no, it's not the internal speakers who are at fault, at all.
You can buy Bluetooth receivers that plug into the line input of your amplifier.
Phone/tablet/laptop etc. in my top comment was not a technological limitation, like "oh no, we don't have a port or protocol to connect o speakers and so we can't use them". It was a logistical limitation. Like being physically in place without speakers or possibility to even buy them. Traveling, renting, having big family and only one set of speakers, and so on. Situations where you can't just pluck a Dolby setup from a thin air but do still watch movies.
Here is a datapoint - in the whole world around 1-2 *billion* headphones are sold, every single year. I would bet that at least a double digit percentage of those numbers had been used to watch a movie at least once. Proposing that all those people in all those situations bought themselves a surround speaker setup just to understand voice track in the movies is an inane take.
You are trying to turn this into some ideological debate about the equity of audio mixes.
If you care this much about audio just buy some better speakers ffs.
New content especially comes with more channels, more channels that will get muddled into your two for output.
Do you spend the effort of specifically selecting stereo tracks (or adjusting how it gets downmixed)?
It's pretty annoying.
Umm, isn't that literally a job description of a sound engineer, who on a big production probably makes more in a year than I will do in my whole lifetime?
Is spending a few hours one time to adjust levels on a track, which will run for likely millions of hours across the world such a big ask? I think no, because not every modern movie is illegible, some producers clearly spend a bit of effort to do just that what you wrote. But some just don't care.
Well, if your setup is stereo then either selecting a stereo track is your job, or your job is to adjust the downmix that is done by your computer because you didn't select the stereo track.
I agree that providing a good stereo mix is the sound engineer's job, but nothing beyond that.
That's the whole point of this whole thread, no one asks for anything more or out of ordinary. Stereo tracks sometimes have unreasonably bad quality. Nolan even admitted he does this on purpose.