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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

I'm listening to a majority of video content in my stereo headphones on PC. They are good and quality of every source is good. Everything sounds fine except for some movie and some TV shows specifically. And those are atrocious in clarity.

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.

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Do you really expect a downmix of eight channels into two to sound super clear?

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)?

Most of these guys would rather debate the perceived morality of the current state of audio mixes over just buying some better speakers.

It's pretty annoying.

> Do you spend the effort of specifically selecting stereo tracks (or adjusting how it gets downmixed)?

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

I'm not a speaker sales person, believe whatever you want.

Do you realize that phones, tablets, laptops, most PCs don't have an option of "just add speakers"? You are technically correct, yes full Dolby Duper Atmo 9.2.4.8.100500 system is better. But people without them are not using their setups incorrectly, they have valid setups they have valid use case and they don't get basic level of quality which IS possible and WAS possible just a few years ago with proper channel mixing.

>Do you realize that phones, tablets, laptops, most PCs don't have an option of "just add speakers"?

You can buy Bluetooth receivers that plug into the line input of your amplifier.

If you are at an arm's length from a proper amplifier/speaker setup, why are you using a tiny screen to watch movies? (that was a rhetorical question)

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.

It is entirely the fault of people buying shitty plastic shovelware pc laptops that they ended up with laptops with dogshit speakers. You can buy laptops with good sounding speakers

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio

Dude I don't care.

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.

Dude, you are completely daft here, bringing some imaginary stuff like "morality" and "equity" into a technical discussion. The fact is that sound producers can easily fix stereo tracks to be legible and they actually did it for decades, before the recent hype came. And you are white knighting billionaires working for megacorps, for no discernible reason. What would happen to you personally if Nolans of the world would mix a better stereo track (which they already do anyway)? Your ego will be hurt? Or what? No one is "taking" precious Dolby Atmo from you. Better stereo tracks can exist in this world at the same time as theatrical surround tracks, surprise surprise.

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