At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”
I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.
But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.
Doesn’t it also have to do with how the sound is encoded and delivered? Most voice is on 5.1 is designed to go center speaker, so if your system lacks a center speaker and you have it set to home audio, instead of L/R it’s gonna be muted.
I don’t think missing channels get muted, they just get shared into what’s available. A 5.1 soundtrack played on a 2.1 system is going to share Centre between L and R, and put SL onto L and SR onto R. I have an old surround sound system that can’t decode the new codecs that Disney plus etc use, but the Chromecast knows this so just sends it out a 2 channel boring signal. Dialogue is fine because it just goes to the two speakers equally, rather than be cut out. If your system is set up to output to 5.1 speakers but you just haven’t plugged in the centre speaker, then that’s a different thing and you would miss stuff, same as if you didn’t plug in the front left speaker.
When I change my reciever to 2.1 I lose all commentary on sports, since those are exclusively center channel. While researching it I found out about this other potential issue, kinda interesting actually.
Some receivers are smarter, some are dumb, so you need to make sure the APP, the TV, the Receiver, and sound bar (if used) all have the same settings, or strange things can happen, like one thinking it’s receiving 5.1, even though it’s not. Or vice versa.
Interesting, fair enough, that makes sense. So your receiver was getting a 5.1 signal, but it really did just ignore half the channels when you set it to output 2.1.
That’s not the problem I think most people here are complaining about though, which is sound mixing / dynamic range / editing making speech too quiet, rather than having the wrong settings.
I think it’s a portion of it, since depending on the mixing and the setting of the amp/reciever it could be muting the wrong frequencies since they disagree. If the audio is quiet I can change my sound field, or the speaker settings, and it can usually fix the audio, while making something else worse.
So I think the problem is people using generic settings and not fine tuning their system, and all the different potential sources with different setting and encodings make it impossible. So it’s either fix it for each source, or find a generic “okay” solution.
Thank you. I thought I was old man yelling at clouds over this. Drives me crazy. The worst is when the sound editor thinks some dumb pop song really slaps and turns the volume WAY UP and drowns out everything else.
And OMG the low talkers. Low talking and dimly-lit scenes are all the rage these days. I think part of it is Galaxy Brain people in the streaming biz thinking this is how they save time and money.
It’s true, I have switched to headphones multiple times cause I had trouble understanding the dialogue.
I thought I was going deaf because I struggled to make out what people on screen were saying. Then a friend got a bunch of us together to watch a TV show that was filmed in the 90’s and I could clearly understand every single word being spoken. The problem is on the production end.
Tip: If you don’t have surround sound, make sure that you’ve got your in-app settings/tv settings set up the right way. If you have it set to surround sound, you won’t be able to hear shit.
My partner is English as a second language. They’re always on for her benefit. But as I introduced her to Game of Thrones, I realized I was picking up on details that I’d never noticed prior. I can’t imagine watching without them at this point.
Lol, I hate them. You spend your time reading rather than seeing what’s happening. Drives me nuts
Also any lines that depend on timing of delivery (mostly jokes) get completely ruined
I can’t read while I’m also trying to see things!
I put subtitles on so my friend can understand whats being said when I show them Letterkenny.
I think they understand, they’re just not laughing because the show isn’t funny.
I hate subtitles; the only time I’ll put them on is mmf mmnmm fmm ffmmm. What? Mmf mmnmm fmm ffmmm. What? Mmf mmnmm fmm ffmmm. What? Oh dammit. -click-. When the elocution is so poor I can’t make out what they’re saying.
Ah a fellow fan of Steven Seagal
It’s so bad with shows like Vikings, where they’re doing accents that we’re unaccustomed to.
Grew up with a partially deaf sister. I cant even game without subtitles. And now spotify has lyrics in real time ? Get the fuck outta here.
My hearing is getting worse as I’m getting older and movies/music/etc are just getting mixed worse and worse these days, so subtitles are something I tend to like more these days, especially after getting used to them with anime too. I’m not too surprised others feel the same way too.
Unpopular opinion: Subtitles detract from the watching experience more than mishearing some words. tv / movies are a visual medium, the image on the screen is primary to it. And it doesn’t matter how fast you read, the subtitles still degrade what you get out of watching the show. If your eyes are constantly darting down to the words and then back to the image then you’re missing meaningful things that are happening in the image. And the text physically blocks part of the image. And the words appear on screen at a different timing from how the actors speak the words, which further worsens the emotional impact you can receive.
Yes, i agree, dialogue mixing has gotten very bad and it sucks to miss words that are said, but imo subtitles ruin the experience even more
I get what you’re saying and I wish I didn’t need subtitles, but it’s kind of hard to understand what’s going on when 90% of the dialogue in modern shows is unintelligible mush.
What genre are you watching typically? I find that very few shows and movies give me this problem.
Actually… Have you considered it’s your speakers? I have this issue with music. My high fidelity speakers are perfect, but I’ve got a cheap anker speaker that’s nearly impossible to listen to lyrics on. It’s all bass, and no treble.
I mostly watch anime these days so I’m reading subtitles regardless. The dialogue sounds pretty clear, though; I may not know what the words mean but I can easily make out the syllables being spoken. American stuff, though… If it was made in the past 15 years then it’s probably going to be full of mumbling and too-loud background noise. I suppose it’s possible that my friends have cheap speakers, but I remember sometimes having the same issue at the theater, back when I still went out to see movies.
More recently, I’ve been watching old British and American shows that a friend has been streaming. Stuff from the 60’s and 90’s. Didn’t have any issues understanding what was said.
the image on the screen is primary to it.
Exactly. Cinematographers spend so much effort to put everything in the scene in exactly the right place, lit exactly the right way.
Watch, for example, this breakdown of how Akira Kurosawa frames everything in a scene to draw your eyes in certain directions. If you look away and don’t see the character looking left and right with shifty eyes, you miss a key part of what’s happening. Or, take some of the more famous individual frames in movie history and imagine them with white text on top of them. It’s especially bad when it’s a very dark scene, or a scene where the key elements are in the shadows.
And the words appear on screen at a different timing from how the actors speak the words, which further worsens the emotional impact you can receive.
Not only that, but sometimes the subtitle ruins the suspense. Like, in the audio version there’s a faint sound you can’t quite make out, but that’s how it’s meant to be. But the subtitle says something like [sound of coffin opening].
It does suck that a lot of dialogue mixing these days is terrible. But, I’d rather have to go back and listen again if I missed something than have the entire movie downgraded by constant subtitles flashing up on-screen.
Besides, I think you need to train your ear. It’s the same way that people have trouble with foreign accents. When they haven’t heard them before it’s initially hard to understand. But, over time, you learn to hear that accent better. Similarly, I think people who always use subtitles are losing and/or never developing the ability to hear the dialogue properly, so they have more problem with it, so they continue to rely on the crutch of subtitles. Even though movie dialogue mixing is significantly worse these days, it’s very rare that I actually have trouble hearing and understanding the dialogue. It’s an effort sometimes, and it’s annoying that they’re so badly mixed, but I can still understand what’s being said and don’t need to either go back and listen again or turn on subtitles.
Can we take a moment to appreciate the irony of the first image in the header of that site you linked having white text superimposed over it?
You can see how it detracts from the image though, can’t you?
Oh bro, you’re preaching to the choir here. I absolutely hate subtitles. Even with foreign content it’s a shitty requirement to engage with the media, although preferable to dubbed content for me in most situations. I have an Apple TV, and tvOS allows you to set subtitle size, color, border type, background type, and brightness, which really help make them much more bearable in these unavoidable situations.
That said, I’m not hating them as much as I thought I would in Shogun, probably because they’re edited in to the master by the producers and they actually look decent compared to that harsh sterile blinding typical white type of subtitle that most included forced subs use.
Yeah, sometimes they’re unavoidable, Shogun is ok, but I still think everything would be better without them. I wonder if there’s a version of Shogun without subtitles for people (not me) who understand both English and Japanese.
On the subject of Shogun, one thing that’s hilarious: the English is supposedly Portuguese. It took me a while to figure that one out. Like, when they’re speaking Japanese it’s Japanese, but when they’re speaking English, it’s supposed to be Portuguese. At least, I think? Although there were some scenes early on that I think where they were speaking English. I guess there’s no way you could get away with a TV show where the two actual spoken languages were Portuguese and Japanese, with everything subtitled for English speakers. But, the way they did it is really weird. Like, the actual Portuguese speakers sometimes speak English with a Portuguese accent, and the Spanish speakers speak Spanish-accented English, which is maybe supposed to be Spanish-accented Portuguese, but the main character speaks a variant of British English, but it’s supposed to be accentless(?) Portuguese?
Yeah, the whole Portuguese but spoken in English thing is kind of ridiculous I guess. I did read an interview about that though and they wouldn’t have been able to find enough actors who spoke both Japanese and Portuguese to the level they would need.
And I’m not sure about the subtitles for people who can understand both languages. I do know that the subtitles aren’t “forced”, they’re mastered in to the video. I pirate my shit, if they were forced subs my player would use my system settings for size, positioning, color, opacity, etc. I would assume that the English portions are subbed the same way for the show in the Japanese market, but idk.
Good ol closed captioning: decaying everyone’s ability to comprehend each other in person since about 2015
No, because people aren’t sound mixed in real life.
My tinnitus begs to differ
Sounds like a skill issue to me \s
Actually I had a very hard time understanding people when I was a kid. Fortunately I developed the capability through exercising it.
The world is actually quite noisy.
Nah I listen to podcasts of British, Australia, and non-native English speakers to train my ear so I don’t have to use subtitles.
Also helps that I was a musician for 11 years
If you cant hear the dialogue properly, it’s usually to do with (bad) surround sound!
I dunno, we have a decent Dolby Atmos system I’ve assembled over the years which sounds immense & has a setting to accentuate speech, yet I always use subs for TV & movies. My brain is hopeless putting names to faces, the subs help me with this (plus slang & accents).
I think it’s something to do with how my brain processes sound as I have the same issue with songs - my brain doesnt comprehend lyrics, I don’t know the words to songs I’ve heard thousands of times no matter how well known the song is, maybe a few lines from a chorus but that’s about it
I’ve got the same song lyric thing, and a pretty decent 5.1 setup.
It’s the modern sound mixing. When I watch a movie from the 90s or early 2000s using the same system, the dialogue is generally clearer
I’m watching on my laptop, not a home cinema. This one’s on the filmmakers preferring rich people over everyone else
