I was gripping about this last night. Actors practically whispering. Had to move to headphones. Many times i wonder why the industry can't seem to properly mic the scene or pick a decent cohesive/compatible decimal range.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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There is a lot that goes in to sound engineering in order to make a movie going experience really good. Basically the sound is engineered to sound really good on the 100ish channels that movie theaters have, but when going to a home they have to crunch all that down to work with a 2.1 or 5.1 etc and there is inevitably loss due to overlapping frequencies and even immersive aspects. How can a voice seem to be as loud as an explosion for example.
On top of those difficulties you have directors like Christopher Nolan who has said that he doesn’t care about home audio and that his movies are made to be seen in a theater.
I sure hopes cinemas will die out sooner rather than later.
There is a lot that goes in to sound engineering in order to make a movie going experience really good. Basically the sound is engineered to sound really good on the 100ish channels that movie theaters have, but when going to a home they have to crunch all that down to work with a 2.1 or 5.1 etc and there is inevitably loss due to overlapping frequencies and even immersive aspects. How can a voice seem to be as loud as an explosion for example.
A simple sound compression of the entire signal would solve the issue. VLC player has this feature and it's working perfectly.
Yeah, unfortunately while it’s very simple to set up compressor levels in a DAW or even in feature-rich players like VLC, I haven’t come across any easy way to blanket apply one to your computer’s output without weirdly looping it through something like Ableton.
It seems like it should be so simple to have in Windows sound settings, but it’s never been an option. Sometimes there’s a toggle for “normalization”, but that gives you no control at all. You at least should be able to set compression ratio, lower threshold (in dB), and upper threshold (in dB).
Sometimes there’s a toggle for “normalization”, but that gives you no control at all. You at least should be able to set compression ratio, lower threshold (in dB), and upper threshold (in dB).
That's the thing, the Windows setting completely squashes the dynamics, it's just way too much.
I was wondering if there's a software compressor for the master channel of a computer. Like many, I usually stream movies nowadays, so VLC is of no use unfortunately. Any ideas? I'm on windows, if that matters.
Windows actually has this function in the sound settings. I tried it once, but it was way too harsh. It basically removed the entire dynamics, which is pretty bad in its own way. I tried the feature quite some time ago, so maybe it's better now, I don't know.
In my experience, this is intentional. You're watching a thing with full dynamic range sound. Honestly, the intention is for you to have a decent speaker system and to turn it up so you can hear the dialog comfortably. The loud parts will be loud and that is the intent. Why would they make the loud parts quiet? An explosion isn't supposed to be quiet. They shouldn't make it quiet for the sake of you listening to it through your TV's built in speakers at 2 in the morning while the rest of the house is asleep. If you need the dynamic range to be compressed for your purposes you can do that yourself. Many devices have this option these days. My Roku has "leveling" and "night" modes which compress the dynamic range so there's not such a difference between the quiet parts and the loud parts.
A lot of us live in apartments and choose not to be obnoxious assholes to our neighbors. Wheres the sound mix for us?
If you have to keep changing the volume throughout the movie, the audio engineer did a bad job, period.
Dude you can just turn on the "night" mode on whatever device you're using and completely solve your problem. You don't blame the sun for being too bright, you just put on sun glasses.
Or, and I know this sounds crazy, the highly paid professionals at the top of their field can do their job properly for the majority of their consumers.
And ruin the experience for those with good equipment?
Should music be mixed in mono so quality is the same for those who listen to it on a base cellphone and those who listen to it on 1k$ speakers?
People will speakers for $1000 are suckers anyways. Do yes.
I honestly believe this crap should be illegal. The visual equivalent is GoT's level of just blackness. I can't afford a damn OLED TV you fools. And besides Lord of the Rings had the perfect solution to show darkness two decades ago.
The Nvidia Shield TV (small Android media player) has a built-in way to normalize audio in all apps running on it. It works great!
It does? Can you give me a hint?
It's part of the Nvidia firmware since version 9.1: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/software-update/
We used to call it "compression" and itwas an essential part of the recording process. It seems TV shows don't do that anymore.
It's still called that way: Dynamic range compression