Honestly? Sound mixing in a lot of movies and some shows sucks ass nowadays. You have uber loud explosions and then relatively quiet speech.
Tenet was an amazing movie (many disagree, but it’s a matter of opinion - I really enjoyed it), but I wouldn’t have heard half the dialogue. Subtitles helped.
It’s all supposed to be immersive - after all, explosions ARE loud. But I don’t want my living room to explode. I want a lower range of volume.
Shit, watch an old action movie. The speech isn’t as quiet compared to the explosions and gunfire as it is nowadays.
It has nothing to do with movies, but I was posting my reply here and the page updated realtime itself like three times while you were editing your post. I saw your edits almost instantly. I found that feature neat, compared to reddit. Also, agree on the loud noises.
Strongly agree with the audio mix here, that’s my biggest problem.
Additionally, having kids running around making noise, subtitles have become a necessity most of the time for me and the wife.
We try to keep them off as much as possible though because we do find them distracting.
I only have a soundbar, but I found Tenet perfectly understandable when watching at home.
Ah, I watched it in the cinema and while mine wasn’t the worst, in some cinemas it reportedly was completely unhearable.
Of course with piracy in particular there’s another thing - people will often download a 5.1 or 7.1 audio track movie because that’s the first available torrent they find, but then play it on stereo speakers on their TV or computer and the discrepancies in volumes will be huge.
Sound mixing has gotten absolutely terrible. Vox did a pretty good video on why which explained a lot about it.
From what I can remember a few key points are
- The director has a lot more play with sound now, so they’re trying to make it in their ‘vision’, which usually means deafening explosions and background noise and quiet dialogue.
- Microphones have gotten a hell of a lot better over time. Both directors and actors have picked up on this. Mics have gone from being huge and failure prone to something that can fit in an actors jacket, perfectly capturing everything they say. This has the unfortunate side effect of actors gaining a mumble… usually to sound more dramatic. This has the other side effect of not being able to understand what they’re saying.
- Theatres have constantly upgraded their audio equipment and some now have 128 channels of sound (Dolby Atmos). When you’re watching on your television, you’re likely watching with stereo, which is two channels. Even if you have a fantastic home theatre setup, you’re probably going to have 11 channels at most, which is usually through a 4K Blu-ray disc. It’s the job of the sound mixers to make sure that the sound is coherent over these channels, but going from the master with 128 channels to 2 channels is a difficult job.
- Audience expectations have changed and technology has changed with it. Movies have progressively become more and more focused on spectacle rather than story. It’s far easier now to add some explosions or have a huge monster pick up a car and toss it, naturally you’d expect these to make some noise… which they do. A loud noise naturally has an impact on you, it’s just human nature. They want to use that to their advantage and have begun to prefer that over dialogue.
But you can combat the storm!
Closed captioning is an obvious one but there is other methods such as dynamic range compression. This is like sacrilege to audiophiles but they’re the ones who caused this in the first place so they deserve it. Effectively, it amplifies quiet sounds whilst reducing loud sounds. Explosions can still be heard but they’re quieter and dialogue can be heard again. Huzzah!
I totally forgot about that video! Thank you for summarizing everything in there for everyone. This is such an awesome comment.
Going to agree that the sound mixing sucks. It is much more enjoyable to watch a tv or movie when you can properly hear the dialog. I ended up watching subtitles so much I can’t stand to be without them.
You’re so right. I’m a deaf motherfucker sometimes and I have trouble making out words through some accents. Good subtitles are a critical accessibility option.
I’m getting older and it’s gotten harder to hear. Also after having children the background noise is tremendous. When i was a kid, if we watched tv it was as a family. Now we rarely watch tv and when i do it’s with my wife while the kids do other stuff. When i was going my high school graduate parents had a house with another room for us to do that in. Now we’re all in the living room sharing the space. I keep the volume low and read the subtitles now. Also it’s helped me develop a taste for foreign films as am added bonus. I tried Dark dubbed and hated it. Tried again with subtitles at the pressure of my compatriots and loved it!
I like to dust off old movies and rewatch them. Old gems like Ghostbusters or the first Indiana Jones movies or Big trouble in Little China. Even the Goonies is still worth watching today.
What I noticed compared to today’s movies, is three main things:
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the sound mixing is hugely different. The voice channel is loud and clear compared to the background music and sounds effects.
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The dictation is different. Maybe, today, to a native English speaker, old movies sound more staged, like listening to a theatrical recitation. But it makes dialogues a lot easier to understand.
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Today, everyone is mumbling their lines, maybe to make it look more real, I don’t care, just give me the subs, because of all the languages I can speak and understand, English is the one where you chew away most of the sounds and is still considered proper. You can pronounce “what are you doing?” like “what’dya’doin?” and is still clear, you cannot do such thing in Italian or Japanese.
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something is happening to people’s hearing, it’s not getting worse, we have tests for that, but somehow people seem to hear less. It could be a matter of focus.
Yeah, I definitely think it’s focus. I have none of these issues with sound or dark images everyone’s been complaining about the last few years. But then once I sit down to watch something, I’m focussed on it until it finishes. My rule is if I pick up my phone, then I stop watching as it clearly isn’t good enough to hold my attention.
I’ve mostly stopped watching movies and series since the mixing is so bad.
Not to mention the past decade had a weird fetish with video being shot in a low light.
Mate, I’m not going to pay money to watch shit that’s grainy and inaudible.
Yes, soundmixing sucks lately… but also, I’m AuDHD and subtitles helps me focus
I have a feeling that more people tend to watch shows now with a lot of other things going on around them. I have no problem hearing all the dialogue, but I usually watch by myself in a quiet room with no distractions.
I do wonder how much of it is people can’t stop looking at their phones and the like.
