Then comes a commercial break and all hell breaks loose with the sound levels.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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What are commercial breaks?... I stopped watching TV many moons ago. I stream and sail the seven seas.
Ads are making a comeback on streaming services. Not only Youtube, which is now getting more serious about blocking ad-blockers, but even on paid streaming. Netflix has an ad supported tier, Amazon runs ads for its own stuff (so far)...
I think Netflix and Amazon have the option to switch from surround sound to 2:1 or whatever which could help the audio issue if dialogue, it won't save you from commercials though
Came here to say this. I HATE it when I set a reasonable volume level for the show, and all the commercials are twice as loud. Grrr!
It's 2023 why are you seeing commercials 🏴☠️
There are ads everywhere. To a certain extent, you can pay money to avoid them, but they're slowly sneaking their way back into some paid services as well.
I was watching a "free" movie on Tubi the other day, when a commercial came on and blasted my eardrums. It really took me back.
For it was my late childhood and early adolescence that our family finally achieved cable television. If you fell asleep with the TV on, god help you when it woke you up at 2 AM with a commercial louder than an atomic blast playing Enya and Enigma in Pure Moods.
Glory to Cable Networks and bless the FCC for the awakenings. For even though everyone hated the constant volume change, the FCC was powerless to stop it against the might of The Telecommunications act of 1994, which they themselves crafted with the wisdom of the telecom industry. Specifically these glorious sentences:
Title III: Regulatory Reform - Bars any State or local statute, regulation, or legal requirement from prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide interstate or intrastate telecommunications services.
and
Title VII: Media Diversity - Requires the FCC to complete a proceeding to: (1) modify or remove national and local ownership rules on radio and television broadcast stations to ensure that broadcasters are able to compete fairly with other media providers and that the public receives information from a diversity of media sources; (2) review a certain ownership restriction with respect to cable operators and report to the Congress on whether such restriction serves the public interest; and (3) consider the applicability of the FCC's rules regarding network non-duplication protection, syndicated exclusivity protection, and sports programming exclusivity to programmers whose programs are transmitted on common carrier video platforms.
Which, among other things, allowed monopolies in media including ClearChannel which quickly ruined radio for everyone. Bless us all.
The commercials on B104 in the lehigh valley of PA in the morning are so loud it's distorted.
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.
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.
But why do they do it in TV series as well? It’s not like I’m watching better call Saul in cinema.
The people that made it probably wanted to make the audio sound best for the one person that has a great sound system, there's a good YouTube video about it https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8
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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.
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).
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unfortunately it sounds like this in the cinema too. Dialogue is barely understandable and 80% of the scenes are so dark, it looks like shot with an iPhone under moon light.
Just compare with any movie from the 80’s or early 90’s.
I personally reached a point where don’t even bother to pirate those movies anymore.
Who watches movies anymore? Costs a fortune, theater is dirty, people are annoying, food is overpriced, show times are inconvenient, ...
At home you can just choose another movie to watch, pick another video.
But watching a movie in a big theatre is awesome
I don't care now that I've bought a big TV and an ATMOS/surround system but I understand it's not financially possible for everyone...
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I sure hopes cinemas will die out sooner rather than later.
They can. You're listening to the incorrect audio stream on your device. Your device has to request the stereo stream from Netflix or whatever, otherwise it'll just send you a surround stream and then your TV will downmix it badly... resulting in quiet dialogue.
/work in the industry, we have to hit specific loudness averages and ranges for both dialogue and overall mix. -24 LUFS, if you're curious.
The main reason why I bought an Appletv. Its "reduce loud sounds" feature is amazing
I never knew I needed this
You preparing yourself for Oppenheimer?
It's actually the way the sound is remixed these days. I'm not going deaf😮💨. Old movie dialogue is loud and crisp as fuck. Just watch some TCM.
Because it's compressed, overdriven, and clipped to hell. Audio equipment back then didn't have much dynamic range. People had to almost scream their lines to be picked up clearly by the mics. Actors used to be trained to compensate for poor audio recording with a certain speaking technique.
Funny how that made for a better watching experience.
Blame George Lucas for not finding audio acceptable in theatres and making THX to create a standard
That's because old movies were mixed stereo or mono, not surround, and your TV can naturally handle stereo or mono.
The problem most people in this thread are having is a result of their TV crappily downmixing a surround signal to a stereo signal. You have to set your streaming device to request the stereo stream from your streaming service if you don't have a full-on home theater. Devices by default request the surround stream.
Any time this comes up in conversation at someone's house, I set their device to request the stereo stream, and it's fixed. Every time.
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.
Tvs with built in decibels limiter when?
my apple tv does this. underrated feature
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.
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That explosion isn't real, it's not actually filmed at night, actors didn't really get shot, isn't filmed in real time.
If you have to start editing the movie yourself, to make it watchable, some story teller isn't doing their job. I guess we're at the Ikea point of 'movies', some assembly required.
Not all horror movies are mixed for a hundred odd channels, right? Yet even horror movies have whispered dialogues
I think we can all agree that a lot of tension stems from dialogues
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!
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Matrix was terrible for this. Literal explosions and gunshots constantly. Literally all dialogue was whispered. Don't get me started on the damn rave club where they were talking normally. Like that's possible.
i'm seeing oppenheimer in a week; i'm beyond excited because of the hype and loving historical drama but i cannot stand chris nolan. i watched the prestige recently and they made the electricity sounds 1000x louder than the dialog [and cut the movie intentionally to make it a pain in the ass to follow instead of just telling the story straight, because that was the thing to do in 2010]
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