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.
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.
Man, dimly-lit scenes have been a pet peeve of mine for years. Every time Law & Order is on, I can’t help yelling “turn a light on!” at the screen. Maybe they’d be able to solve the murder faster if they could actually see shit.
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.
Literally why I don’t bother going to a concert unless I’m extremely familiar with their songs. Every time they sing something new I’m bored out of my mind because everything comes out like the teacher in Peanuts.
Filmmakers have actually changed the way they capture and mix audio to take advantage of this. They also sometimes abandon TV audio in favor of tuning the sound for high-end setups.
Here is an interesting deep-dive that focuses on Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking.
In a perfect world, there would be the recommended mix, and then the apps (Netflix, Hulu, etc) would let you adjust the faders the way you can with EQ. Instead of one stream of sound, you can balance the voice/music/fx by yourself. Hell, throw EQ on each of those channels. Late at night and you don’t want to bother the neighbors? Let me turn down the bass on the FX and Music channels. Also let me just turn down FX and Music channels in general because I can’t fucking hear what the actors are saying.
Edit: I was talking to my wife about this subject and she was like “yeah, I can do this on my Peloton. Adjust the voice vs music”
So yeah. The technology exists. It may not be retroactive. Like movies and shows already made won’t have the option (but vocal isolation plugins have come a long way). But we have the technology and bandwidth to do it moving forward.
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.
One thing I’ve done to train my listening in Spanish (not my native language), is I watch TV and listen to podcasts, but I only put one earbud in at a time.
So I listen to the dialogue with just one ear.
I’ve found that when I do this for a while, then switch back to two ears, I can understand so much better.
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.
I’m with you. If you like subtitles, you do you I won’t judge, they just personally drive me nuts. I try to ignore them when I watch with someone else, but they pull my eyes away from the movie. Plus they spoil jokes and ruin the timing.
Also, maybe I have super-ears, but I really haven’t struggled to hear dialogue at all in the movies I constantly hear people complain about (mostly Nolan’s). I’m genuinely confused about that controversy, because they sound fine to me.
I haven’t struggled to hear dialogue in movies either. And I have the opposite of super ears. I had serious issues understanding any speech at all when I was about ten.
I think people are socially anxious en masse these days and are relieved they can abstract themselves away from the human aspect of the story by not having to watch the action.
It’s really easy to watch the movie, and to catch that one word in the sentence you want to look at without losing anything in the frame. People who watch with subtitles don’t read every sentence, more like 30 words per movie, and subtitles and scenes don’t change that fast, you have ample time to do some back and forth between the image and the text.
It never works like that for me; if the subtitles are on, I can’t distract myself from them whatever I do and end up reading every sentence.
Yeah, I feel like people in this thread are really slow readers. After a while, you learn to do both at the same time. it’s really not difficult. I just watched Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall. Both are in foreign languages (to me, an English speaker), and therefore were entirely subtitled. Both are beautifully filmed, and I had no problem completely appreciating that while still being able to understand everything being said. It was trivial.
It’s really easy to watch the movie, and to catch that one word in the sentence you want to look at without losing anything in the frame.
What? How would you even do this? Glance straight to the one word you need, somehow locating it without reading the other words?
Yeah, it’s pretty easy to do. The sentences always lag behind a bit, and you know which part of the sentence you want to reread. Movies just don’t move that fast.
Your eyes can also understand words without reading them, that’s how youre able to skim to a known part of a text you want to reread, in a book for example.
I totally agree. The subtitles are so obtrusive that I’m unwillingly forced to look at them and it distracts from the video. They also completely ruin comedic timing. My wife, however, needs the subtitles on, so I live in a subtitle household now.
I’ve never had a problem generally understanding the dialog even with the terrible sound mixing, but the subtitles have ruined a bunch of jokes and completely block things I need to see on the screen very frequently.
Yeah I prefer when the subtitles are like half a second late so it doesn’t ruin the comedic or dramatic impact of every line.
Or, perfectly timed. I’ve seen captioners do this before: if a character pauses, what they say after the pause doesn’t appear until they say it.
I don’t mind using subtitles when I watch movies in my language but when it comes to anime or movies in other languages I prefer subtitles because it’s better than not understanding a single word.
I watched Dark in the original German, don’t speak a word of German, and didn’t use any subtitles.
It was a really interesting and satisfying experience. There was no point where I didn’t understand what was going on.
As an autistic person I felt very gratified to realize I’d built up my social skills to the point I can grok a story without anyone explaining anything, even the characters.
For me, it’s several things:
As others have mentioned, sound mixing sucks on a lot of newer movies. Watching a movie with a pleasant max volume could render dialogue inaudible. Holy crap, that last batman movie was hard to watch.
While I watch movies, there are often a lot of things happening around me. The dog might be playing around, my girlfriend is having a phone conversation or there are noises from the kitchen. I am not great at mentally filtering out sounds, so subtitles help a lot.
I live in a country where subtitles have been around my whole life. Now that TV is on-demand rather than linear TV with hardcoded subs, most services enable subs by default, and it doesn’t really bother me.
Finally someone with the courage to say it! Although if you like subtitles you do you, but I agree with this take, I feel like I get more into the movie without subtitles (which leads to obsessive rewinding if I miss some dialogue but that is the tradeoff). If a movie or show is egregiously hard to understand/ heavy accents then you might need em on.
Apple TV has a feature if you miss something you ask Siri “what did he say?” It’ll rewind like 10-15 seconds, turn on subtitles for that 10-15 seconds, then turn them back off. It’s super handy
Unpopular opinion: Subtitles detract from the watching experience more than mishearing some words.
I agree if you can otherwise hear fine, but many people who do use subtitles/captions don’t use them out of choice, they use them due to disability: if I don’t have captions I will miss 80% of what is being said, rather than the 5/10% that an abled person would.
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.
This emotional spoiler-ing certainly happens! (Though I personally don’t mind it too much) What is particularly frustrating is when the captions don’t match what they are saying. Filmmakers, PLEASE don’t do this, I understand that you may want to tweak some lines afterwards, but this just makes it so that my brain has to do additional audio processing, (which is the entire reason for captions in the first place) meaning I either have to mute the movie, or slow it down so I can keep up!
I’m right there with you
Hate hate hate subtitles. I 100% agree sound mixing is absolute shite now, and I definitely understand why some people need them (as someone who has audio processing issues myself I really do get it)
But I refuse to watch things with subtitles. They’re way too distracting. Either I’m reading them of I’m trying to ignore them but all my brain is saying is ‘don’t look at them don’t look at them don’t look at them’. Like if I wanted to read something, I’d have a book in front of me
Fucking hate subtitles, the moving words attract my eyes and then i just end up reading and missing the scenes.
Here’s a fun fact: autistic people’s attention is more strongly captured by movement than neurotypicals’
For this reason, as soon as I’m less lazy, I want to start a web dev standard where you can turn off all animation that’s self-timed.
I cannot read a website if things are moving on it. If there’s an image carousel that moves on its own, I have to delete it with dev tools, along with all other self-initiated animations, before I can read anything on the page.
As an autistic person, I literally can’t look at repeating animated GIFs or images with short loop cycles. When people post them in chats, I have to scroll past them, or even scroll up and not look at the new posts until I know the moving images will be above the window threshold once I scroll back to the bottom.
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?
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.
