The best solution I’ve found for this is to play content at about 10% TV volume and have Kodi apply a ~16dB preamp to the audio. Works perfectly, everything just sounds the right volume, no distortion or clipping, no suddenly getting quiet before action scenes.
A lot of content is (unfortunately) mastered for a very quiet room.
This means they expect a low noise floor (say, 35dB). Which means for 45dB of dynamic range, you have a max volume of 80dB.
If your listening room isn’t perfect (no deadening, cars passing in the street, someone vacuuming), your noise floor could be 45dB to start with.
And if you go for the same range, suddenly you’re up in the 90s. Or, as this comic shows, you crank the volume in the low sections to hear things over the noise floor, but you don’t want it that loud at peak.
There are probably already 50 comments about dynamic normalisation in the comments. And it’s the right answer for generic environments.
That, and boosting the centre channel (either with a real channel, or virtually). As the centre channel tends to have a higher percentage of use for dialogue.
I’m ok with it, I’ve got a room in my own house with a surround sound system. I recognize not everyone has this. A mix with a compressed dynamic range should always be an option.
Down-mix does not mean reduce volume, it means output for a smaller number of channels than originally intended. The idea is to create your own mix that prioritizes the centre channel more than the standard mix does.
Oh, interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I’m going to check if Stremio has that. Is there a way that I could configure it on my amp? That might be a more reliable approach. The amp has a dialogue mode, but it’s not great. Medium setting on that mode produces slightly more intelligible speech. Does downmixing the center have any negative consequences, like not getting an actual surround sound experience? I love the enhanced experience from sounds coming from behind me, the sides, etc.
What’s worse is TVs that lie and say they have 5.1 surround and force the streaming to use it. Shout out to Netflix and Prime for letting you manually select Stereo though.
It’s gotten to the point that I only feel safe watching movies with headphones (on my phone/computer). I can always keep a finger on the volume button, and at least with headphones I won’t upset my roommates with the volume lol
Subtitles are great for this, but also investing in actual speakers instead of a soundbar or the tv’s speakers.
If the movie has multiple sound channels beyond left/right, then dialogue is usually one of those channels and can come from a specific speaker, making it less muddied than when mixed with other sounds.
If the movie doesn’t have multiple channels, the speakers might still help a little just by being better quality.
There are a ton of reasons why audio mixes for movies are fraught with quality issues during home viewing, and “people have crappy equipment” is the weakest and lest-compelling of them.
It is definitely under-appreciated. A lot of people don’t care, or don’t know what they’re missing. Some people get intimidated with the technical aspects of the setup. So even people that want a better experience are shy about it. Then they see lies on the sound bar box and think that’s a great solution. Sound bars are better than TV speakers, but they’re not a replacement for a real surround sound system.
This is a great article, but given your context, I chuckled when I stumbled across this line: “There is yet another important variable in this sprawling equation, and it might be the most important one of all: the home theater experience.”
What’s wrong with sound bars? I don’t want my whole living room redesigned with speakers everywhere, I just want stereo and each frequency to sound decent.
No amount of software will make speakers in front of you sound like they’re behind you. Plus there’s not really much distance between the speakers in the sound bar, so even the main speakers are very center focused. Lastly, they’re small speakers. You can create a lot of sound with small speakers, but it will never fill a room like large speakers, they just can’t push enough air. I can hear my big floor standing speakers at reasonable volume throughout the house. I’d have to turn smaller speakers up to painful levels to hear them in the other room.
I’m intrigued by this - do you mean that the smaller speakers sound unpleasant at the same volume you need to hear it in the other room, or that a literal higher volume is required? The latter goes against how I thought sound worked!
If you have the system calibrated for reference levels then it will be the same volume, but it’ll require more power to produce it. Yes, it will sound unpleasant, and feel less “full”. Unless they’re very good small speakers it will sound harsher and can cause more listening strain.
HRTF is designed to replicate the way that humans perceive where a sound is coming from.
It’s not perfect, and it’s not going to create an identical experience to a full-range speaker in every corner, but it does a remarkably good job tricking our brains when done right.
The quality of your speakers has a big effect on the audio, sure, but it should not have an effect on speech intelligibility. I could put my phone on speaker and lean it against the TV screen and be perfectly able to hear better mixed videos.
but also investing in actual speakers instead of a soundbar or the tv’s speakers.
NO God Dammit, just NO. It’s completely unreasonable to expect a full multi speaker 5.1 or better surround system on every fucking TV so people can comfortably hear the dialogue! There’s absolutely no reason that a quality soundbar can’t provide a decent audio experience. NONE.
You’re really passionate about this, so change your audio setting to stereo and you’ll notice an improvement. A 5.1 system isn’t required, but it dramatically improves your viewing experience. You can get an affordable used system in a lot of places. I suggest checking the thrift store. In some areas the thrift stores are just a garbage dump, but if you check the nice areas periodically then you can build a great 5.1 system over time for just a couple hundred dollars or less. I’ve seen Polk audio subs for $10, Klipsch floor standing speakers for $20, Yamaha home theater amps for $10, and a bunch of other great deals. Half my system is from the thrift store, but it was all from there until not too long ago.
And the sound engineer people (not sure if that’s their official title) are* suuuuper condescending about it. “Well it’s your fault for not having a professional setup mixed the same as a theater.”
Edit: *Fixed a typo.
Thanks for the replies people, I’m learning a lot! I think another commenter referenced the same article I’m half-remembering (as you do) where some professional audio people commented on this issue. They said movies are designed for the theater and nothing else with no intention/interest in fixing it. IIRC (and I probably don’t) this is likely due to directors or studios not wanting to pay for a home version or having a specific vision they would rather not compromise. Even though the effect of not compromising is…well, the posted comic.
Former sound engineer here. Yes, that’s the correct title, but no, that’s not our doing (not mine at least). I want as many people as possible to reasonably be able to enjoy my output, regardless whether they have a 40000$ home cinema, or if they’re on a cheap TV.
I know that some directors (Christopher Nolan) tend to want to produce “best” quality at the expense of those who don’t care. See Tenet as an example.
If you can have sound separated into different channels based on what their purpose is, I don’t see why they can’t just have a software solution that allows you to raise the volume of dialogue separately from everything else.
Like in video games, you can control volume for dialogue, music, sound effects, etc all individually.
I love this idea. I don’t want it balanced or perfect for my system, I literally just want everything that isn’t speech to be quieter, even if the voice is behind us or the explosion is front and center. That’s it.
That’s because it has to use some sort of impercise method to identify speech vs everything else, since speech is mixed in with the rest of the audio.
If speech had a dedicated channel it wouldn’t be mixed in with everything else and you wouldn’t need to use any tricks to adjust it independently.
EDIT: need more coffee, I misread the comment talking about a software solution as suggesting just putting speech in a dedicated channel. Whoops. This comment is useless.
I recall reading something on Reddit or medium about an audio engineer who demanded to talk with the manager because the sound was “wrong”. Apparently the theater had a different speaker setup than she had designed the movie for.
I can’t find the link now though. Is there a name for that? Like baader-meinhoff but in reverse?
Sound engineers are the nicest of people in the audio world ime. Always ready to explain to my dumb ass complex math that makes sound work, and I love them for it.
The people you’re thinking about go by “audiophiles” most commonly and are the coffee people of the tech world: nothing is ever good enough and they’ll sneer at you for not knowing that.
What do you mean, you don’t have a $1400 wooden volume knob to help suppress harmonics? Coupled with a True DC source with microvolt ripple for your final stages It’s like lifting a veil from the sound stage!
Edit: No, seriously, there are people like that. This company used to sell a $400 wooden knob some 15 years ago. They still sell a lot of stuff like that for the True Audiophile.
Most digital signals carry extra data for error correction even if there is issues with the electrical signal due to distance and EM interference.
Cable issues like what you’re talking about should only be happening on cables carrying analog signal, and that should be solvable with basic, dirt cheap shielding in the cable itself.
Yeah, like it needs to be super long. That’s why you see it more in Ethernet cables and why they have better shielding. With HDMI it’s not as big of a deal because they’re so short.
I should sell a full line of audiophile goods, including door knobs, jackets, and wallets. The key is in the resonant frequency of our products, they will really lift the veil and not hamper the sound waves traveling through the room, but instead enhance them with constructive interference.
Cables can make a difference. If you’re running HDMI 2.1 to get full HDR video and uncompressed HD 5.1 or 7.1 audio, then you should use a certified cable because it’s a lot of information moving across a cable very quickly. I’ve tried cheap Amazon cables before and they fail. They get too hot and the devices lose handshake and shut off or throw errors. But once you have a cable that’s rated and certified for your intended use, it’s not going to get much better.
cables can absolutely make a difference, but it’s still easy to get a quality cable without paying for the extra cost of someone having marketed it as “audiophile” gear. Keep in mind the commenter was talking about switches and servers
Re-recording mixer would be more accurate. Engineer is more a music thing I think. Regardless, designer Mark Mangini knows this is an issue for example due to theater mixes being a priority over a basic stereo mix. This is an issue in action films (I can’t imagine a drama would have this huge an issue, less dynamics) and as long as the mixers have to prioritize the Atmos theater mixes n shit and the studio doesn’t want to pay for a great home stereo mix, the dynamics issue will continue
Yea it’s better for media to have a high “dynamic range” (as in the comic). But for most consumers it’s bad. My solution is to use a “compressor”, a audio filter that practically averages loudness. www.thewindowsclub.com/compressor-tool-in-vlc
Funny enough shitty laptop speakers are better for watching these kinds of movies.
Most of the time sound engineers also make a stereo mix, with significantly less dynamic range.
Blame your TV/computer/whatever-screen for going technically a multichannel surround system could be plugged into me at any moment, I will tell the streaming-service/Blu-ray/DVD/media-file to feed me that sound track! Switching to the stereo track makes a big difference, but yeah, for some reason the surround track becomes the default option.
99% of the time, the cause is trying to output a 5.1 signal into a Stereo setup (Like your TV speakers). A 5.1 signal is 5 speakers and 1 subwoofer. The speakers are front left and right, rear left and right and - the important bit - the centre channel. The centre channel tends to be where all of the dialogue comes from, while everything else comes from the other speakers. But what happens if you don’t have 5 speakers? What if you only have 2? You can’t ignore that audio so you’ve got to mush it together somehow and now you’ve got dialogue and explosions coming out of the same speakers with mixed results.
It’s not about not having a professional setup mixed the same as a theatre, it’s usually about a setting somewhere that’s incorrect. If you’re only using your TV’s speakers, there’s a good chance something somewhere is trying to give it a surround sound signal and it’s trying to downmix that to stereo. Usually you can fix it by adjusting a setting somewhere, either the TV itself or whatever app/box is sending the TV the signal as most sources do actually come with a stereo mix.
However, a better way of solving it is getting yourself a soundbar. It doesn’t have to be an expensive one at all, even the cheaper soundbars will sound better than your TV ever will and they’ll at least have a 3.1 signal that’ll separate out the sound effects/music from the dialogue because usually that dialogue goes through the centre channel which you now have. You can also usually adjust the volume of that channel independently.
Note that nobody would suggest that a cheap soundbar is anything close to a “professional setup”. Most audio folk would turn their nose up at the idea of using a soundbar over a full surround system but you know what, they’re pretty “good enough” for most folk and if you care about media consumption, it’s a nice improvement.
i was once present to recording of some cheap radio advertisement, and the last step in the mixing process was that the guy burned the cd and plugged it in into 20 usd cd player to hear what it will sound like to the intended audience.
so not every professional has necessarily be an obnoxious asshole.
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