this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
1240 points (100.0% liked)
Comic Strips
17289 readers
1569 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- [email protected]: "I use Arch btw"
- [email protected]: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.
If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they're shouting, that's not adding realism, they're doing bad acting.
If the sound engineers can't get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that's not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they're bad at mixing.
If the director can't keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that's not artistic choice, they've made a bad film.
Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don't want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.
If you don't want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it's not the director's problem, it's the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it's just that streaming platforms and TVs don't always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a "night mode" in your TV settings though, that's an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).
There is millions of people who "don't want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup". It is the director's problem, optimise for the masses, not people who can afford to setup a cinema system in their home
We have movies with multiple audio streams. So you can choose English, or French, or crew commentary.
Why not have a mix for "standard home TV setup" and a mix for "5.1 ultimate surround sound system" and keep both groups of people happy?
It's called Dolby 2.0 and a lot of Blu-ray movies actually do have a track (though not all). Though it's been my experience that the native 2.0 usually sounds worse than the 2.0 that I compress down from the 5.1 or 7.1 when I make a backup of my movies. I am unsure as to why this is. I'm guessing it's cause, as OP stated, the studio sound mixers just don't give a shit to make a 2 speaker system sound good.
Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.
Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.
The problem is that there are "default" weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don't care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you're using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie's problem.