- cross-posted to:
- moviesandtv@lemmy.film
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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.
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.
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’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!
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 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.