Nah, Christopher Nolan says it’s our fault that we don’t have IMAX theater setups at home.
“It’s called dynamic range, you philistines!” quoth the audio engineer who hasn’t consumed his own work on consumer-grade hardware since his early teens.
Yep. I think this is the real problem right here. Whenever I’m producing my first pass at a music project, I do it on my laptop speakers or similar. That way I know the core idea of the track still works on basic speakers. I’ve tried going the other way and all that comes through is a melody if I’m lucky.
I also check in the car and on a crappy BT speaker after. The fact that they’re producing entire movies and shows without ever seeming to do a consumer audio check is just annoying.
Dynamic ads in podcasts are absolutely terrible for this.
I am driving along listening to a podcast, and suddenly the ads appear at 50% higher volume, with zero warning.
I wonder if you could sue a podcast provider for dammages if you are hard of hearing and need the podcast playing loud, and the ads come on and blow your speakers out…
What should be especially illegal is those ads that use “alert” sounds. Door knocks/bells, phone rings, and worst of all, fucking car horn and other alarm noises.
Anything beeping or sounding like a siren should be completely forbidden for safety reasons.
Mr. Lovenstein version
Yes it’s dynamic range but the most common cause is listening to a source that’s been mixed for a centre vocal speaker.
It will play on a stereo (Left and right speakers only) but you will have very little vocals and lots of special fx.
This is also completely ignoring the us lack of lufs standards for advertising (apparent loudness.)
Not necessarily the end users fault. If the wrong audio source is selected/streamed then you are stuck. There are workarounds but no real solution
Except I have Dolby 5.1 set-up and it’s still dogshit
If you have a true 5.1 setup then increase the centre speaker levels relative to the others. Or get a much bigger centre speaker.
Most centre speakers are woefully small compared to the left and right fronts being towers.
Center speaker is matched to stereo front, rear are intentionally under powered… as someone who appreciates good sound - the mixing on most every movie is fucked (and some TV - HBO looking at you). It’s not a set-up issue.
Interviews with sound mixing techs indicate this is because everything is optimized to theatres and then only slightly remixed.
For the basic consumer we would much rather have audible dialogue than ear shattering gun shots…
