cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/30154354
Volume [Mr Lovenstein]
Source/secret panel: https://m.tapas.io/episode/3005249
US media is often terribly mastered like this
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Someone in the movie industry once told me that this is because movies are mastered for big theaters with massive speakers and THX Dolby 400.25.xqpiss MegaUltraπ+ Surround sound. Then they have to be remastered for the home when they make a DVD/Blu-ray/VHS/Laserdisc.
They used to remix it for 2-channel sound, which was totally fine, but then people started buying 5 or 7 or 11 and a half speaker setups because they wanted movie-like sound in the home for their big 17-inch black and white TVs. So movie studios had to remix it for both 2-channel and >2 channel sound. This cost money, which reduced the number of margaritas the executives could order on their Jamaican vacations, so they stopped doing that and only remixed it for people with home studio speaker setups. So if you're listening through the normal 2 speakers on a TV/monitor/phone/repurposed Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet, it gets compressed and all of the voices (which would normally come out of the center speaker) get split between the 2 speakers. This makes them sound very quiet relative to the car explosions. Hope that explanation makes some sense!
Sonuvabitch, I had not read your comment and literally guessed this as an explanation, goddamnit.
Yeah, doing an actually good reduction down from the many channels in a theatre... that takes a lot more work than basically just smashing all the channels together haphazardly like a teen learning how to do audio levelling for their first youtube video by just flattening them all real quick...
... But that level of skill/work is apparently now just industry standard?
I keep running into media where ... even if I am using a 5.1 or 5.2 or 7.1 or 7.2 setup... its still all fucking wrong, and I have to whip up my own audio equalization script with various layers and activation thresholds... to fix it... because even though the media i am viewing claims its 5.1+ mixed... it isn't, its only a flattened 2 or 2.1.
Which is why I use subtitles
Every Christopher Nolan movie.
Time to turn on subtitles!
I think they still sell volume gates / normalizers
Capitalist create pseudo problem and then give a solution to make profit.
They feed us poison, so we buy their "cures", while they suppress our medicine
Heh, there's one built into VLC, hard recommend
This can mostly be solved in one of two ways:
- If you don’t have surround sound, switch your tv/app to use stereo sound, or
- Buy and configure a surround sound
And then turn on night mode (or the equivalent) of your surround setup and thus compress the dynamic range if you don’t want the loud sounds to sound loud.
You need to put both the TV and media being watched to stereo. If it's netflix specifically you will need to set it to stereo multiple times cus FU you obviously want this in 5.1 surround sound!
It won't work all the time either. Sometimes the audio mixing is just bad.