this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Because they insist on mixing the audio in a shitty way so unless you want to fiddle with the audio-level every 5 seconds or have your eardrums shattered by action/suspense-scenes, you can't hear dialogue and need subs to understand what the fuck is going on...
Edit: and before people start saying "5.1 in stereo is the cause!1!!1!1", no forcing stereo does absolutely nothing to alleviate this.
It's not that it's mixed shitty, it's that they never remixed it for new releases. So it still uses the theater audio mix and range where there's 12,000+ watts of audio power available and like 12 audio channels.
When they actually remix it to a home release format the issues almost always go away. Even remixing for 5.1 most TVs can downmix to stereo just fine.
Hyperrealistic acting also doesn't help. Lots of actors insist on mumbling in a way that makes it hard to understand even if in a cinema.
I love Tom Hardy, but dark gods he's impossible to understand half of the time.
At least I expect that from him and basically all his characters. It's most irritating when it's a character who should have eloquence, ht doesn't.
Also by extension, film / TV is the ideal medium for imperfect dialogue. The medium took queues from theatre and literature in it's inception but there is truly no other medium suited to the imperfection of real dialogue like real life.
Mediums which demand a high critical analysis like most paintings invite the viewer to study and puzzle over the narrative, but film has it's roots in cinema, and lowbrow cinema at that. I don't really mean that critically, it's my preferred medium, but nothing expects an easily digestible narrative like film and TV.
I don't think it's inherently the mediums flaw, duration and viewing time dictates a lot.
Film and TV his a wired niche. Although mainstream TV also takes days, weeks of months to compete, the vast majority intentionally invites you to consume without analysis. Mainstream film fully invites the average viewer to see it once, and anything further than that is for chance or deeper fans.
However film and modern high budget TV is mor* e venture capitalism than art, it's just that in it's method of consumerism, it poses as art. This gives it its own rules, and one of those rules is that comprehension is only a useful tool when it favours creating and retaining viewers/income.
But as it's rose to dominate all other media, there and many, many people who enjoy film and TV without any media literacy outside of it, and therefore their only touchstone is reality. That paired with the fact that we've largely cracked our ability for movies to direct focus via mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing sound etc, means it's the ideal medium to not just emulate realistic performance, but focus on it and celebrate it. This often comes with unclear dialogue.
Then the only way for deeper fans to enjoy this mediu BBm is to re-experience it By re-exploring rit. Each additional delve, albeit short - often just an episode or feature film length - gains that viewer status unlike other mediums.
This forces realistic dialogue to be idolised by fans bove clarity, while being irrelevant to the casual viewer. At last in my opinion.
This is a lunatic ramble, which I'm writing at 3am in my time zone after being unable to sleep. Beyond any typos, I apologize if this is entirely incoherent or just wrong and assumptive.
What about direct to streaming shows. They still have the same problem. Not saying it does not happen, but its mostly shitty mixing. Especially in American shows.
That and that they intentionally make the commercials about 30% louder than the show
The habit of compressing commercials super loud comes from the fact that many of them also have to fit radios where it is important for the brainwash being clearly heard on weak signals too.
Commercials? What are those? Sounds like a boomer thing.
Yep, only time i watch "tv" is when im visiting relatives
Also, not many of us live in single homes with basements that we can turn into a home theater like our parents did.
having surround sound helps, but not enough
Here's a good video about it... https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8
This seems like a good use case for AI so that volume automatically fluctuates when switching between dialogue and action scenes.
There's no need for AI, standard look-ahead normalization would be more than enough for this if it was allowed to work properly. I've not met the content that VLC's audio normalization can't fix, for example.
Technically even the standard system is also AI (and it totally would've been advertised as such too before the LLM-boom).
The ‘problem’ is dynamic range. They mix movies with a large dynamic range because explosions and shit are a lot louder than spoken words. You are supposed to have your eardrums shattered during action scenes. That’s how it’s intended to be listened to.
Could they mix it differently? Sure, but that would mean that the people who want to watch it as intended can’t. There is also no reason to because you can simply adjust this during playback. Any half-decent A/V receiver will have an option for dynamic range compression. Just because you didn’t set up your surround sound system properly doesn’t mean the movie is badly mixed.
I don't have a surround system...I have 2.1 stereo, and even with dynamic range compression this is an issue. And it's not just explosions, things like suspenseful music is also loud as shit which is unnecessary.
I don't want eardrums shattered when watching a movie, nobody wants that, it's unpleasant and 100% unnecessary for watching at home.
They don’t mix for a 2.1 home setup, they mix for a (home) theater. You’re using a set-up meant to watch the news and maybe a soccer match to watch a movie and then complain that it’s a crappy experience. Yeah, no shit.
Cool, so you're not allowed a ~~good~~ passable movie experience if you don't invest a shitton of money for a home theater.
Quality audio doesn't have to cost a ton. You can get a quality budget Dolby ATMOS soundbar for less than $350.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hisense-5-1-2-ch-ax-series-dolby-atmos-soundbar-with-wireless-rear-satellite-speakers-wireless-subwoofer-black/6541474.p
https://www.rtings.com/soundbar/reviews/hisense/ax5125h
Buddy you can buy a 55” TV for less than that, it is utterly ridiculous to even entertain the idea that “less than $350” is a reasonable price for passable audio.
I'm sure that is a good price for the soundbar, but speaking for myself it's too big, I don't have the space for it, as I imagine many others do too. It isn't too cheap either, imo.
But that is really not the point. Not everyone is a giant movie geek, they just want to be able to understand what is being said.
You have a setup that’s not suitable for watching movies and you’re trying to blame it on the movie. How is that reasonable? The content you’re trying to watch simply was never meant to be watched in that way. I’m not sure what you expect here.
Even if they did a different mix, that still wouldn’t give the intended experience of the movie, it would be at best a watered down version. You simply cannot optimize for two very different things. If they wanted it to be viewed on a TV they would have made a very different movie to begin with. There are plenty of made-for-TV movies that do exactly that.
You expect that something that was made to be shown on a huge screen, in a dark room with a high end sound system somehow magically would work on your living room TV with stereo sound. I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation.
In other words, movies are not intended to be played back at devices that aren't connected to theater-grade audio hardware.
Of course this requires the question of why movies are even released on Blu-Ray, DVD, or streaming services at all instead of just using the existing distribution system for movie theaters. Everyone who doesn't run an IMAX setup at home is too poor to watch movies.
Not just audio hardware, also a big screen, darkened room, etc.
Because there is a demand for them and they like making money?
If you’re ever in the Netherlands, go visit the Rijksmuseum and see De Nachtwacht by Rembrandt van Rijn. It’s absolutely enormous (363 by 437cm). Just look at it for a while, marvel at the details. Then go visit the gift shop and buy the 50x70cm poster.
Go home, stick the poster on your wall. Do you get the same sense of awe as you did from the full size painting? Can you even make out all the intricate details that make it so compelling? No, you can’t. It doesn’t work in that small format in your living room.
Is this Rembrandt’s fault? No, of course not. He painted it at the size it meant to be viewed at. He didn’t take into account that people would be making small posters off it almost 400 years later. Worse, if he had made the painting so that it would look good on a small poster, would that painting also have had the same impact in its full size? I’d say it wouldn’t have.
Rembrandt also made much smaller paintings, if you want a Rembrandt in your living room you’d be better off getting a reproduction of those. Does this mean that the gift shop shouldn’t be selling small posters of ‘De Nachtwacht’? There clearly is a demand for them.
Same goes for movies. They didn’t set out to make a movie to view at home, they set out to make a movie to be viewed in the theater. Could they have made on that worked at home. Sure, but then it wouldn’t have worked in the theater. Should they not sell them on BluRay when there is clearly a demand for them? There are plenty of people who do have a nice setup at home that does the movie justice.
No, you can go to the theater or watch made-for-TV movies. The fact that blockbuster movies are made for the theater doesn’t prevent anyone from making TV movies, and they do make them. Just not that particular movie.
The problem is that you didn’t actually want to see that movie, you wanted a similar but different movie, one that would have worked on a regular living room TV. But that’s not the movie they decided to make. You bought the small Rembrandt poster and now you’re complaining that you can’t see the details and the painting kind of sucks because of it.
By that measure, most movie theaters also shouldn't be showing movies – very few of them have the precise setup a given movie was mastered for. If the movie was made with IMAX laser projection in mind, it should only be down in theaters with such projectors even if this excludes 95% of theaters. Likewise for rumble seats. Or theaters with Atmos sound systems if the movie was made with DTS-X in mind.
Of course this leads to the conclusion that it's financially unwise to release movies at all because any movie will only ever be able to be shown in very few theaters and will not recoup its production costs.
Or, you know, you release it for multiple projection and sound setups and accept that there is a close enough level of fidelity for a given use case. Which leads us back to actually properly mixing it for the home release because the people who have IMAX laser 3D projectors and 12,000 W sound systems are not going to be using Blu-Ray in the first place.
That’s what calibration is for. You master using a reference display and whatever you use in the theater should be calibrated to the same specs.
Why would that be a problem? DTS:X is more flexible with speaker layout than Atmos. If you have a theater with a speaker layout for Atmos it should be no issue to use them with a DTS:X processor.
How do you go from “Atmos and DTS:X in a theater are close enough to give a similar experience” to “we should mix it for a bunch of crappy 2.0 TV speakers” ?
If you mix it for such an inferior setup, nothing is left of the original movie. Sounds i a huge part of the movie experience. Try watching a scary movie with the sound muted, it’s not scary at all. If you mix it for a TV’s built in speakers, nothing of value is left. What is even the point of watching a movie like that?
You got a smidge of a point. Yes, movie surround sound is mastered for (home) cinemas and if that’s the setup you have, it works. You don’t even need a fancy setup. I have a cheap old 5.1 system and when I’m in the mood for a home cinema experience, including the volume, it works great.
However, there’s no excuse for studios to not provide a more compressed TV mix because not everyone has a home cinema or the capability of turning up the volume without angry neighbours kicking down your door. Especially for Series and direct-to-streaming movies that never had a theatrical release but just drop on Netflix one day. Because there are plenty of those that are also not mixed for quieter soundsystems, TV speakers or people who cannot or don’t want to turn up the volume.
So yes. I expect the audio to work well on my living room TV. Because I’m paying to watch it on a service that’s available on on my living room TV and Studios know that the vast majority of people do not have a home cinema. It is thus, in my opinion, a reasonable expectation, for any movie that released past the DVD age, to have an audio track that doesn’t require me to own a home theatre. Because you can optimise for two things, by just having two audio tracks. Some movies on Netflix even have a dedicated stereo tracks available. Why can’t that be the norm?
Or, those streaming services could offer a setting to compress the dynamic range for home viewing. My AppleTV actually has that function built in and it’s very useful when you want to watch something late at night without waking the whole house up. Sadly, most streaming services use their own media player instead of the native one and don’t have a comparable feature…
That said, I very much don’t want a compressed dynamic range sound mix to become the only one available. I happen to have a setup that can just about handle a higher dynamic range in most of cases, if I can/want to raise the volume accordingly and I usually like it that way.
I think this depends on how you see movies. Do you see them as art or just a form of entertainment?
For me, it’s about how the movie makes me feel. I think movies are art, and art is meant to make you feel things. If I watch a movie I want to be overwhelmed by the action, I want to be moved by the music swelling at that emotional moment, I want to be creeped out by that scary scene in the spooky house with the wind howling all around me.
You don’t get that if you watch in a bright room with a 2.0 sound track with no dynamic range. To me there is no point in even watching a movie if it can’t immerse me in the movie and make me feel all those things.
For the folks disagreeing with you, I think a helpful analogy might be to think of it like a recipe.
If you try to make a fancy dish at home without the high quality equipment and ingredients the chef had, it's not gonna turn out like the chef intended, and it's not the chef's fault or a bad recipe.
It's art meant to be enjoyed in a particular fashion, and will naturally be less enjoyable when prepared or consumed in another manner.
There's a valid argument to be made for remixing it for shitty speakers, since it doesn't seem hard and would make a lot of people happy, but artists shouldn't be obligated to bastardize their work if they don't want to
Nah, most of it is mixed like shit
I got a soundbar. Some look at this like a luxury. You are expecting a receiver?
Sound bars are not worth the money, you can get a better setup for what you pay for a half decent one. They only exist because they have a high WAF.
I expect an A/V receiver with at least 5 speakers and a subwoofer. With the left/right front speakers being 2 full-range floor-standing speakers.
Ideally, you want a 7.1.4 setup.
Okay moneybags
Ideally I dont care.
If you're playing the sound back through your TV speakers, it should compress the dynamic range by default.