Re: interesting article on the understanding modern movie dialogue problem

On 2024-12-29 00:09:34 +0000, Your Name said:

On 2024-12-28 22:53:31 +0000, Pluted Pup said:
 

On Tue, 24 Dec 2024 01:36:52 -0800, super70s wrote:
 

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/story/why-movie-dialogue-is-so-hard-to-understand-these-days-163708191.html   I didn't take the guy's Twitter poll but I would've been included in that 83%.

 It is a misleading question. My answer would be sometimes
I use subtitles, not whether I use them or not.
 

 I don't think he mentions anything about a setting that comes with some
Blu-Ray or DVD players -- in my old Panasonic Blue-Ray there's a
"Dialog Enhancer" setting that is supposed to pump up the dialogue (in
the center channel of a 4-speaker setup) and I have it turned on but I
still find myself using subtitles often.

 "Filmmakers have leaned into the rise of special effects, making explosions, fights, and gunfire significantly louder. This makes
dialogue seem that much quieter."
 This is quite dumb, there's nothing "realistic" about the
shots and explosions on screen, engineering is incapable
of recording and reproducing such sounds accurately,
they are always far louder than they possibly can be on screen,
as if anyone would want to hear that in a movie theater.
So the excuse to muffle voices to make it more "realistic"
doesn't wash.
 To sum up, the muffled dialog in films is caused by
bad engineering, probably caused by spending too much
money on the project. Over-engineering is caused by
too much money.

 There's a similar problem with TV adverts usually being much louder (despite TV networks claiming otherwise) than the TV show they interrupt. Thanfully these days we record most of our shows and can simply fast forward through the adverts anyway.

Most modern TVs have an AVL (Automatic Volume Level) control in their settings but I've never used it myself.
My cable provider, a regional outfit, used to be really bad about cranking up the volume on their self-produced local commercials (possibly it wasn't intentional, they just didn't know better) but it's much better nowadays. Probably after several complaints (which included myself).