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It is why I enable “Loudness Equalization” on every audio device in Windows.
It makes soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer.
Can’t stand it otherwise either.
You can get an audio compressor extension on most browsers too. It functions by reducing volume above a threshold and increasing overall output to compensate.
On the flip side, if a poor audio mixer overly does this to make their track sound louder, services such as YouTube penalize the volume of the entire audio track.
Human ears are more sensitive to certain sounds, so boosting certain frequencies can make something sound louder without necessarily increasing the overall amplitude of the sound waves (air pressure).
I blame Dolby 5.1… switch to Dolby 2.1… people encoding online video should do this before ripping video or us and audio leveler on the resulting files and save everyone else the hassle.
Or just get a 5.1 setup. Speakers are cheaper than ever.
Edit: Well. They were. Before an orange man decided to destroy the economy.
I looked into this. I’m not paying 300 euros for a decent speaker set if I can get the same results by not having 5.1 surround sound selected.
Hey totally fair, whatever works. I built out the surround system because, after experiencing someone’s home theater when I was a kid, I’d always wanted to. 😁
I always have this problem on yt. At least I can complain in comments
I feel like the problem is the TV. I used to have this issue constantly but ever since I started watching things with headphones on it never happened
My TV has a “Night” mode that caps the volume at a certain level, so you can make the dialogue audible without having action be way louder. And also a “Volume Levelling” setting that has a similar effect, by trying to make all the sounds roughly the same volume rather than only quieting the ones that were louder to begin with.
It’s the TV. No one should expect TV speakers to be worth anything. Even getting one of the cheapest sound bars or even computer speakers will make a noticable difference
Nobody should expect a product to function reasonably out of the box. That would be insane, right?
It does function reasonably. It plays audio. That is all it needs to do. If you want high quality sound, but a device that specializes in sound.
My ass plays sound too, but nobody want to pay to hear it.
They may as well just sell them without speakers at all. I don’t need specifixally high quality sound, just not-garbage sound.
Are you willing to pay through the nose?
Getting decent audio out of a TV with basically no bezel is a hard engineering problem. Read: expensive.
There are some crazy schemes that have been tried, like embedding a piezioelectric layer on top of the display, but the reality is no one wants to pay a grand or two for that when they could just plug in a soundbar. What TV makers should really do is bundle soundbars with the TV in a combo pack, which I think they already (sometimes) do.
Getting decent audio out of a TV with basically no bezel
That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? They’re trying to make TVs into an art piece instead of a functional appliance.
We were ok with fatass CRT sets when that’s all that was available. When LCD became standard, most people were happy about that. Now that bezel-less TVs are a thing, apparently we can no longer go back to anything but a 65" iPad.
If you want your TV to have an audio system on par with the 4k OLED display it’s going to cost twice as much and weigh three hundred pounds. And be gargantuan. Speakers need space to move air and resonate.
I don’t need high-powered, audiophile-grade surround speakers. Just maybe something a little better than a landline phone. There’s a pretty wide spectrum, and TVs come with shit tier audio. They don’t have to, but they do.
That’s what they sell sound bars for. They even have brackets to hand the sound bar from your tv or wall mount. Putting that in every tv adds a hundred bucks for hardware not everyone will use.
“One size fits all” sucks, it’s better to offer a modular system that people can adapt to their needs and situation. It requires a tiny bit of extra effort but plenty of retailers will do the thinking for you too if you pay them.
It doesn’t need to be one size fits all though. Currently one size fits few, when a few extra bucks could make it one size fits most.
I’ve got some decent stereo speakers connected to my TV. Music sounds great, but it does not fix this issue at all.
A soundbar might actually be better cause it has no base I assume.A sub would help, it would divert some of the responsibility away from your driver’s there. It could then focus a bit more on dialogue, and you could probably tweak the EQ to be more friendly towards the mids. That being said, play with the EQ in general, you might be able to squeeze a bit more out of your current ones
Play around with your settings, you might be able to fix it.
For anyone who might find this useful:
Kodi is great for normalising volume and I try to use Kodi for Plex and YouTube on the TV:
Try adjusting the Volume to about -20 dB and the Volume Amplification to +30 dB. The latter will compress the audio as it increases volume to avoid peaks, and will effectively “flatten” the volume contour a bit. Adjust the values to your taste.
The other thing that has really helped is having a good Bluetooth speaker. If the kids are playing and being noisy in the room while I’m trying to watch TV, then sound is much clearer if the speaker is right next to me rather than trying to turn up the volume to drown out other noises.
Exactly why I use subtitles.
This could be because your TV sucks, or at least the audio, a lot of companies push for big Bass like would be in an explosion because it sells TVs which would be fine if they didn’t skimp on the highs and mids making speech suck.
Lol, no, it’s not because your TV sucks, but because almost none of us are watching on a 5.1 or higher channel system and the audio mix was never changed from their cinema release
Anything I watch in my TV that sounds awful sounds just fine out of my 5.1 PC because I suddenly have access to more channels where the audio is actually out (dialogue looooves to get mixed to center only for some reason)
This may be for some cases. But I’ve also had the exact same experience in the theater except I can’t change the volume. All the fun of not understanding mixed with the thrill of losing your hearing.
I’m pretty sure a lot of it is simply because that sort of mixing style is pretty fashionable at the moment. If you mix movies like they were mixed in the 90s and 2000’s (i.e. very clear and distinct dialog) then they don’t ‘sound’ modern.
Even in cinemas the mix is awful and almost inaudible half the time. Extreme example but I saw Tenet at the cinema and had to guess at half of the dialog because Christopher Nolan is especially and increasingly fond of this.
This is perfect lol. Now we need one for absurdly loud motorcycles ruining an evening’s cool.
Subtitles on, dumbass.
Some of us can’t use subtitles. I want to actually watch the cinematography and the actors. If text is on-screen I can’t not read it
Well since you’re obviously into film, you should invest in a proper Dolby Atmos/DTS:X surround setup to give you options. You can either turn up the center channel, put it in “dialog” mode, or enable dynamic range compression (night mode).
Regardless, tou’re not getting the full experience if you don’t have a surround sound setup. Ideally you should buy a receiver and hand pick your component speakers, but even a sound bar is better than TV speakers, so long as it’s from a well-known brand and has up firing drivers in both the front and rear. If the third number in the number of speakers is 4 or higher (ex 5.1.4), then you’re good to go.
This applies to everybody reading this, not just lagoon8622. All your dialog problems are being caused by your TV speakers.
I shouldn’t have to invest hundreds of dollars into a whole separate sound system just because the sound designers of a movie can’t properly balance to audio for stereo sound, the single most common audio set up in the entire world.
It would be nice if TVs came with a proper sound system, but since they don’t, you should factor audio into the cost of your home entertainment system. That’s like going to a restaurant and ordering food without a drink.
Blind people don’t exist.
If subtitles are on I may as well be deaf because I’m no longer watching with those damn words getting in the way. That’s what books are for.
Exactly why I use subtitles. Seem to recall Interstellar was horrible like this.
It was great in cinema. It’s terrible at home.
Frankly annoying as hell that shows and movies can basically only be enjoyed in a cinema or with headphones.
Where’s the audio equivalent of HDR?
It’s called dynamic compression, often labeled as night mode. Makes quiet stuff louder and loud stuff more quiet. My AVR has it as a feature and probably most TVs as well.
192kHZ/24bit audio vs 44.1kHZ/16bit
It’s funny because I understood what you meant, but I think it’s the exact opposite of HDR. You want to reduce the range with a compressor.
There’s HDR for displays, which increases the dynamic range, but there’s also HDR for photos, where the dynamic range is compressed. So maybe they meant the latter? Very not confusing naming…
What about the HDR on my HDR TV that just makes all colors darker when enabling HDR?
And some home cinema receivers do offer this option. Often labeled something like “night listening mode”.
I’ve found upgrading my front center speaker has greatly improved dialogue. I had my speakers from a home cinema kit and the center front was a puny crappy speaker.
Yes. And stop fucking mumbling. And use a proper lighting for fuck sake, I don’t care if it is middle of the night in a forest, I want to be able to see what’s going on.
And please stabilise the camera. I’m not in this car chase, I’m trying to watch it without getting a migraine.
Shakey cam to cover up a limited budget for a car chase, instead of getting creative … so if the rapid cuts and wobble wasn’t there you’d see that they only had one street and couldn’t exceed 30mph
I swear there was a phase where shakey-cam had just become the in-thing.
I remember watching a TV series or a movie or something where shooting had clearly wrapped before shakey-cam was popularised. And it looked like they had just added it in post. It was unnatural movement (so, not like someone was holding the camera), and there was too much of it. I had to skip a lot of the shakey-cam scenesMe when I feed the false memories of strangers and myself onlineI swear I’ve made that exact same complaint about a show or movie! I like when I can see whats going on when I’m watching something
Good luck getting actors and directors to understand hyperealistic and method acting are not ideal on every instance.
I prefer for actors to mumble then their character is supposed to mumble, and just use subtitles. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten too used to subtitles from all the anime I watch but I always enable it for anything on YouTube or any other video content I consume.
Agree on the lightning part though, at least for action scenes, bad lighting is often used to cover for bad CGI. For narration scenes of the place is actually dark, I don’t really mind for me to basically only see silhouettes, it’s appropriate.
Sometimes there’s also a random high pitched buzz in the background that’s louder than anything else for one whole scene. How heard would it be to just remove that frequency range or maybe see that it is louder than every other scene?
Solve guy went to music school instead of law to add that in there. He’s keeping it in there if it’s the last thing he does
Just run the audio through a dynamic range compressor. Then everything will be just as loud as the commercials.
Have no shame in using subtitle, because american movie is either horribly sound balanced or spoken in unintelligible accent.
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