Comics

Former sound engineer here. Yes, that's the correct title, but no, that's not our doing (not mine at least). I want as many people as possible to reasonably be able to enjoy my output, regardless whether they have a 40000$ home cinema, or if they're on a cheap TV.

I know that some directors (Christopher Nolan) tend to want to produce "best" quality at the expense of those who don't care. See Tenet as an example.

Sound engineers are the nicest of people in the audio world ime. Always ready to explain to my dumb ass complex math that makes sound work, and I love them for it.

The people you're thinking about go by "audiophiles" most commonly and are the coffee people of the tech world: nothing is ever good enough and they'll sneer at you for not knowing that.

99% of the time, the cause is trying to output a 5.1 signal into a Stereo setup (Like your TV speakers). A 5.1 signal is 5 speakers and 1 subwoofer. The speakers are front left and right, rear left and right and - the important bit - the centre channel. The centre channel tends to be where all of the dialogue comes from, while everything else comes from the other speakers. But what happens if you don't have 5 speakers? What if you only have 2? You can't ignore that audio so you've got to mush it together somehow and now you've got dialogue and explosions coming out of the same speakers with mixed results.

It's not about not having a professional setup mixed the same as a theatre, it's usually about a setting somewhere that's incorrect. If you're only using your TV's speakers, there's a good chance something somewhere is trying to give it a surround sound signal and it's trying to downmix that to stereo. Usually you can fix it by adjusting a setting somewhere, either the TV itself or whatever app/box is sending the TV the signal as most sources do actually come with a stereo mix.

However, a better way of solving it is getting yourself a soundbar. It doesn't have to be an expensive one at all, even the cheaper soundbars will sound better than your TV ever will and they'll at least have a 3.1 signal that'll separate out the sound effects/music from the dialogue because usually that dialogue goes through the centre channel which you now have. You can also usually adjust the volume of that channel independently.

Note that nobody would suggest that a cheap soundbar is anything close to a "professional setup". Most audio folk would turn their nose up at the idea of using a soundbar over a full surround system but you know what, they're pretty "good enough" for most folk and if you care about media consumption, it's a nice improvement.

1. I have that setup

2. The theater is also too imbalanced and too loud

Screw how they do it in the theatre. Watching Dune gave me a migraine for the rest of the day thanks to the sound.

i was once present to recording of some cheap radio advertisement, and the last step in the mixing process was that the guy burned the cd and plugged it in into 20 usd cd player to hear what it will sound like to the intended audience.

so not every professional has necessarily be an obnoxious asshole.

Yea it's better for media to have a high "dynamic range" (as in the comic). But for most consumers it's bad. My solution is to use a "compressor", a audio filter that practically averages loudness. https://www.thewindowsclub.com/compressor-tool-in-vlc

Funny enough shitty laptop speakers are better for watching these kinds of movies.

See also: loudness wars

Most of the time sound engineers also make a stereo mix, with significantly less dynamic range.

Blame your TV/computer/whatever-screen for going technically a multichannel surround system could be plugged into me at any moment, I will tell the streaming-service/Blu-ray/DVD/media-file to feed me that sound track! Switching to the stereo track makes a big difference, but yeah, for some reason the surround track becomes the default option.

Supposedly most Gen Z now use subtitles and I don’t blame them. With the way movie sound is mixed it’s really hard to hear the dialog. Not everyone has a Dolby-certified sound system in their living room.

Even with a basic surround system that has a separate center channel (and fiddling with the settings for 5.1, Atmos, stereo) we still often have to use subtitles. It’s major failure on the part of movie studio audio engineers.

Turning on the subtitles while children are watching television can double the chances of a child becoming good at reading†. It’s so brilliantly simple and can help children’s literacy so much that we want to shout it from the rooftops!

https://turnonthesubtitles.org/

†Based on an academic study of 2,350 children, 34% became good readers with schooling alone. But when exposed to 30 minutes a week of subtitled film songs, that proportion more than doubled to 70%. There are lots of studies about the benefits of subtitles. This is just one! Check out our research page to find out more.

I'm Dutch. I put subtitles on everything, even if the show is in my native language.