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The Sound and the Fury
(files.mastodon.social)
Whisper and Explosion 2 is even better. The whispers and explosions happen at the SAME TIME!
Secret Panel HERE 💥 https://tapas.io/episode/3005249
(Originally published earlier today on mastodon.social) - Click the Fedi-Link to visit.
I had this problem for so long until I got a really basic sound bar. Can’t believe how many years I put up with it.
That seems like the only solid solution. I got a budget 5.1 with rear satellites because not only did I want a dedicated center channel for dialog but I wanted to avoid the 5.1 to stereo downmixing issues (such as in Plex) where the center channel gets incorrectly divided with a volume decrease (jellyfin didn’t seem to have the issue), but this way I can just sidestep those issues by being able to directly play 5.1.
This has helped a ton but there are still some movies that don’t cooperate, like dune part 1 during the Paul and his mother breakfast scene at the beginning. Even though I have the truehd 7.1 atmos and DD 5.1 (which direct plays without conversion), the only way to make that scene audible without blowing out the speakers the rest of the movie is to crank up the voice boost EQ which ruins the balance.
I think it’s a psychological thing where people are more willing to deal with loud scenes in the theater versus at home.
It’s not just psychological. You’re expecting a loud experience in a theater. Everyone around you is, too. And the building is designed for it. Versus at home, where I have neighbors, potentially other housemates who aren’t watching, etc.
Sometimes, idk if dune is one…. Shows/movies have scenes with intentionally difficult to hear dialog. It’s like, sure, they’re talking… but we want you to just watch and don’t worry you’ll get everything from visuals
Then maybe shut up a bit? Let the vibes just go, why you gotta keep talking over em? If you put words in a movie, I’m going to try to interpret those words. If they’re not important, I dare say they can be removed.
Tenet is the ultimate example of this. Lots of dialogue is drowned out by other sounds. Couldn’t hear fuck all of what the actors were saying. Wish I’d known before going in that Nolan was going for vibes over dialogue. I probably wouldn’t have bothered.
Why Include the dialogue if it’s not meant to be there? Why have the subtitles written out instead of [unintelligible speaking]? Why waste my mental energy on trying to parse which pieces of the talking are important, and which are just, what? Vibe checks? You put those words in your movie for a REASON Christopher, and damnit, I’m going to uncover it.
Absolutely. I spent the film straining to hear the actors unsure if I was missing anything important. I was so distracted that the only ‘vibe’ I got was frustration
Nah, you can just regulate it using software, no need for additional hardware.
I mean that’s technically true, but:
If the problem is bad 5.1 to stereo downmix, then you’d be trying to use software tricks to separate out dialog that has already been merged with the other audio tracks, which won’t do a great job.
That software needs to run on some kind of hardware, so if you’re playing your media from a streaming box that doesn’t run custom software (Chromecast for example) then you will need to add an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this processing, such as a DSP.
This essentially amounts to trying to fix it with EQ when you can just not merge the center channel with the other channels in the first place. Having a dedicated center channel speaker lets you use the ultimate software regulation trick - simply turning up the volume on the center channel.
Just lower the high volume sounds and highten the low volume sounds, it really isn’t any more difficult.
Windows has Loudness Equalization for that.
Unfortunately volume normalization only works on the overall volume. If spoken dialog happens during sound effects that are supposed to play on a separate speaker (but got mixed into the dialog due to downmixing to stereo), no amount of fiddling with EQ or volume normalization will boost just the dialog without also boosting the background noise (in the case of using even a 30 band EQ, it won’t work if there’s any background music, vocals, or sound effects in the same frequency range as speech).
If you want to boost dialog with only software, the best route to go is to get in before downmixing so you can boost the center channel before it gets irreversibly mixed with unwanted sound effects from other channels. Some players might have that option, but like I said if you’re playing from a set top box or streaming stick, you’re gonna need an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this. If you have the video file itself, you can use ffmpeg’s audio filter to do a custom downmix using the -af flag. This way, you can use a downmixing algorithm like the Robert Collier night mode dialog downmix mapping which preserves original dialog volume (which actually is an improvement in some cases since some algorithms erroneously lower the dialog volume when downmixing to stereo) while slightly reducing music and other channel volume - you can adjust the weights used to boost center channel volume further as well.
My LG sound bar still fucks me over, maybe it’s just too old? (2017)
You can also just enable Loudness Equalization in the audio properties in Windows.