Secret i learned on my raspberry pi running stereo speakers on Kodi is you can set a seperate volume for the dialogue channel so i just bumped it up like 14 decibels and now it matches the action fairly well. You can set it from the audio settings inside the movie and its called something like center channel downmix i cant remember exactly

Yeah it's bad... It's gotten to the point that I have unironically said "Wait! Where are my subtitles? I can't hear without my subtitles!"

As a HoH person I secretly love this trend and hope it never dies

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

The problem is that he masters his audio to top of the line theaters, so it sounds muddy on anything other than that. Very snobby.

Me and dad saw Oppenheimer in the cinema, the sound was almost unbearable at times...

I have it, still need subtitles because mumbling is cool yo

Atmos won't save you from shitty sound mixes, I have a pretty nice speaker setup and still have to turn on captions if I want to hear a conversation without my neighbors calling the cops during the next action sequence.

Not just that, they assume you have an IMAX Dolby system installed in your theater sized living room, that everyone obviously has. Bad mixes are inexcusable and sound mixing snobbism is a symptom of the pompous pretentiousness that is the rotten core of Hollywood. Yes, Hollywood, most foreign films with DTS have perfectly good and serviceable mixes that sound nice in both Stereo and Surround..

I do.

I still have subs on.

Hell yeah PREACH brotha!

My partner and I use it for watching ANYTHING. Turn it off for music and games, and on for any possible watching thing. It’s MAGIC.

It is and they used to.

There's something called dynamic range, which is essentially the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds. With a low dynamic range explosions and whispers are just as loud as each other.

There has been a recent trend for filmmakers to want a high dynamic range. This makes explosions, car crashes, and gunshots feel extra impactful. The problem is that that means other things become more quiet by comparison. Those "other things" include dialogue.

This leads to people not in a movie theatre or with a home audio setup that costs more than my car not being able to hear a goddamned word.

I fucking hate modern movies.

On Windows, right click the sound icon, go into sound options, playback, double click on your default playback device, and go to the Enhancements tab.

LOUDNESS EQUALIZATION

is fucking awesome and more people should be aware of it. It’s baked into Windows 10!

This has driven me crazy for a long time too. It really feels like this picture and takes something away from any enjoyment.

It isn't just you. Vox has a good video on it.

The mixing isn't for your home. Which it obviously should be.

Older TV shows generally have a more even audio mix, because they were mixed for clear dialogue on TV speakers. Nowadays even TV shows have movie theater mixes, despite the fact that no one will ever see these shows in the cinema. I think TV execs just assume way more people have a Dolby Atmos system in their living room than they do in reality. It's pretty stupid.

Most TVs seem to default to playing the surround audio track, which is a terrible idea when you only have stereo speakers, but I guess the TVs do it in case you decide to hook up a multi speaker system mid movie?? Choosing the down mixed stereo audio instead, makes for a much better experience for most people.