This is a particularly important topic for myself on the spectrum, as I’ve had a lot of difficulties trying to follow what’s going on in the cinema. I’d have subtitles on all the time if that was possible.
This is a particularly important topic for myself on the spectrum, as I’ve had a lot of difficulties trying to follow what’s going on in the cinema. I’d have subtitles on all the time if that was possible.
TL;DR:
Modern actors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles with no theatre training whatsoever who mumble their words because they think it sounds cooler.
Directors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles who believe unintelligible dialogue is more realistic, but also that drowning it in way too loud music makes the film more emotional, that sound recording equipment gets in the way of filming and should be kept as far away as possible from the action, and that if they know what the script says (because they’ve read it a thousand times) so will the audience.
Producers (and the aforementioned actors and directors) are cheap lazy incompetent self entitled imbeciles who’ll refuse to film another take claiming the useless shit they just filmed can be fixed in post (it can’t, it’s shit).
Theatres fired all competent projectionists and are now manned by lazy incompetent untrained teenagers who have no idea how to properly operate and set up the sound systems and will more often than not play the films at the wrong volume.
Streaming sites overcompress and overprocess (and overprice) the audio into an even more unintelligible noisy mess.
“Smart” TVs overprocess it even more on top of that, making it even worse. And you’re probably using the wrong settings anyway.
In short: the audio is intentionally crap, becomes even crappier in every step between filming and your ears (except, according to people working in sound processing, the sound processing step, but there’s only so much you can do to fix crappy digital audio).
Audio standards are also a fucking mess. Getting a surround sound system to actually work is a nightmare because there’s more surrounded sound audio standards than there are atoms in the universe, and the “auto” settings that are supposed to take care of it just don’t.
And if the format of the media you’re watching doesn’t match your speaker setup, the audio ends up being awful.
As somebody who recently set up a Denon 5.1 system, that’s not been my experience. I mean, there’s certainly a lot of tweaking, wires, and configuration to do, but it’s not because of the audio standards. Dolby just fucking works, and everybody uses it.
The main problem is trying to figure out how best to upmix stereo inputs to get it to sound decent, and make sure you can get a decent mix of narration and music. I’ve found it’s best to just trust the microphone-based auto-configuration for speaker levels, and use the other options like multi-channel stereo and the dialog enhancer settings to make it work better.