All right, I meant crap sound tracks.

I'm watching Windtalkers right now. The dialogue goes along very nicely, and everything is clear. Then there's music, or bombs, or whatever, about 40 dB louder. I kept reducing the volume at home and I would have hated it in the theater.

I get the volume adjusted for the gunshots and whatnot, then they go back to dialogue and you can hardly hear it.

What are some current films with the same properties?




edit: the title. Every time I looked at it it looked wrong, then right.... must need new glasses!

Interstellar was the same way- I watched it at Cinemagic, with Cinedigm, a new paradigm in sound.... Whatever that means.

The movie had great sound effects, so much so that it was hard to tell what the actors were saying.
I had a customer recently complain the bass in his theater was too loud at any volume and to play interstellar to see what he meant.
There is a light with a frosted plate glass cover that rattled incessantly and thanks to interstellar we were able to pinpoint that and try to put some type of gasket around the edges.
I liked the movie, but no matter what you do to correct the audio there is no clear separation.

Breaking bad was pretty terrible. All of the whispering, then yelling, then whispering, then yelling, then whispering, then shooting. It was a pain in the ass. We have kids, and we woke them up several times. Night mode helped, but it was still bad and annoying.

I watched Jurassic World in the theaters..Horrible Sound track...so many lost opportunity for epic sound..

The movie also was terrible so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Is the same thing that happened to music with the invention of the iPod happening with movies with the popularity of streaming video services? Are they figuring people will be watching on a crappy vizio TV with the amazing wireless soundbar the salesman threw in for free so who cares how it sounds on a real system?

Or is the fault of the people who set up the theaters' sound systems? I know there is supposed to be some kind of a standard for such things, but I doubt they are regularly and forcibly inspected. The ones here sure sound different that is for sure.

Yeah, movies with "massive" differences between dialogue and music or other effects did seem to have been getting better lately... but then suddenly there are some new, shocking examples. And I'm sure most of us already have the center channel turned up a little bit above spec, which makes the difference even greater on a "flat" calibrated system!

I don't understand why the sound designers want it so you have to strain to hear what anyone's saying, and then make our ears ring with deafening explosions. Sure, you want dynamic range in a soundtrack... but this is range taken to an impractical degree.

Love The Matrix, but you have to throttle down the subs a bunch or bad things will happen. Doesn't matter how calibrated it is, the LF takes over the action scenes.

Maybe there's something lost in translation between a real theatre environment and using the same soundtrack in a small home environment.

Somebody should write up a spec so that the movies provide the same level of performance in every theater and in a home environment.

We can call it Totally Harmonious eXperience, or something.

Without knowing the equipment in your system and how it was set up, it's almost impossible to know how to respond to this. Assuming the channel levels were set according to some format's requirements, the balance between them should allow you to hear everything without any of them overtaking the dialogue.

Did you think of increasing the Center channel level and decreasing the overall SPL?

This is something I don't need to worry about, since I'm using a two channel system for everything.

:)

The middle Audyssey setting does help a bit but does not improve bad sound mixing.

There is a standard and it's a scam.

Dolby, I believe, was the subject of a conversation at a local technology summit a few years back. Or maybe it was at a CEDIA dinner. The basic idea was that the company, whoever they are, requires periodic testing of the audio setup to guarantee that it is within spec. Audio people who do good systems know that once set up, an audio system rarely changes performance. But this inspection and tweaking system was created to bring in repeated income rather than make every purchase a one-shot situation. So yeah, they get tested, but the actual reason isn't the best fidelity!



Me too. It was the performance of this system that spurred me to start this thread.

The thing I'm complaining about happens on some very specific movies, not on most movies or TV shows. I'm comparing the good performance of a system that is set up some way with the same system playing the movie I'm complaining about. The only difference is the movie. In fact, the source for audio and video in all cases is the same DirecTV HR24.

How could the complaint then be about the system?


It's a Yamaha AV receiver set to 2 channel stereo and adjusted via the mic calibration they include.

The speakers are the Marantz 10, an incredible 10" 4-way made for a very short period around 1981 when Marantz had an actual loudspeaker engineer, Rich May, who designed them. The speakers are so spooky good that I've heard sounds to the left and behind me, though I've only got two speakers in the room!


How would doing that invalidate my complaint? "I have to turn up the center channel and lower the overall volume ONLY WHEN I'M WATCHING THIS MOVIE so there must be something wrong with my setup." Uh.... nope. It's the movie. And the comments of others here back that up.

Lighten up, Francis!

Have you tried setting the cable/satellite box to Stereo? This may be in the conversion from multi-channel to stereo- what was the format of that movie? I don't remember seeing it posted.

Yeah, properly set up speakers make a huge difference, whether two channel or more. I used to move through my living room and hear wide variations in the sound and now that I did some tweaking (when I got the Parasound equipment), I can walk in, through and out of the room without losing the placement of the instruments and vocals. I hear a lot that's outside of, behind, above and in front of the speakers, now.

I may have asked before- did Rich May work for Sony, in the early-mid '70s?

I don't think he did. I know he worked with his dad at JBL; was at Marantz; was at Califone; was chief engineer at Xantech for several years; and is now retired. I may have missed something in there.

The DirecTV Receiver allows a choice of Dolby Digital on or off. I have it off and use the analog audio outputs. There are no other audio adjustments other than turning the Bonk! up or down.