- cross-posted to:
- comicstrips@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- comicstrips@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/nonpolitical_comics/p/1657114/mr-lovenstein-volume
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One of the main reasons i watch everything with subtitles, people used to be amused when i would watch an english movie with english subtitles, then they got apartments with poor sound proofed walls and floors, they weren’t so amused anymore.
See also: crunchy snacks
Oh yeah that too, good shout.
Idc if the walls are literally paper like in feudal Japan! I’m not giving up my cracklin’ strips!
Oh I meant it’s hard to hear dialogue when eating popcorn or chips, so subtitles help out
My gf and I have been doing this for more than 20 years.
This is so common and so irritating that it literally makes me not look forward to watching movies, particularly at home in a shared living space. I don’t even watch many movies anymore because it’s annoying watching with subtitles all the time.
This is what getting old looks like people, take note.
That thing that mildly annoys you right now? It won’t go away, it will get worse, then your intolerance of thing will lead to avoiding the thing. Next thing you know, someone is asking you “Did you see the new Sooperfoob and Jerry movie? it’s amazing! Best one of the franchise!” and you’re going to be like… 😶
What does your audio system look like for your TV?
We’re expected to have separate audio systems now?..
Always has been. 🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Yes. TV speakers have gotten incredibly cheap and low quality. It’s audio/visual. You’ve invested a fair chunk into half of the experience with a TV, but ignored the other half.
Gotten? I never knew any TV set with at least respectable audio and I knew CRT TVs.
I think they were better at least, and mostly because there was space for them. In a CRT you had enough volume inside the TV to have even just little 2" drivers, now with ultrathins it’s hard to fit any even moderately okay speaker in there.
I didn’t, really…I can barely afford a 1080p TV. I’m not buying a sound bar, screw that, rather do something else.
K, like I said your personal finances are your own, but that’s why you don’t have good sound. Asked and answered.
I thought it was obvious that it was a rhetorical question, man
If you’re watching movies mixed for surround sound on the stereo speakers on your TV, you’re gonna have a bad time
I would know, I do it all the time
I’m glad I’m no avid of movies. Wasn’t enough that TV’s are so locked down and spying on me, now I’d have to buy extra stuff too… Screw that noise…
I appreciate TVs not wasting resources on putting decent speakers in it that I’ll never use because I did buy a soundbar over a decade ago that has decent sound and has outlasted the TV I bought it for. Plus TVs are so thin these days that they probably can’t even drive decent bass, and the speakers they do have are rear facing, so they don’t even drive the sound towards you.
Modularity isn’t a bad thing IMO.
Okay this I can completely agree with actually, good take. You changed my mind and you’re right.
I kinda wish some things would be simple but eh it is what it is.
Oh yeah, I understand the sentiment entirely. With so many dark patterns dominating the world we live in because we live in a society that decided to embrace greed instead of seeing it as a primary motivator of evil, I can’t blame anyone that looks at the state of things with suspicion anytime there are downsides. And while it isn’t realistic to expect as good audio from a built-in system as a separate dedicated audio system, I do think it’s ridiculous that the standard is so dysfunctional that you either can’t understand what people are saying or explosions are way too loud. Especially in this digital world where mixing separate audio channels isn’t a difficult task. Streaming services should just have a stereo and mono version of the audio that is mixed well for that format if it is actually a harder problem than I think it is.
Some of it is practicality, but I don’t doubt that greed also plays into it. I mean, even on the modularity side, I don’t have the option of easily finding a TV without any speakers at all, or a TV without smart features that a) aren’t as good as other options I have to access those features and b) were actually thrown in to spy on data, as your previous comment mentioned.
So yeah, I don’t blame you at all for being suspicious of the companies that absolutely are trying to fuck their users because their real customers are data buyers, even if I do prefer my soundbar.
Home theatre systems have been a thing for decades. Soundbars are the cheaper and simpler new alternative.
Alternatively you can just use a media player thay compresses audio. This is easier if you use a PC connected to your TV but I’m sure some TV apps allow it too.
you’ve had to buy ‘extra stuff’ for decades. The TV is only half the equation.
Its buying a DSLR camera, and being upset it didn’t come with the best lens. It comes with one that works, but you arn’t going to have good results.
Buying a consumer TV is nothing like buying a DSLR camera…
Are you unfamiliar with the concept of an analogy?
Yes, because there’s a limit to how thin a screen can be and still fit decent speakers, and that sailed by 20 years ago.
No, but the solution is different if you were to have a sound bar or are using the build-in speakers.
“Whatcha doing housemate?”
“Rigging 5.1 surround-sound that I can’t fucking afford, so that the bass and explosions absolutely rip through your walls, but at least I can hear the whispering.”
Yeah fuck that. I’ve had surround sound before. It’s not remotely the issue I’m complaining about. It’s about audio volume mixing for home screens for average people who just have a TV and thin walls.
So, you haven’t invested in your audio. You have a TV, great, but tv speakers are basically phone speakers.
You don’t need a big surround sound system, but you need something. Even the cheapest sound bars will likely solve this problem for you.
I choose food and rent.
Your personal finances are your business. I am here saying why you can’t hear anything. If the audio is bad, the invest in better audio, simple as that.
Yah I am dying to continue to feed the system that requires us to spend more money than we already did for stuff we own to get decent experience from it rather than add one fucking toggle that balances audio for people who aren’t interested in chasing optimization by feeding corporations more of our labor. Go play with your lootboxes.
“The system” is physics. You can’t have tiny speakers embeded in a flat screen sound as good as a dedicated sound system due to how sound works. Same goes for phones camera, the tiny size just cannot compete against bigger, dedicated hardware due to how light works.
So go ahead and go fight the universe if you want, I’ll be here enjoying my audio on big ass speakers you can find in a thrift shop since those things existed for decades.
Pretty sure the “corporation” that made my speakers in the 70’s are well fed with the non-existant money I sent them.
K. You asked why your sound was bad, I gave an answer. Your opinions on if it should or shouldn’t be that way are not relevant, this is the way it is. If you want good sound, you have to buy it. I can’t change society or manufacturers for you, I am only a guy explaining how you can get good sound.
Or you could just enable something like Loudness Equalization on whatever device you are playing the content from.
The getting old part is you not searching for a solution and just complaining.
FYI this is one of the main differences between the Hollywood and German soundtracks.
Here it’s mixed far better to listen in stereo while in surround cinematic you need to turn the front speaker up, if you have that system. And it doesn’t translate well to stereo.
Hollywood mixes are just awful, have been for decades now. You can go to the theater and have quiet voices and blown-out eardrums from a race scene.
I have a middle-to-upper-end 5.1 setup and have to fiddle with it like hell to keep the voices audible without ruining the action scenes.
And just forget about watching a Christopher Nolan film
Tenet was unwatchable without subtitles.
I haven’t watched it yet. Kinda want to, I have a low bar for video enjoyment. Maybe I’ll throw it on my phone and wait for a no-network time, but i’ll make sure i have subs for it :)
Watch Memento first. Its his better, non linear, film.
Scene:
- Important person walks into a room
- “Needless exposition about how rich and influential that person is”
- Another important person walks into a room
- “More needless exposition about how rich and influential that person is”
- “That person is rich and influential?”
- *wry smile*
Next scene, more of the same
They mix shit for 7.1 and to hell with everyone else
Yes basically what I said, but some say it’s good for reasons that elude me. So I try to stay on the technical base to avoid discussion.
Wouldn’t that be a question of studio sound versus scene sound? The original sound is usually recorded with a boom mic, resulting in a wider dynamic range, whereas the German voiceover can be recorded in a studio, without interference and the speakers much closer to the mic.
The alternative would be to give each actor a lapel mic which would then have to be edited out of the video and would also be infeasible in some situations.
Might want to put your link in fedi format: !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social
The way it is now people have to search their instance in their app to subscribe.
Problem is, that doesn’t work for links to actual posts, only communities.
Ok, I’ll try to keep this in mind
And this is why I, a genius, watch my content with subtitles. So I can keep the volume at a perpetually low level whilst still understanding what is being said even when it isn’t in a language I speak.
I suspect it is all a trick to teach people how to use a compressor
Older movies tended to have audio mixes where the dialogue was clear even when loud things were happening, people shouldn’t need to use a compressor.
They also didn’t have much dynamic range, it’s much easier to compress the range than expand it
I have not had a great experience with compression.
A couple TVs would have the audio delayed slightly, enough that the last syllable spoken was after they closed their mouths. Most of them also did a terrible job playing from TV speakers if the audio was in the center channel and I could not set it to stereo.
Also I find the leveling or night settings make it harder to hear because while the speaking volume is raised that doesn’t make it clearer. So if there is background music the same volume it is just muddled at a higher volume.
Compression is better than nothing but in no way comparable to a mix that is actually intentionally made to reduce the dynamic range. Having one mix and letting the compressor software fudge the balance is lazy and has mediocre results.
I still feel like it probably works better than trying to expand a flat mix. Center channel dialogue is a different issue imo, there should definitely be 2.0 mixes available for streaming content auto-downmixing will always be bad.
Center channel dialogue is part of the overall issue of only having one 5.1 high dynamic range mix available to play on a wide range of devices with vastly different setups.
Yeah, I have audio compression permanently cranked up to the max in VLC.
Nolan has entered the chat
The scene on the catamarans was deliberate, right?
By default I enable Loudness Equalization, which makes soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer.
I don’t care about the dynamic range if you can’t understand what they are saying.
I had such a situation years ago. I was listening to Mike Oldfields “Tubular Bells II” on headphones. For the first time. There is a sequence where the music stops, and a child is telling something. I turned up the volume to hear it, and got the last words “and nothing was ever heard of him again, except for the sound of tu-bu-lar bells”, and then came BANG the promised bell…
Good ol dolby
Pay for better audio people. TV companies make big shiny displays but out smartphone sized speakers in them. Gone are the days where you can get good audio from your TV. Even the cheapest sound bars will make a difference.
It’s not your ears. It’s your sound equipment.
Nope. Not always.
I have a none cheap but not super expensive soundbar. We were watching the film Phantoms the other night and the sound was just terrible.
The women’s voices were very clear but the men’s voices were inaudible whispers.
Turn it up …FUCK YOU, ACTION SCENE
Turn it down
Peter O’Toole introduced. We can hear him clearly because he was classically trained.
Go back to usual men talking and just whispers again.
Turn it up. FUCK YOU I SAID, ACTION SCENE
Oh FFS, turn it down.It was like that all the way through.
I have all the clear voice options working. I have tinkered on the sound profile on my TV to help try to lose the bass and give a bit more clarity on the voices but sometimes it’s just the shit way the audio on the film is mixed.
DRC
What about the Democratic Republic of Congo?
upvote for the comic, downvote for the political crap, so…zero sum votes?
Which part is political?
FYI, I am not the person you replied to.
The part where the comm it’s from is trying to not be political is, apparently, political. Some people here seem to think that spending every waking moment inside a landscape of political doom is a necessary purity test.
You there! Stop! You said the word ‘political’! That’s too political!
![[Mr Lovenstein] Volume](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/579/944/976/646/219/original/e93a9a49d1ddc0df.png){kind=link}