[eli5] Why is it so hard to hear the dialogue in a lot of movies and shows when everything else is so loud?

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I’m constantly having to turn the volume up and down depending on the what the scene is. It’s not just me either. A lot of people I know have resorted to just turning on the closed captioning so they can hear what they’re saying. I don’t remember this being an issue before.

In: 2005

34 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m seeing a lot of comments talking about how the sound is made for cinema’s and that’s why it’s shit on my home tv. But… A lot of times (I’m looking at you Tenet for example) it’s not really any better in cinema’s. The explosions still hurt my ears and I still can’t actually hear what people are saying.

Anonymous 0 Comments

We watch everything with closed captions now. Some of the movies are so loud, it would be nice if you could turn the music down like in video games.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So you have a space to work within when you make your sounds for a film, Think of it like a sheet of paper: you have space down the bottom for quiet sounds and space at the top for loud sounds and everything in between for all the ‘normal’ sounds. When they make all the sounds in a film, they like to be able to save space in the top area for really, really loud sounds, so quite often, because they need to use all that top area for the loud sounds, they put a lot of speech in the quiet area. This is fine when you are watching at the cinema and everything is really loud but at home when you have to have the TV a bit quieter, those quiet sounds can be so quiet you can’t hear them. But when those big explosions come, you can hear them just fine!

Anonymous 0 Comments

If u have 5.1 speaker it will “solve” the problem.

The dialogue comes from the Center speaker.