You got a smidge of a point. Yes, movie surround sound is mastered for (home) cinemas and if that’s the setup you have, it works. You don’t even need a fancy setup. I have a cheap old 5.1 system and when I’m in the mood for a home cinema experience, including the volume, it works great.
However, there’s no excuse for studios to not provide a more compressed TV mix because not everyone has a home cinema or the capability of turning up the volume without angry neighbours kicking down your door. Especially for Series and direct-to-streaming movies that never had a theatrical release but just drop on Netflix one day. Because there are plenty of those that are also not mixed for quieter soundsystems, TV speakers or people who cannot or don’t want to turn up the volume.
So yes. I expect the audio to work well on my living room TV. Because I’m paying to watch it on a service that’s available on on my living room TV and Studios know that the vast majority of people do not have a home cinema. It is thus, in my opinion, a reasonable expectation, for any movie that released past the DVD age, to have an audio track that doesn’t require me to own a home theatre. Because you can optimise for two things, by just having two audio tracks. Some movies on Netflix even have a dedicated stereo tracks available. Why can’t that be the norm?
Or, those streaming services could offer a setting to compress the dynamic range for home viewing. My AppleTV actually has that function built in and it’s very useful when you want to watch something late at night without waking the whole house up. Sadly, most streaming services use their own media player instead of the native one and don’t have a comparable feature…
That said, I very much don’t want a compressed dynamic range sound mix to become the only one available. I happen to have a setup that can just about handle a higher dynamic range in most of cases, if I can/want to raise the volume accordingly and I usually like it that way.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 3 days ago
In other words, movies are not intended to be played back at devices that aren’t connected to theater-grade audio hardware.
Of course this requires the question of why movies are even released on Blu-Ray, DVD, or streaming services at all instead of just using the existing distribution system for movie theaters. Everyone who doesn’t run an IMAX setup at home is too poor to watch movies.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 3 days ago
Not just audio hardware, also a big screen, darkened room, etc.
Because there is a demand for them and they like making money?
If you’re ever in the Netherlands, go visit the Rijksmuseum and see De Nachtwacht by Rembrandt van Rijn. It’s absolutely enormous (363 by 437cm). Just look at it for a while, marvel at the details. Then go visit the gift shop and buy the 50x70cm poster.
Go home, stick the poster on your wall. Do you get the same sense of awe as you did from the full size painting? Can you even make out all the intricate details that make it so compelling? No, you can’t. It doesn’t work in that small format in your living room.
Is this Rembrandt’s fault? No, of course not. He painted it at the size it meant to be viewed at. He didn’t take into account that people would be making small posters off it almost 400 years later. Worse, if he had made the painting so that it would look good on a small poster, would that painting also have had the same impact in its full size? I’d say it wouldn’t have.
Rembrandt also made much smaller paintings, if you want a Rembrandt in your living room you’d be better off getting a reproduction of those. Does this mean that the gift shop shouldn’t be selling small posters of ‘De Nachtwacht’? There clearly is a demand for them.
Same goes for movies. They didn’t set out to make a movie to view at home, they set out to make a movie to be viewed in the theater. Could they have made on that worked at home. Sure, but then it wouldn’t have worked in the theater. Should they not sell them on BluRay when there is clearly a demand for them? There are plenty of people who do have a nice setup at home that does the movie justice.
No, you can go to the theater or watch made-for-TV movies. The fact that blockbuster movies are made for the theater doesn’t prevent anyone from making TV movies, and they do make them. Just not that particular movie.
The problem is that you didn’t actually want to see that movie, you wanted a similar but different movie, one that would have worked on a regular living room TV. But that’s not the movie they decided to make. You bought the small Rembrandt poster and now you’re complaining that you can’t see the details and the painting kind of sucks because of it.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 3 days ago
By that measure, most movie theaters also shouldn’t be showing movies – very few of them have the precise setup a given movie was mastered for. If the movie was made with IMAX laser projection in mind, it should only be down in theaters with such projectors even if this excludes 95% of theaters. Likewise for rumble seats. Or theaters with Atmos sound systems if the movie was made with DTS-X in mind.
Of course this leads to the conclusion that it’s financially unwise to release movies at all because any movie will only ever be able to be shown in very few theaters and will not recoup its production costs.
Or, you know, you release it for multiple projection and sound setups and accept that there is a close enough level of fidelity for a given use case. Which leads us back to actually properly mixing it for the home release because the people who have IMAX laser 3D projectors and 12,000 W sound systems are not going to be using Blu-Ray in the first place.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 3 days ago
That’s what calibration is for. You master using a reference display and whatever you use in the theater should be calibrated to the same specs.
Why would that be a problem? DTS:X is more flexible with speaker layout than Atmos. If you have a theater with a speaker layout for Atmos it should be no issue to use them with a DTS:X processor.
How do you go from “Atmos and DTS:X in a theater are close enough to give a similar experience” to “we should mix it for a bunch of crappy 2.0 TV speakers” ?
If you mix it for such an inferior setup, nothing is left of the original movie. Sounds i a huge part of the movie experience. Try watching a scary movie with the sound muted, it’s not scary at all. If you mix it for a TV’s built in speakers, nothing of value is left. What is even the point of watching a movie like that?