Comment on Off topic
accideath@feddit.org 3 days agoYou 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.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 3 days ago
I think this depends on how you see movies. Do you see them as art or just a form of entertainment?
For me, it’s about how the movie makes me feel. I think movies are art, and art is meant to make you feel things. If I watch a movie I want to be overwhelmed by the action, I want to be moved by the music swelling at that emotional moment, I want to be creeped out by that scary scene in the spooky house with the wind howling all around me.
You don’t get that if you watch in a bright room with a 2.0 sound track with no dynamic range. To me there is no point in even watching a movie if it can’t immerse me in the movie and make me feel all those things.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I sorta agree with you, except that I’ve worked in audio before, and you can in fact mix for HiFi and normal people at the same time. That is actually what like 90% of mixing/mastering is. Making it sound good everywhere.
I also hard disagree on not being able to get a good experience with 2.0. Spend a couple thousand (obviously not everyone needs to do this) on 2.0 tower speakers, maybe add a sub (technically now 2.1), and you will almost certainly get a better experience than 99% of pre-build everything-in-the-box surround sound systems.
You can, of course, build you own surround sound system for more than a few thousand, but that is a radically different price range, which I don’t think is really relevant to this conversation (I certainly don’t have that kind of money to spend on a speaker that I’m only using when watching movies). I think it is borderline poor-shaming (or really just not-rich-shaming) to say that movies can only have audible dialogue at $10,000 surround sound systems. Before that, 2.0 or 2.1 will almost always be a better investment.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 2 days ago
It doesn’t have to be expensive at all. You can get a 5.1 setup with a decent amp, floor-standing fronts, bookshelf surrounds, a center and a subwoofer for as little as €3000, and that will blow any sound bar in the same price range out of the water. Add a nice 77” OLED, pick last year’s model for a good deal and you can have a home theater setup that will be good enough for 99,9% of people for less than €5k.
Why do you think I would use it only for movies? I have never even heard the speakers in my TV because disabling them was the first thing I did after unboxing. I use my 5.1.4 set all the time. Why wouldn’t you?
No one says you need to spend that amount of money, it can be much, much cheaper. €3k can get you a pretty nice set, but you can build a passable one for half that.
accideath@feddit.org 1 day ago
3000€ is still a hell of a lot of money. Most people I know don’t have a TV that’s more than 500€ and no sound system at all or maybe a 200€ soundbar. I don’t know anyone whose TV + sound system is above 3000€ combined and the one guy who hits that mark is a movie lover.
If multi thousand euro setups would be the norm, I don’t think we would be having the conversation about bad-for-home-video audio as much. Most people aren’t in the position to spend that much cash on their TV, though.
That said, you can get a decent used 5.1 audio setup for well under 100€, that can totally cope with most of the dynamic range and deliver a good audio experience. But most people don’t know and don’t care about that. They just want whatever movie they’re watching to sound good enough on their TVs.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
You misunderstand me. My principal point is that any 2.0/2.1 (i.e., stereo) setup will always be better than the surround sound system of equal price.
That axiom only starts changing when talking about exceedingly expensive setups (e.g., spending 10k on a custom Elac or KEF system). Until then, a stereo system will have better value 99% of the time.
As for my comment on spending money on speakers I would only use for movies: surround sound only has a real advantage for movies, for other activities stereo speakers of the same price will undisputedly be better. I would hate to spend 3k on a surround system, when I’ll use my 3k stereo system for most of my listening anyway (this is an example).
But I see that we have very different values (and likely different budgets) when it comes to audio.