Yea, the few times I remembered ear plugs, I had a more enjoyable experience
This guy knows what’s up.
Question if you’ve been recently: is it just me or have they made movies really damn loud? Not in the sense that they’re trying to get a broader dynamic range, but the whole thing is just tinnitus-inducing the whole way through. Is the mix just bad, the tuning bad, or are the volumes just cranked?
AA5B@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They changed how they measured loudness a few years back on both the mixing side and the playback side. Back in the 00’s the measurements were based on peak volumes, so brick wall limiting was used to get the most volume that you were allowed to have in playback. This caused the dynamics to be essentially non existent. Filmmakers hated this, movie goers hated it, the only people who liked it were the lawyers because it meant lawsuits didn’t happen.
Laws were changed in the early 10’s that changed how loudness was measured. Now it’s measured as exposure over time. This has had many benefits in the production of both films and music, however the laws, at least in the USA and Canada, were written very broadly, and consider movie theaters and concert halls to both be performance venues. This means movie theaters have the same restrictions as concert halls.
Because the law measures exposure over time it allows the loud areas to be loud as long as there’s quiet areas to offset it. This means when you have someone who doesn’t understand yet how the new laws affect the audio mix, the dialogue will get buried to make the explosions more “impactful”. It has started to get better since the laws have been around for a while and people have gotten used to them.
As dumb as all this sounds the calculations themselves, are very well calculated and you are way less likely to get hearing damage these days from a concert or movie theater than you used to. Your ears get damaged from long term exposure easier than peak volumes, and with measurement stick now measuring long term exposure as opposed to peak volumes, you end up better protected. Because of the regulations you are more likely to get hearing damage from headphones than you are a concert or a movie theater.