kottke.org: In theory, this should be a golden age for movie sound. There’s better digital recording and mixing equipment than ever, theaters are incentivized to offer a premiere experience, and home theater equipment is more expensive, elaborate, and ubiquitous.
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This article immediately caught my attention. Recently I saw Dune in the Movie Theatre. Everyone was ranting and raving about the sound and when I saw saw it, I could barely understand what they were saying, even when they were speaking in english. And I even saw it in Imax. I don’t know too much about sound, other than a sound design class or two in undergrad but I did learn a thing or two from it and in this article. I had no idea that different streaming companies had different standards. Also that there is no industry standard. I can’t imagine the work that must already go into transposing the material from one mode to the next. I do have an idea of what compassion does to sound and it makes sense that things will sound differently when using different viewing methods. I feel that with all of this information, I may be more inclined to purchase physical copies of movies that I really enjoy. Especially if there is supposedly a good sound design.
What I found interesting from this article was first how they were talking about "dialogue levels" which is a term that eludes me, but based on inference I'm going to assume it's based on how loud they're speaking? Someone can correct me if I'm incorrect, but then they mention the "overall volume" of the film and initially I'm still rather confused. But again. I'm going to assume they're talking about the volume at which everything that's caught on film is caught on a mic and measured overall? Again, sound design and technology is an art that I'm not at all familiar with, but to read that certain streaming services have different specifications on how they sound is kinda awesome. Like, people have RANTED about how the movie Dune had a piss poor sound experience and people preferred the movie theater experience over the HBO streaming platform makes sense, y'know? They'd have better equipment than my Surface Book. But to hear that the quality is pre-determined by different platforms is worth thinking about.
When I first read this header, I thought about the debate that I have seen happening recently about the accessibility of movie dialogue and how theaters should automatically provide subtitles for all movies, regardless of the language or audience. Even to this day, there are some movies I have seen a dozen times that I realize I misheard or didn’t actually hear an important line that I only caught because I had subtitles on. There truly shouldn’t be any reason that you can’t hear the words spoken, unless it’s written to not be heard. The insight on movie theater replays and streaming adjustments was interesting to read, but the fact that this problem continues to happen means that people aren’t taking the time to actually make a change or listen to audience feedback. What also interests me is the note about how the “theatrical mix” comes first, then the “streaming mix” next. If a movie is made for streaming with the potential for a theater release, do they create that theatrical mix in advance? Does making the streaming mix first provide different results as opposed to the opposite?
Yeah, sure, compression is unavoidable for streaming, but in addition to the points made in this article about what you're compressing (dialogue vs overall sound and effects) a lot of people don't understand the difference between audio compression and data compression. I think the problem comes from most people just not being able to tell the difference (at least, not able to recognize that the sound is the reason they are having a bad experience) between good sound and bad sound, and so they don't bother to understand how different types of things affect the sound. Sure, a not overly compressed .mp3 can sound okayish, because a lot of work went into the .mp3 algorithm to minimize the heard effects of the compression that they do, but that doesn't mean that it's really all there, and when things get more complicated, that can be a real detriment. It can be surprising how much data compression you can get with something like .flac before you even start to have to compress the actual audio, and if people bothered to understand that and build systems around using those algorithms, I think there could be drastic improvements even around the seemingly insurmountable problem of needing to compress things when you're streaming.
Also, if you can afford the bandwidth to stream something in 4k, you can afford to stream at least 44.1k x 16b audio (CD quality), and if we're being real with ourselves, CD quality should really be the minimum.
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