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More important question: Why subtitles are called "closed captions"?
Closed captions are encoded separately and their display is elective.
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This aligns pretty well with McLuhan's concept of cool and hot media [0]. The younger generations prefer it cool - perhaps their hotness is found in newer forms like video games. [0] https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/MIDDMedia/Hot_versus_cool_m...
For context, I'm in my mid-30s and grew up playing video games. When doing chores I listen to podcasts or audio books. I really like to think of media consumption in terms of attentional pressure. How long can you not pay attention without "missing something". For movies and TV shows it seems like 15 seconds, plus or minus depending on the content itself. Chatty podcasts give you 30 seconds or a minute. I enjoy the f…
One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…
There's a lot of podcasts with egregiously bad audio mixing. Which...c'mon guys it's a podcast. You should get that right. I've wondered if there's a way to use an algorithm to make people's voices a little easier to understand, like slightly exaggerating consonants or something.
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Would a soundbar help the situation or make it worse? With two kids 90% of the time I'm watching kids movies but I still turn on the closed captions. Any background noise and it's nearly impossible to hear the dialogue without cranking up the volume to an undesirable level.
It might to some extent, but it's not the perfect way to go. Speech reproduction gets muddled by distortion and by masking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking ). If you have one speaker reproducing both speech and other sound, this is what happens: 1. additional sound output means heightened distortion 2. when two sounds come from two places, our brains can separate them due to phase differences and spat…
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The conversion isn't so much as "automatic" or opinionated, but clearly defined in a spec. And it _is_ mathematically correct in terms of sound energy entering the ears. A device may be doing the conversion incorrectly of course. But there is still an omission, which is the introduction of the centre speaker was (as I understand it) to "pin" dialogue to the screen more effectively. That implies there _is_ some physic…
The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations. Having dialog in a center speaker means it comes from a different location than the mu…
That's because a human is not 1 microphone. It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2, which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area.
The open source hardware "ReSpeaker" allows to start experimenting how a microphone array works, including why the cocktail party effect doesn't really affect us in most cases.
The notable exception is if there's a signal that is generated perfectly on the plane perpendicular to the 2 ears. Then, humans have a hard time localizing it between front or back (180deg swap). We can still get an angular vector where the sound is. However simply turning your head removes this constraint exception.
(Also bring able to your your head and move your body also shows a visual-acoustic SLAM algorithm going on in your brain.)
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Dune sounds great on my 2.0 system at home (low mid-range receiver and ~$200 yamaha floorstanders). Sicario too, from the same director, I generally think he does a fantastic job with audio mixes. Strange that article doesn’t talk about the tripod noise from the ‘05 War of the Worlds. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY099ihULs
The '05 tripod noises are meant to sound like V1 bomb scare-sounds, which is originally made to sound like mythical Horns of Jericho: https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/09/sound-fear-room40-boss-la... Listen to the V1 bomb sound in the clip on that page - there's no surprise they're being referred to in following works of fiction.
I always have subtitles on in games. Especially since I find it hard to focus on the words being spoken and video game cutscenes are almost always unable to be rewound. During gameplay it's harder to read and play at the same time though, although over the years it's gotten easier. Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time. I think for watching movies they can b…
One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…
Things became worse in the past 10 or something years (I am a 40 something btw.). As the article states we used subtitles in movies to learn language and to understand thick accent. However throughout time while we got better and better in comprehension the use of subtitles remained the same in overall. But very uneven too.
Old movies (not yet seen) and movies for children are never a problem. Also some properly made movies. The atmosphere and sound effects are fine as well as the dialogs.
But it became too much of a trend to make muttery a mushy dialogs where people seemingly unable to articulate. To the level never heard in real life (where muttering may be more common due to the more causal and mood or situation affected nature of conversations, unlike the carefully created and heavily controlled ones in movies). Also it is uneven. Some movies are still fine, but others (perhaps the newest Batman comes to mind, unsure, forgot that movie mostly, being so obscure) are a struggle, not fun at all. Aggrevated by the loud bangs and muttery dialog combo.
A sign that this is a systematic and intentionally manufactured problem, that sound engineers and directors lost their touch completely, is the existence of a feature in the newest Apple TV for equalizing the sound level in a movie. Streaming hardware manufacturers had to come up with solution to correct what sound engineers ruined or unable to get right nowadays.
Older movies are almost never a problem. New movies are in an uncomfortable amount.
One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…