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Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

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Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#591

Post by c0nsumer »

jader201 wrote: post #306
IgorPartola wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.

> most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most Wait, is this true? I’ve always thought I was in the minority for “still” having “just” 2.0. I’ve been needing to upgrade my receiver for a while, but mostly putting it off since I can’t find a decent 2.0 one with a good number of inputs. Almost every receiver is (5+2n).1 these days (where n >= 0). I feel so behind the times in my simple 2.0 system, even though I think…

I'm with you. After having a nice 5.1 system 20 years ago, and a space set up for it, I now have fallen back to nice 2.0 or 2.1 systems.

Decent amp with a DAC to some quality speakers and a sub and poof: really great audio in a simple system that doesn't require running wires everywhere.

With the advent of cheap, decent, small single-channel amps it's really easy to do something like Apple TV -> HDMI -> TV -> TOSLINK -> Amp -> Speakers and be done with it. (I know I could go Apple TV right to the Amp, but passing it through the TV mitigates image-audio delay.)

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#592

Post by coliveira »

skydhash wrote: post #321
coliveira wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know a foreign language, an option that works is to watch the dubbed version. I sometimes do this, especially for action movies: the foreign dubbed version is often easier to understand than the original english, because people doing the dubbing want to be understood.

French version are always so clear (friends and family watch movies on laptop and phones). But I know enough English to notice that the movement of the actor's mouth does not correspond to the sound.

That's correct, but if the option is to read subtitles, I prefer to listen to the translated version.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#593

Post by daniel-cussen »

mihaaly wrote: post #579
daniel-cussen wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SUBTITLES: The film industry makes high art as well as common fare. The high art is what the artists want to make and enjoy but it has a very small market. The common fare is what pays the bills, because it sells like 100x more tickets than high art. High art = caviar, Shakespeare "caviar for the general" whereas common fare is hamburgers, flipping burgers, which is a real business, many more servings of hamburgers t…

Sounds like a parallel topic to the poor sound mixing trouble to me. High art existed before muffled conversations mixed with loud sound effects or music. Also high art can coexist with balanced sound and articulate conversation. Or balanced sound can be used for 'burger' movies for their benefit.

Well back then just making a movie was cool, now you gotta make it better, use all the technology available, leave nothing on the table. They're trying to impress each other, stedda making good movies everybody can enjoy.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#594

Post by moffkalast »

analog31 wrote: post #76
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #12

Not mentioned: The increase in poor audio mixing that sounds like it was done by a monkey in addition to the prevalence of devices with speakers crammed in odd directions inside of enclosures that are in no way, shape, or form big enough to contain them. If there was one advantage of the days of big tube TVs it was you had plenty of space to also fit big speakers in too

In addition, I've read that young people are going deaf due to ear buds.

Tbf, that's been the case for a hundred years since headphones were invented. I doubt it's changed much.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#595

Post by ei8ths »

ryandrake wrote: post #136

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…

We do the same thing, loud noises, quiet dialogues and im constantly adjusting the sound. I've tried the audio settings where you can normalize or do night mode, it just doesn't work well. I have kids trying to sleep. We recently started hooking up a bluetooth speaker that sits between us and on loud scenes we just flip it down into the couch. We both try to work on stuff while watching so subtitles isn't something we can just turn on.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#596

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

ryandrake wrote: post #136

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…

You've got this backwards. Overly compressed dynamics are far more common than "excessive" dynamics. It's definitely not a case of sound engineers needlessly flexing.

Your receiver will have a dynamic compression feature of some sort. Make sure that's maxed and it'll help. But frankly, an action movie isn't supposed to have explosions at the same sound level as dialog.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#597

Post by snarfy »

ryandrake wrote: post #136

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…

> Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them

Most of this is a result of surround sound and people not setting it up. There are two main speakers, a center speaker, and various surround speakers depending on the setup.

Dialog is primarily mixed to come out of the center speaker. If you turn the center volume up and the main speakers down you can fix the problem where explosions/music are too loud but dialog is too quiet.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#598

Post by KineticLensman »

troad wrote: post #396
zengief wrote: post #355

A new hearing loss modality seems to be gaining traction -- "hidden" hearing loss. A core symptom is difficulty parsing speech in noisy environments. Caused by repeated exposure to loud noises. Don't know if folks around here are going clubbing much but I'm under the impression that it's gotten way louder recently. Live music as a whole is pretty popular these days. Apparently most who have it don't have the classic…

I definitely have this. My friends can usually understand one another shouting in a moderately loud bar; I can’t understand them at all. I don’t know if it’s technically hearing loss though; I feel like I can hear the noises my friends are making, I just can’t segregate them from the background noise enough to parse the former as speech.

I wear hearing aids for moderate hearing loss. They are optimised for picking out speech from the background sounds and in the open air or rooms that have good acoustics my comprehension can be better than people with notionally better hearing. But some sounds are very effective jammers for hearing aids, notably running water, boiling kettles and, unfortunately, the ambient noises in typical restaurants.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#599

Post by antiterra »

egypturnash wrote: post #274
antiterra wrote: post #52

The other trend I notice is not caring much at all about video quality. If there’s social interaction, young people I know are happy with a low bitrate 720p streamed over discord in a small window. Maybe this is an artifact of videos on phones?

This is not new. People were absolutely delighted to watch smeary third-generation VHS dubs of Japanese cartoons back in the eighties.

I was one of them which is maybe why I want to be as far from the low vertical resolution smeary VHS world as possible when it comes to film/Tv.

Of course, the frustrating limitations of the past become the faux-nostalgic aesthetic of the future (there’s like a Gibson quote for this I think?) I’m all for fake tracking artifacts in a music video.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#600

Post by mindslight »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #400
IgorPartola wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.

It’s honestly ridiculous how bad the stereo (aka what 99% of viewers will experience) mixes are. The explosions can be heard by my neighbors yet I can barely hear the dialogue at the same volume. Find myself basically doing half the mix work myself with the volume control. Too many audiophiles in the production chain focusing on something that barely matters at the expense of most viewers.

What is your setup like? I feel like your comment better describes a problem with subwoofers. I've had plenty of enjoyment from bass throughout my life, but I still don't see the need for a sub anywhere near watching TV or movies. Never mind the related issue of highly-resonant perfunctory ones bundled with cheap consumer gear.

Just the other day I was helping a relative who had gotten a soundbar because her TV's speakers broke. She was complaining the sound carried too far to other rooms. I found the equalizer settings and turned down "woofer" which seemed to help, but then I read the manual that it only applied to an external subwoofer so I was left wondering if it was the placebo effect. Turns out there was a wireless subwoofer placed some distance away. I showed her the equalizer settings if she wanted to turn it down even more, and told her she could also just unplug the subwoofer if she wanted. To her, the inclusion of that box was actually an anti-feature.

And for other frequencies, I'd say middle-cost "prosumer" gear generally exacerbates dynamic range problems, being decent at low levels but distorted at higher levels. My Thinkpad speakers sound like crap all the time, and my receiver+speaker setup handles higher volumes without sounding louder due to distortion.

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