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The rising problem of inaudible dialogue. - Page 2

post #51 of 82
7/16/10 at 12:00pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by wadew1 View Post
It's more of an actor/dialogue problem than an audio problem. I got most of what Rampage was saying in the A-Team, but sometimes he just didn't enunciate.
Blame Marlon Brando and James Dean. Can anyone understand half of what Dean was saying in Giant?
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post #52 of 82
7/16/10 at 1:23pm
My hearing problems aside, I've always attributed the annoying "loud music and effects/quiet dialogue" effect to mismatched speakers.

We've got a fairly small center channel speaker competing with pretty substantial l/r speakers, and no adjusting I've ever done to their respective volumes has ever managed to even things out. So when we're watching a movie later at night, we have to turn everything down lest we piss off the neighbors, meaning that the dialogue gets buried. The obvious solution is to either get a bigger center channel speaker or ditch the neighbors.
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post #53 of 82
7/16/10 at 1:32pm
I'd advise people to try out headphones. I use them for 90% of all movies I see and I've never had problems understanding dialog
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post #54 of 82
7/16/10 at 2:13pm
I read this thread yesterday morning and didn't comment because I hadn't really noticed this problem. Then, wouldn't you know it, I watched EDGE OF DARKNESS last night... and had to put on the subtitles. Goddammit.
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post #55 of 82
7/16/10 at 2:27pm
I've actually noticed it with television. Sometimes its just CableOne's shitty DVR, and for some reason, its usually stuff on FOX like 24 and Fringe.
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post #56 of 82
7/16/10 at 2:31pm
I had to turn the subtitles on halfway through Hot Fuzz because of the light-speed dialog, and the British speak.
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post #57 of 82
7/16/10 at 2:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sleeplesslumber View Post
The most recent film I recall having trouble hearing the actor's words over the the other elements in the sound track was Sherlock Holmes. Most of the scenes in that film were fine. The moment where I was completely lost as to what was being said was when Holmes is introduced to Watson's fiancee. The background soundtrack of the restaurant completely obliterated all meaning in Holmes's analysis of her. I had to re-watch it with subtitles when the DVD came out to get what was said.
Exactly what happened to me. But I do have some hearing problems, but that scene in that movie in particular was very difficult to follow.
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post #58 of 82
7/16/10 at 4:59pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
Yeah, she just says "It ate him", then starts scream-laughing.
Thank you.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Dnim View Post
I think some of you probably have some hearing loss you're contending with.
No doubt. Like I said, headphones 8 hours a day, 5 days a week will do that to you.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Dnim View Post
You think Caine has heavily accented speech?
Maybe "heavily" is too strong a word, but I have difficulty understanding what he's saying because of it. I'm not saying he's not a terrific actor; I just have a hard time understanding him, and it's on me.
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post #59 of 82
7/16/10 at 5:07pm
I've been known to put on subtitles when watching DVDs, particularly for action films, where the F/X and score drown out the dialogue. Though, generally there's little dialogue in action films so there's that. Generally I have no problems hearing films in the theater or watching TV shows at home. I do find that commercials are louder than TV shows. That used to annoy the fuck outta me until I got a DVR and just fast forwarded through them all.

One of my biggest pet peeves though is when TV shows subtitle people speaking English and they don't have a thick accent. Having a Spanish or British accent doesn't make the person intelligible in and of itself. This annoys me to no end. I guess living in NYC has allowed me to tune into different sounds. I feel bad for people who never hear any type of speech pattern but their own. It must be so boring.
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post #60 of 82
7/16/10 at 7:13pm
I had a lot of trouble hearing dialogue today during Inception, but I think it had a lot to do with the booming soundtrack and the shitty theater speakers. At one point I actually heard one of them make a loud popping noise due to, I believe, the bass.
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post #61 of 82
7/16/10 at 9:54pm
Just got A Serious Man on DVD, and even with the sound cranked I couldn't make out some of the dialogue. This wouldn't be a problem, but there are no subtitles, and not even Closed-Captioning through the TV. As I recall, The Man Who Wasn't There was also subtitle-less, but at least TV captioning worked with that one.
I figured that captioning through the television was a requirement nowadays.
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post #62 of 82
7/17/10 at 12:10am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Princess Kate View Post
I'd advise people to try out headphones. I use them for 90% of all movies I see and I've never had problems understanding dialog
This is the worst fucking idea you've ever posted.

Quote:
Originally Posted by vertabraker View Post
I've actually noticed it with television. Sometimes its just CableOne's shitty DVR, and for some reason, its usually stuff on FOX like 24 and Fringe.
Again, it's likely the compressor that the stations use. FOX is notorious for not having consistency from station to station in regards to what they use as a compressor.
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post #63 of 82
7/17/10 at 10:30am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Princess Kate View Post
I'd advise people to try out headphones. I use them for 90% of all movies I see and I've never had problems understanding dialog
I would if I watched 90% of movies alone.
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post #64 of 82
7/17/10 at 11:45am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcnooj82 View Post
Inaudible dialogue is a problem I'm sure I experience, but I don't chalk up as a problem. For me, it's a combination of a lot of things. I ALWAYS use subtitles. Growing up in a household in which English was a second language, we always had closed captioning on if we could. Once DVDs came out, fuggedaboutit. Even if I don't need it, I'll use it. And the more I do, the more of a crutch it becomes.
This. DVD subtitles are the new librettos.
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post #65 of 82
7/17/10 at 1:54pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bendrix View Post
Maybe "heavily" is too strong a word, but I have difficulty understanding what he's saying because of it. I'm not saying he's not a terrific actor; I just have a hard time understanding him, and it's on me.
I understood every word Michael Caine said in Inception last night. I think it's more the accent he adopts in the Batman films that gives me trouble--or that could be his real accent, for all I know.
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post #66 of 82
7/17/10 at 2:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by GreatMindsThink View Post
I would if I watched 90% of movies alone.
A 99 cent splitter, a two dollar extension cable, and a second set of headphones solves this.

I have to side with Kate on this. I live in a small 2-story house whose acoustics funnel the entertainment center's sound right up the stairwell to all of the bedrooms. My wife and I watch movies after our light-sleeping kids are in bed. I hate riding the volume up and down to contend with dialogue segueing into explosions, so headphones it is. I do all of my gaming with headphones too. I rarely get to use my 3.1 setup unless the wife kids and/or wife are out of the house (a rarity). I probably watch movies alone half the time too, so it all works out OK.

Anyway, with headphones, my receiver downmixes everything into two channels, so everything is perfectly audible. But before we got our center channel speaker, any non-headphone movie watching did involve struggling to hear dialogue.
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post #67 of 82
7/17/10 at 3:00pm
You are a sound engineer's nightmare.

I understand the business about not waking up the kids. But headphones are hell and gone from the ideal way to hear a cinematic sound mix. Ben Burtt is crying right now.
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post #68 of 82
7/17/10 at 3:09pm
Oh, believe me, I know. Practicality is just winning out over idealism, and will be for the next several years while the kids are young, unfortunately. When the choices are:

Hear the ideal mix, but have to pause the movie for up half an hour every ten minutes while you soothe one kid or another back to sleep,

or

Hear an inferior, altered mix, but be able to finish the film in one uninterrupted sitting without waking anyone up,

I'm going with the second one every time.
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post #69 of 82
7/17/10 at 3:55pm
I use headphones a lot of the time because I rent an apartment above someone and my AC is louder than hell. It lets me hear the film without having to turn it up disturbingly loud.
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post #70 of 82
7/17/10 at 4:49pm
A fellow chewer I know well always has to have captions on. I'm convinced he has hearing loss because I can hear the dialogue just fine 90% of the time. However he says he uses them so he won't miss anything.
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post #71 of 82
7/21/10 at 3:53pm
I saw Inception again yesterday. However I can't say the experience was good. Not because of the film, but the audio was completely botched in the theater I went to. Some fuckhead amped up the music track to the point that I could barely hear the dialogue. If I hadn't seen the film I sure as hell would have never been able to tell what the characters were talking about. Because of that, two of my sisters (who never saw the film) got so lost in the film because they couldn't tell what the hell anyone would be saying during critical points. This seemed to happen for everyone else. When the film finally ended there wasn't much of a reaction, everyone just kinda apathetically walked out of the theater talking about what to do next. Fucking theater kids who don't know how to properly set up audio. I'm glad I didn't pay for my ticket.

So inaudible dialogue is certainly not the film's issue, just make sure you're going to a theater where you know the people who work there are efficient when it comes to setting up the audio (and visual).
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post #72 of 82
7/25/10 at 7:09pm
This is why Kubrick used mono.
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post #73 of 82
7/25/10 at 7:34pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Stockslivevan View Post
...just make sure you're going to a theater where you know the people who work there are efficient when it comes to setting up the audio (and visual).
That is not always the problem. Sometimes the theater itself to blame. Some places, especially those theaters which have been around since the silent era have terrible acoustics. I once heard a sound designer comment that even though the Castro theater in San Francisco has a state of the art audio system, all the movies that play there sound like shit because of the theater's shape.

Admittedly this is a much rarer problem than inexperienced theater employees getting things wrong.
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post #74 of 82
7/25/10 at 10:51pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Blank View Post
This is why Kubrick used mono.
Actually, Kubrick used mono for the same reason he stuck with narrow aspect ratios; home video. He realized pretty early that his films would be seen on TV's far more often then they'd be seen in theaters, and adjusted his habits accordingly. Of course, he didn't foresee the advent of widescreen televisions and digital surround sound systems.
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post #75 of 82
7/25/10 at 11:06pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Princess Kate View Post
I'd advise people to try out headphones. I use them for 90% of all movies I see and I've never had problems understanding dialog
Yeah I'll make sure to go plug those straight into the system the next time I'm at my local cinema.
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post #76 of 82
7/25/10 at 11:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
Actually, Kubrick used mono for the same reason he stuck with narrow aspect ratios; home video. He realized pretty early that his films would be seen on TV's far more often then they'd be seen in theaters, and adjusted his habits accordingly. Of course, he didn't foresee the advent of widescreen televisions and digital surround sound systems.
According to Kubrick's longtime tech assistant:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Leon Vitali
First of all, the reason why the only film that he made apart from Eyes Wide Shut, that was recorded in mono, in stereo, was 2001. Now he recorded in stereo because A) he could, and B) because it was 70-mil and how ridiculous to have a 70-mil picture with a mono soundtrack. And you know that the release is going to be in theaters which can show 70-mil. They're not going to want to show it and hear it in mono, so the two go together.

All the other movies, what he understood was if they were going into cinemas, they may or may not have decent stereo sound. And you know even right up to Full Metal Jacket, I'll tell you because we checked about 300 cinemas in the U.K. He had people checking cinemas over here in the U.S. when we released Full Metal Jacket. And even by 1987, some cinemas hadn't even looked at their sound systems for like ten years. What Stanley understood was that if you made a stereo track and the sound system was no good, you've lost half your sound. It sounds terrible. His notion was better good mono than bad stereo.
Vitali has also said one of the big reasons for Kubrick preferring narrow aspect ratios — aside from 2001 being mutilated in pan-and-scan — was that Kubrick started out as a photographer and the squarish image most closely correlated to his old still-camera image.
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post #77 of 82
7/26/10 at 11:38am
Vitali makes no sense. If the speakers sound like crap, which is what he's implying, they'll sound like crap whether they are in mono or stereo.
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post #78 of 82
7/26/10 at 12:25pm
He's quoting what Kubrick said. So you're saying Kubrick made no sense.
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post #79 of 82
7/26/10 at 12:53pm
I have had this problem for awhile. Pretty sure, especially with Blu-Ray, the disc is putting out surround sound no matter what and if you are listening in stereo, you pretty much have no choice but to get subpar sound.

I got surround sound about six months ago and was still having the same issues. I turned up the center speaker(where most of the dialogue comes out of) louder than the l/r speakers and it totally solved the issue. While I do still have to manually adjust occasionally if it gets too loud, I am not having the issue of hearing dialoge anymore.
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post #80 of 82
7/26/10 at 5:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Blank View Post
He's quoting what Kubrick said. So you're saying Kubrick made no sense.
Sure. Just because he's a brilliant filmmaker doesn't make him right.
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post #81 of 82
7/26/10 at 5:34pm
He was stubborn, I'll give you that. And he apparently kept to his index-card system despite, y'know, computers.

For all of Kubrick's interest in technology, there's a lot of proof in his work (you don't have to go any further than 2001) that he didn't trust it.

We don't have video of Vitali saying these things, so for all we know he was like "What Stanley understood...*rolls eyes*" ...with the subtext being "Yeah, I told him like 50 times, but he wouldn't listen, and I'm going to try and couch that in very neutral terms in this interview so I don't look like a dick and get fired from my job as technical curator of his films."
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post #82 of 82
7/26/10 at 5:41pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan S~ View Post
Sure. Just because he's a brilliant filmmaker doesn't make him right.
Wouldn't mono solve the problem of a disparity between the sound quality of the left vs right speaker? Vitali/Kubrick may have been referring to this issue when he describes losing "half your sound."
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