Some things about sound mixing and dialogue and why subtitles are a trend
I keep seeing links to stories about how an increasingly large number of people are turning subtitles on to watch streaming movies and TV shows, primarily because they can’t hear the dialogue.
I’m not an audio expert by any means, but I have put a lot of thought and energy on optimizing my “not super audiophile but really nice consumer level” home theater setup. It sounds great. I never have problems hearing the dialogue. I think the primary reason is that modern movies are mixed for surround sound with a dedicated dialogue channel, and if you don’t have that setup at home, there are all kinds of places where it can go wrong.
I care a lot about sound field quality for movies, but clearly not as much as some. My total home theater setup cost around $1500, not including my really really nice front speakers which my parents used in college. I know people who have spent 10x as much. My main concerns are surround sound and a dedicated center channel. Atmos is cool, but I don’t find that it makes as much difference to me. I’ve done level checks on each speaker and then tuned further by ear on movies I enjoy watching to make sure the speaker separation mix sounds good.
But I don’t think most of it is the fault of the filmmakers themselves, and it can drastically alter the experience of a film. Tenet is famous for being unintelligible and requiring subtitles, but I thought the sound was great on my home setup. I’ve since seen it in IMAX, and that reinforced a lot of this opinion. The sound mix is fantastic, but I think if you try to shoehorn it into a TV setup, or you get a theater that isn’t properly mixed, you’ll have problems. A really interesting this about this one in particular, that also surfaces in Oppenheimer, is that Nolan uses the technique of driving out the dialogue with background audio effects in order to give the impression that the sound is a LOT louder than he can reasonably make it for technical limitations. This works really well in a tuned audio environment, and… completely falls down once it’s not in that environment anymore.
So the root cause of this is that you probably have a bad sound setup in your home for watching surround mixed movies (which is most of them now), unless you have discrete speakers. Soundbars can provide the illusion of discrete speakers, and I’ve heard some of them sound good, but I’ve never heard one that compares and I would look at that with some skepticism if that’s what you’re considering to solve this problem.
The reason for this is that movies are usually mixed only once by the filmmakers, and that mix is for surround sound. If there’s a dedicated stereo mix, it’s usually done by the people who put together the DVD/Blu-ray/streaming conversion, and the original sound team has little or no input into it.
A few articles I found helpful when delving into this:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/how-to/a12561/4320807/
And this is a very good deep dive into what the complexities are and how many guesses there are at each stage of the process:
Good home theater receivers will let you tune sound levels for dialogue separately, and some of them will have night modes for dynamic range compression that will keep the dialogue audible even when you turn the volume down. Modern movies are mixed for surround sound, and mixdowns for stereo are hit or miss. Even if the media you’re watching has a stereo mix, it was likely put together after the fact by a different crew, and if it doesn’t have a stereo mix your receiver or TV or laptop or whatever is processing the audio is implicitly mixing it down on the fly for you. There are a ton of variables in doing that, and the only way this is going to sound good is if you can adjust some of those variables for your setup.
All of this is to say that audio processing is exceptionally complicated, and it’s not just a matter of blaming the filmmakers for somehow breaking it because they hate you.
If you enjoyed reading this, come yell at me about it on threads, bluesky, or mastodon.
