cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/nonpolitical_comics/p/1657114/mr-lovenstein-volume
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Older movies tended to have audio mixes where the dialogue was clear even when loud things were happening, people shouldn't need to use a compressor.
They also didn’t have much dynamic range, it’s much easier to compress the range than expand it
I have not had a great experience with compression.
A couple TVs would have the audio delayed slightly, enough that the last syllable spoken was after they closed their mouths. Most of them also did a terrible job playing from TV speakers if the audio was in the center channel and I could not set it to stereo.
Also I find the leveling or night settings make it harder to hear because while the speaking volume is raised that doesn't make it clearer. So if there is background music the same volume it is just muddled at a higher volume.
Compression is better than nothing but in no way comparable to a mix that is actually intentionally made to reduce the dynamic range. Having one mix and letting the compressor software fudge the balance is lazy and has mediocre results.
I still feel like it probably works better than trying to expand a flat mix. Center channel dialogue is a different issue imo, there should definitely be 2.0 mixes available for streaming content auto-downmixing will always be bad.
Center channel dialogue is part of the overall issue of only having one 5.1 high dynamic range mix available to play on a wide range of devices with vastly different setups.