"It's called dynamic range, you philistines!" quoth the audio engineer who hasn't consumed his own work on consumer-grade hardware since his early teens.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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Yep. I think this is the real problem right here. Whenever I’m producing my first pass at a music project, I do it on my laptop speakers or similar. That way I know the core idea of the track still works on basic speakers. I’ve tried going the other way and all that comes through is a melody if I’m lucky.
I also check in the car and on a crappy BT speaker after. The fact that they’re producing entire movies and shows without ever seeming to do a consumer audio check is just annoying.
Yeah, my test checklist after mixing/mastering using my studio headphones is:
- Laptop speakers
- Apple wired earbuds
- Cheap bluetooth headphones
- TV soundbar
- Car speakers
It’s only final until it sounds good on all the above.
- Bus station loudspeakers in Pondicherry
lol, I posted simultaneously with you. And basically posted that. 🤣
This being the Internet - and great minds thinking alike - it was bound to happen sooner or later :)
I hate audio dynamic range. And i also hate how they don't ensure dialogue is audible over other noises unless it's dubbed.
This last one is so bad that I basically don't watch any American content in the original language anymore, because the French dub has clear voices and doesn't force me to use subtitles. So ridiculous.
You don't hate dynamic range, you hate bad mixes, two different things, without dynamics audio sounds like shit. An explosion is supposed to be louder than talking speech.
It's just not supposed to try to mimic the absurdity of an actual explosion, to the point of discomfort.
Also, like said before in the parent comment, most consumer systems don't even even have the dynamics to reproduce it without distortion (or damage the woofers).
Imma be honest, I don't see why the explosion should be louder than speech. I can see the boom; I can tell that it's an explosion. It doesn't need to be reinforced to be through volume.
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What I hate most about this attitude is a disregard for the fundamentals that make a film hold up over time: the story/plot/world building, way, way, way more than the graphics or other bells and whistles.
Sound design and graphics are very important, but if you're sacrificing dialogue for the vast majority of watchers, for you to have a wank over dynamic range, then you don't have your priorities straight.
They really ought to release multiple audio mixes. This is really getting annoying, and if wanting to hear dialogue is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
Preach, brother. I don't get the fetish with aiming for 'natural' dynamic range in a movie in the first place. I need these people to explain to me why reproducing the relative sound pressure of a fucking explosion relative to normal speaking volume is somehow desirable to me.
Mr. Lovenstein version
Fuck your dynamic range, it doesn't enhance the media what so ever.
enables loudness equalization
Nah, Christopher Nolan says it’s our fault that we don’t have IMAX theater setups at home.
Or--and hear me out here, Mr. Nolan--maybe have the important dialogue take place once the characters are off the speedboat.
(I assume that wasn't actually important dialogue, but I'll never know.)
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Yeah I can't hear the dialogue, but when those two characters kissed I could hear everything happening in their mouthes and that's what's really important.
Two characters kiss in deep space 9 and it sounds like a kiss irl. Two characters kiss in superman (2025) (or almost any modern media) and I'm listening to a 30+ second close-up of the actors trying to wetly suck the other's lips into their mouth. Why??
No idea why anyone thinks the kissing audio needs to be so pronounced. Drives me up the wall. Watching a tender scene, only to be ripped out of the moment by kissing audio that was recorded by having toddlers eating fettuccine alfredo for the first time.
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Because DS9's tagline is "To wetly suck what no one has sucked before."
I thought it was quite bad already in the EU but we at least have standards for it. I'm currently in the US and watching TV I have to turn on closed captions for everything because voices are just so damm silent, while Ads and stuff just blast your face off.
I think the US passed some sort of standard, under Obama, to normalize the volume for commercials on broadcast TV.
That worked for a while, but now that everything is streaming, they're fucking doing it again. Because of course they are.
Tbf before that standard it was ROUGH. You'd have advertisers that would absolutely CRANK the volume on their sound, even distorting it, just to make it the loudest thing on earth. You could literally be somewhere in the house and just hear "mnmmmmnmnmnm....BIG BOBS CARPET EMPORIUM TWO DAYS ONLY" like it was some kind of stadium speaker system, like the neighbors hearing it was gonna help the ad reach more people.
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There also the fact that speakers on modern tvs suck because they want only a little black frame around the screen. CRTV speakers pointed at the viewer and modern tvs point downward or behind the screen, so everything is a bit muffled. It's like they forgot that audio is a big aspect of watching shows and movies or they are wanting to make a ton of money off a separate speaker system.
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Dynamic ads in podcasts are absolutely terrible for this.
I am driving along listening to a podcast, and suddenly the ads appear at 50% higher volume, with zero warning.
I wonder if you could sue a podcast provider for dammages if you are hard of hearing and need the podcast playing loud, and the ads come on and blow your speakers out...
What should be especially illegal is those ads that use "alert" sounds. Door knocks/bells, phone rings, and worst of all, fucking car horn and other alarm noises.
Anything beeping or sounding like a siren should be completely forbidden for safety reasons.
It’s literally the non-verbal equivalent of the classic “crying fire in a crowded theatre” scenario, it should already be illegal by existing law imo.
“Honking horn at the operator of high speed multi-ton machine on their radio” seems pretty clear cut recklessness in my book.
Can someone tell me why I'm an idiot: streaming services have access to the entire video you're about to watch. They know the max and the min volume of that video. Why is there no setting to shrink that range? Is it going to degrade the audio really bad and they don't want to be blamed?
This goes double for home theater software like Jellyfin, Kodi, and Plex. They have 10,000 customizations and settings, so why can't I define my own custom audio range in them?
Technically speaking it's very easy to implement, it's just a compressor, oldest thing in audio after maybe the EQ.
VLC has a compressor under effects, if you're using Linux you can add effects to pulse or pipewire really easy too.
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What you need is dynamic range compression. You can get a browser extension to apply it to everything you watch in a browser. VLC also has a setting for it, but I think they call it something else.
If you're using an app or a smart tv, then sucks to be you I guess.
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It's not the broadcasters fault you don't have a 7.1 audio setup and they refuse to allow channel selection. That would involve remastering, dammit!
Even if you can hear them, you'll still need captions because actors today mumble so much.
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This is good for the source audio itself for complicated reasons, but why tf isn't stable sound more standardized?? It's just a compressor!! Just send the values for the compressor in the metadata!!
Yes it’s dynamic range but the most common cause is listening to a source that’s been mixed for a centre vocal speaker.
It will play on a stereo (Left and right speakers only) but you will have very little vocals and lots of special fx.
This is also completely ignoring the us lack of lufs standards for advertising (apparent loudness.)
Not necessarily the end users fault. If the wrong audio source is selected/streamed then you are stuck. There are workarounds but no real solution
Except I have Dolby 5.1 set-up and it’s still dogshit
If you don't have a 649.2.2 Atmos setup, that's your fault. Get hearing loss, scrub!
/s because... sigh...
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French dubs have intentionally higher speech volume
Do what you want with that info
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What about video players with no volume control? Or video that starts off at 140dB SPL right off the bat with 250% THD as well?
Horror movies be like:
WHAT?
Breakaway audio volume leveler (if you're on a Windows device).
Same issue with white balance settings in cameras - the setting should be non-linear to give the same perceived change per step.
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