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What's With This Whispering Trend In Movies?

Darkmakaimura

Darkmakaimura

Can You Imagine What SureAI Is Going To Do With Garfield?
Seems like the last 20 or 25 years a lot of movies and TV shows have people who talk at really low volumes to the point where I have to crank the volume up on my TV.

So many times I have to raise the volume just to hear characters speak.

I feel like it's one of those annoying trends in movies and shows nowadays and even the new Star Treks do it.

People speak at these low volumes are whispers when it's unnecessary. Like, normal people don't talk that way.

Yeah my hearing is not the best. Also I have an older TV but for fuck sake, this is a trend that needs to go away.
 
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I started noticing it during the series Prison Break like 20 years ago

Michael Scofield whispers all the time in it, and somehow it became the norm after that

You can tune it out for a while, then suddenly every scene becomes: "...we have to move tonight."
barely audible mumbling intensifies
 


tl;dr it's because movies are being audio mixed for the newer and the more expensive sound technologies like dynamic range and dolby atmos.

So when people don't have those at home everything is either too loud, or too low, or both.

What needs to happen is a second layer/step where they do a second audio mix for home sound, but no one wants to pay for that level of work so they just figure you'll use subtitles and deal with it.
 
March Climber said:


tl;dr it's because movies are being audio mixed for the newer and the more expensive sound technologies like dynamic range and dolby atmos.

So when people don't have those at home everything is either too loud, or too low, or both.

What needs to happen is a second layer/step where they do a second audio mix for home sound, but no one wants to pay for that level of work so they just figure you'll use subtitles and deal with it.
Click to expand...

I started typing up a post but then you posted this which is more comprehensive than what I was typing up.

To OP, you'll have to play with sound settings on your TV. If there's a "night mode" or "dynamic volume" mode, or anything equivalent... turn those on. Most content is mixed for studio reference now and assumes you have some way of compressing the range through a soundbar or smart TV. Otherwise you're SOL.
 
HRK69 said:
I started noticing it during the series Prison Break like 20 years ago

Michael Scofield whispers all the time in it, and somehow it became the norm after that

You can tune it out for a while, then suddenly every scene becomes: "...we have to move tonight."
barely audible mumbling intensifies
Click to expand...
Yeah it all sounds like mumbling to me now. It's super annoying. I don't think I have the sound settings on my television which probably is about 20 years old so I'm SOL because somehow this is acceptable now.

I mean this isn't even when people are just trying to whisper. It's when they normal talk too and you can barely hear it and it just sounds like mumbling.
 
Darkmakaimura said:
Yeah it all sounds like mumbling to me now. It's super annoying. I don't think I have the sound settings on my television which probably is about 20 years old so I'm SOL because somehow this is acceptable now.

I mean this isn't even when people are just trying to whisper. It's when they normal talk too and you can barely hear it and it just sounds like mumbling.
Click to expand...
Out of curiosity, what make/model TV do you have? There's probably a solution of some kind. At one point, I had some Logitech PC speakers I got from a thrift store connected to the headphone jack on the back of an old TV and they had a simple equalizer in the front which could be adjusted. I turned up the midrange to make vocals more prominent.
 
Meicyn said:
Out of curiosity, what make/model TV do you have? There's probably a solution of some kind. At one point, I had some Logitech PC speakers I got from a thrift store connected to the headphone jack on the back of an old TV and they had a simple equalizer in the front which could be adjusted. I turned up the midrange to make vocals more prominent.
Click to expand...
I'll have to check it. It's an old TV but it's a Samsung.

It also doesn't help that I have two fans and an AC running but even without those it's hard to hear.
 
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Darkmakaimura said:
I'll try that out. Thanks. Hopefully it has some sound balancing especially regards to speech.
Click to expand...
No problem, there are two other things to check out while playing with settings to improve speech clarity. If you able to mess with the equalizer in the settings menu, raise the levels for 1kHz and 3kHz as human speech hovers around 2kHz on average. Also, there is a dynamic volume option called "auto volume" which raises the volume of quiet stuff, and lowers the volume of loud stuff to try and fit an averaged-out sound level.
 
I just saw both Bad Lieutenant movies and none of them had this whispering crap or at least not the first one.
 
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I thought my tv was broken but it is the audio balancing of movies and videogames that put voices very low in pretty much everything i play or watch...
 
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GymWolf said:
I thought my tv was broken but it is the audio balancing of movies and videogames that put voices very low in pretty much everything i play or watch...
Click to expand...

It could also be a case of your receiver/TV doing a very bad job downmixing a multi channel audio stream.

I had a 4.0 multi speaker setup at home, because I had room for four front/back L/R speaker but no good place to put a center speaker (where dialogues are usually coming from). I assumed that if I indicated in the setup that if I didn't have a center speaker the center audio stream would of course be heard on the two front speakers. And that was indeed the case.

But I never got it to sound right. The music was always too loud, dialogue was too soft. So I would be turning up the volume to better understand dialogues and then I got deafening sound in action scenes. It was only after I bought a center speaker that the problem was finally solved and dialogues weren't completely overwhelmed by the soundtrack and sound effects.
 
kruis said:
It could also be a case of your receiver/TV doing a very bad job downmixing a multi channel audio stream.

I had a 4.0 multi speaker setup at home, because I had room for four front/back L/R speaker but no good place to put a center speaker (where dialogues are usually coming from). I assumed that if I indicated in the setup that if I didn't have a center speaker the center audio stream would of course be heard on the two front speakers. And that was indeed the case.

But I never got it to sound right. The music was always too loud, dialogue was too soft. So I would be turning up the volume to better understand dialogues and then I got deafening sound in action scenes. It was only after I bought a center speaker that the problem was finally solved and dialogues weren't completely overwhelmed by the soundtrack and sound effects.
Click to expand...
I only use my tv as a pc monitor.

So it is just one hdmi cable going from the gpu to the tv.
 
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My LG uses "AI" for sound and the results are sometimes hilariously bad. Especially when dialog and action scenes follow in rapid succession.
Have to watch movies with subtitles anyway for the misses so at least I get what's happening on screen.
 
It's called 5.1 channels audio mixing in a 2.1 channels audio output.

On some streaming apps you have the option to switch back to the 2.1 track (the best solution) or a setting called improved dialogues on your TV or the app.
 
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I have this problem too, and it's not just a audio mixing/engineering problem.(which is half of it)
A big part of it is that a lot of actors these days, are not trained or directed to project their voices beyond the mic that's above their head.
You can tell which actors have come from the stage/theatre or have been 'classically' trained.

It blows my mind how atrocious the dialogue audio is in a lot of movies, and how directors allow actors to just whisper and mumble their way through films.

You'll notice the vast majority of old movies don't have these issues.
 
Darkmakaimura said:
Seems like the last 20 or 25 years a lot of movies and TV shows have people who talk at really low volumes to the point where I have to crank the volume up on my TV.

So many times I have to raise the volume just to hear characters speak.

I feel like it's one of those annoying trends in movies and shows nowadays and even the new Star Treks do it.

People speak at these low volumes are whispers when it's unnecessary. Like, normal people don't talk that way.

Yeah my hearing is not the best. Also I have an older TV but for fuck sake, this is a trend that needs to go away.
Click to expand...
Check your hearing, old man!
 
Angry_Megalodon said:
In Tenet when they are explaining the heist plan, the music is so loud that you can't understand what the hell they are saying.
Click to expand...
Christopher Nolan is especially bad at this. I had to rewatch the ending to Dunkirk because I couldn't understand what the actors were saying. It completely destroyed the dramatic tension of the whole scene.
 
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