This film tells the story of Ennis and Christine, a couple whose relationship begins to unravel as Christine, a deaf-mute, withdraws from her family.

“Sound effects in movies are too loud compared to dialogue” is a common complaint. Here’s some insight into what’s going on.

Movies are mixed this way, with high dynamic range (HDR) sound, to sound good in a theater. It’s a nice quiet environment with decent acoustics. High dynamic range sounds good in a theater, where you can hear whisper quiet dialogue no problem since the noise level is so low and there’s not a lot of reverberations in the room. In that case loud sound effects and music peaks are at a good level, and sound exciting. Just like how the filmmakers approved it and wanted you to hear it.

But at home, you’re competing with your window air conditioner, or a fan, or an open window, or other people talking in an adjacent room. It’s a lot more noise to compete with. You probably also have terrible acoustics in your playback space with lots of reflections off hard surfaces and little sound proofing in the walls to prevent acoustical energy transfer. So you turn up your movie so you can hear your dialogue. Lets say you want the opposite. You have neighbors, or roommates, or a baby sleeping near by. You want to listen to the movie at a lower level so as not to disturb people. In both these scenarios the playback environment is far from ideal. You set your level so you can understand the story via the dialogue, but those SFX and MX jump out and you have to turn things down.

The problem lies in that the public wants an entirely new mix for their movies and TV shows, but only for these specific situations, where you want lower dynamic range (less difference between loud and soft). There are several problems between what viewers in your situation want, and what the entertainment and consumer electronics industry can provide.

Cost in production:

It would cost the studio and/or distributor more money to make an entirely separate low dynamic range (LDR) audio mix. It’s more time paying for a re-recording mixer, a mix stage, and filmmakers to come in an approve a new, separate mix.

Cost in bandwidth and disc space:

Going off of cost, it also costs more money for everyone providing the content (studios, distributors, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon) to provide extra streaming bandwidth for another audio stream. The studios/distributors also have a limited amount of space on their DVD, Bluray, and UHD discs. They spend a lot of time trying to properly allocate that space just with the basic audio mix, video stream, menus, and bonus content. Few would want to give up disc space for another LDR audio mix.

Cost in Consumer electronics with real-time compressors:

This is a popular “solution” to this high dynamic range (HDR) problem. Just get a new receiver/amplifier/TV with a “night mode” built into it, with realtime audio compressors running to squash down the HDR audio into LDR audio. A few problems are:

• Most people don’t know about or won’t think to go out and buy new stuff with this feature.
• A lot of people can’t or won’t spend the money.
• A lot of people don’t know they have this feature or how to turn it on.
• A lot of times it sounds like crap which takes away the filmmakers ability to deliver the emotion and experience they’re trying to convey. This leads me into my next point.

Modifying the experience from what the filmmakers intended:

The filmmakers and the sound team work really hard during a mix to get their movie or TV show to sound a certain way to give you a certain emotional experience. They HATE it when their vision gets fucked with, as we’re currently seeing with Seth Rogan, Judd Apatow, and Sony. They don’t want a LDR mix of their movie going out that they haven’t approved, and they don’t want some consumer device’s “night mode” to fuck up the audio mix either.

Proper downmixing from 5.1 to Dolby Surround:

Some will say that the volume of the dialogue (which is primarily from the center channel) with be affected when the 5.1 (theatrical) mix is folded down into a 2-track Dolby Surround mix, which is often the only mix people get to hear at home. 98% of the time this process is handled by an algorithm made by Dolby and should not affect the perceived volume of the dialogue when going from 6 channels of audio down to 2.

A lot of people like that theatrical, HDR audio mix.

You don’t want to force people to have only one choice either. Some people like their nice, exciting, HDR audio mix, while others just want the story without all the ruckus and riding the volume with the remote. Video games by their nature of being real-time rendered can be set however you want, if the gamemakers program it so. When I was setting up to play Uncharted 4, there were all kinds of dynamic range choices in the settings menu. Loved it!

So now we’re stuck in a bit of a deadlock, and most of the time it’s about money. The studios/distributors/streaming providers don’t want to spend more money for the sound work or bandwidth to get it to you, most people don’t want to pay more for their movies or for new electronics that they might not even know how to properly use.

TLDR:

It’s too expensive for both the content producers and the consumers to get a lower dynamic range version of their movies and TV shows.

If I missed something or a fellow sound engineer would like to chime in I’d love to chat about it!