This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they're shouting, that's not adding realism, they're doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can't get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that's not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they're bad at mixing.

If the director can't keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that's not artistic choice, they've made a bad film.

Have no shame in using subtitle, because american movie is either horribly sound balanced or spoken in unintelligible accent.

Yes. And stop fucking mumbling. And use a proper lighting for fuck sake, I don't care if it is middle of the night in a forest, I want to be able to see what's going on.

I feel like the real issue, is that we only get one volume bar. If it was normal to define both the minimal and maximal volume setting and have the players stretch the given dynamic range into that then it would all be good.

Exactly why I use subtitles. Seem to recall Interstellar was horrible like this.

Alot of it is... pretentiousness?

Like, there's a lot of high-brow thinking in the movie industry where stuff is mixed for movie theaters. You know, theaters that have good surround speaker setups, but also turn the volume way too loud. It's "as its meant to be experienced" if you ask the Hollywood producers. I think Netflix and more small-screen oriented producers are better about this, where even surround mixes are much more reasonable.

Watching a Christopher Nolan movie I see.

For anyone who might find this useful:

Kodi is great for normalising volume and I try to use Kodi for Plex and YouTube on the TV:

Try adjusting the Volume to about -20 dB and the Volume Amplification to +30 dB. The latter will compress the audio as it increases volume to avoid peaks, and will effectively "flatten" the volume contour a bit. Adjust the values to your taste.

The other thing that has really helped is having a good Bluetooth speaker. If the kids are playing and being noisy in the room while I'm trying to watch TV, then sound is much clearer if the speaker is right next to me rather than trying to turn up the volume to drown out other noises.

#High Dynamic Range™

The solution is obviously to learn german. Then you can watch with our excellent and easily intelligible dubs.

Been there the hard way. I got Tubular Bells II, and listened to it via headphones (I had no speakers).

There is one passage where the music ends, and a child speaks. It was hard to understand, so I turned the volume to 11, and heard the end of the sentence like "and nothing was ever heard of him again but the sound of tu-bu-lar bells." The next sound was the BANG of the tubular bells, making my eardrums meet somewhere in the middle. somewhere...

Sometimes there's also a random high pitched buzz in the background that's louder than anything else for one whole scene. How heard would it be to just remove that frequency range or maybe see that it is louder than every other scene?

Just run the audio through a dynamic range compressor. Then everything will be just as loud as the commercials.

This is perfect lol. Now we need one for absurdly loud motorcycles ruining an evening’s cool.

Exactly why I use subtitles.

Subtitles!

For me Star Trek is one of the worst offenders of this.

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