For years now I’ve wondered why people keep complaining about dialog in movies. Now I’ve spent a few days in a hotel with a TV stuck on default picture and sound settings. I started a Dune marathon. (He just passed the gom jabbar)
Much of the dialog is far quiter than it should be. Enough to be difficult to understand if I didn’t know the movie so well. Even softer sounds I know should be there aren’t audible at all. While I wouldn’t call the loud portions too loud, I’m in a hotel and don’t want to disturb my neighbors, so I’m riding the volume some.
I don’t have access to the TV’s settings, so I don’t know if it’s possible to improve things at all. I can say, the built in sound on televisions is certainly not what it should be. It could be improved from factory, with better down-mixing and level curves. That might cause issues with other programs though.
Atraides are about to rescue a harvester. I’ll get back to it.
Using the built in speakers is always subpar. Soundbars are a pretty easy way to improve the sounds especially with CEC connections.
That being said, even then sound mixing is still terrible. If you aren’t running 5.1 surround then too much gets lost.
I’m old enough to remember when the television had one little tinny mono speaker and you could still understand every word people were saying.
But that’s the best there was at the time. I’m not at all saying we should go back. That would suck.
Even running 7.2 surround there are a lot of instances where shit like explosions are too loud compared to dialog.
Then I can confidently say, your system needs to be calibrated. There’s no excuse for that.