Why is the music in pro tv/movie mixes so much louder than everything else?

Noiz2 said:
Well films are mixed by ear so IF everything is set up correctly then you just don't like what the director liked.

BTW being in a theatre is no guarantee that the system is set up correctly.

The music VS dialog could be explained by a setup but big dynamic range is in the mix. Or your ears. If your hearing is going (and it happens to all of us eventually) dialog intelligibility will get dicey but things with a lot of low end will come through fine. The reverse will happen if the mixers/ director is hard of hearing. And sometimes it's just a really bad mix. The last is usually the directors fault, most mixers will do at least a decent job, but some directors will get in there and really trash it. Reference "Public Enemies". Michael Mann is the deaf (literally in one ear) director who made that films sound track a mess.

Ironically he also produced "Luck" which had an amazing sound track.
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I checked last night while watching "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"(2007) BD, and the only disk 'audio' options were some form of 5.1 for the English, French and Spanish. In other words no 'stereo' option at all...

I'm pretty sure my cheap player doesn't make 'stereo' all that well... so I've been thinking about putting my mixer in the audio path and riding the volume controls, as I have to adjust for the Wife's hearing, so she can sort of 'hear' the dialog, but then when the FX start booming... we want to avoid waking up the neighbors...
 
I don't go to theaters much anymore, but I'm not usually bothered by it there. It's something specific to home setup. So maybe it is just bad settings on my part. It's like a compressor needs to kick in somwhere and BRING DAT SHITS DOWN when it gets too loud.

From listening to a CD in the car vs the radio version of the same song, I understand the difference/impact dynamic range makes and why it's desirable but there should still be a compromise to a happy medium where you can still hear soft dialogue and feel the power of the volume changes without them being unpleasant.
 
Josh Bass said:
What you say about dvds make sense, however even watching movies on netflix streaming introduces the same issues! And i swear ive seen it on tv shows (cant think of any at the moment). For instance when sitcome use those little stings to transition between scenes that music will be bonkers loud.
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Just because it's on TV doesn't mean it's been perfectly crafted by the best professionals or that some hack didn't get their hands on it somewhere along the way. One of our two PBS stations used to run everything through a limiter that was harshly reactionary. I would watch The New Yankee Workshop and This Old House, and every time someone hit a hammer the entire audio level would drop in half for a few seconds making it difficult to hear what the hosts are saying about the work they're doing. The same exact shows on the other PBS station relied on the original mix without filters and everything sounded fine...hammers sounded like hammers and you could hear what everyone was saying just fine with no big spikes in the audio levels. I called the station and talked to their engineer who had no idea how to fix it, or even realized that their broadcasts didn't sound like the other station up the road.
 
To be clear here, it was the OP who got music really loud compared to dialog.

FX in action films are usually loud, they were mixed that way. Film in general has just recently gotten the ability to have a wide dynamic range. When it was all optican and pre Dolby SR the tracks were quite limited in dynamics and in spectrum. They were mixing to the X-Curve so the optical track could handle it (basically nothing under 100 or so and nothing over 12K), and it could never go silent or the decoder acted up.

In the mean time everybody has gotten more and more content in really compressed ways. Broadcast is very compressed dynamically, the internet also tends to have very squashed dynamics and popular music has gone on a no dynamics at all kick. Add to that many MP3 players do auto volume adjustment so it all plays the same.
 
A lot of TV stations used to have OPTIMOD automatic level adjusters in circuit and that could explain certain problems but on features for cinema a mix for a huge dynamic range will not simply compress everything down to suit TV delivery.
 
Even in theaters great (calibrated) playback gear, some film's effects and music are way too freak'n loud.. that's just my opinion but I'm not alone, and many think it's the younger generation of mixers who where brought up listieng to 100+dB SPL music through earbuds on portable (and home) players.
I'm not one to talk though, I have tinnitus after playing in loud bands w/ Marshalls, working live sound, studio recording and racing cars.
 
I notice it when streaming netflix through an Imac, though it's not as bad. Still a (by my guess) 3-6db reduction in those instances would be greatly appreciated.
 
Sound (and picture) in cinema's is a lot better these days as digital allows for a more consistency between screens with little set-up (or not in the past) required by the multi skilled operatives (projectionist and popcorn vendor) on minimal wage.

A surround mix done on a dub stage for cinema with 10k watt of horn loaded JBL speakers at max room shaking levels and dynamic range will still not translate easily to a stereo one on your 5 watt TV with 3 inch eliptical speakers though.
 
This has drifted into a "films are too loud" thread and that is not what the OP had an issue with. His problem has nothing to do with loud FX.

On the films are too loud front, yes some are. Some are also mixed very badly. It's more the directors not the mixers pushing the LOUD. THey have now grown up with ear buds, highly compressed pop music, video games, and TV. Mixers don't like LOUD much. A great example of loud that works is Ren Klyce's work on "The Social Network". The club scene (if you saw it in a decent theatre) was heart rate changing loud, but you heard every word of dialog and you didn't feel the need for earplugs. They worked very hard to get that to work.

Another part of the problem is that theatres are not required to play films back at the proper level. Trailers were the big offenders and theatres would turn down the masters. Then films were told they were too quiet and folks started pushing so that they would play about right in most theatres (with the levels down) and of course in a proper theatre it was way too loud.

Corporate media's general response is to crush the mix through peak limiting but that is a generally awful solution. The reality is that probably there needs to be some real standards set, and maybe digital will be the way to do it. Until there is some level of standardising the playback your just chasing your tail trying to fix it at the mixers end. For home use go get a multiband limiter, or a better playback system. It's not really fair to complain about intelligibility when your listening on tiny rear facing speakers in an acoustically nightmarish room with constant distractions. Not that that describes any particular posters system but just a typical home setup.
 
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