<story><title>Movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand</title><url>https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SkeuomorphicBee</author><text>I like how that quote actually reflects the hubris and disconnection to reality of the sound engineer. That is exactly &amp;quot;how it was done&amp;quot;, how he mixed it, the fact that it didn&amp;#x27;t sound good in a real life matinee (as opposed to the ideal conditions of his sound lab) is a fact of life. That is the target he should be mixing for, for the real life matinees with imperfect equipment and acoustics (or for the even worse real life living rooms with crappy sound system and acoustics), but instead he mixes to sound perfect in his perfect lab. He is doing it wrong, optimizing for the wrong metrics, but he can&amp;#x27;t fathom being wrong, so he will keep screwing up and people will keep not being able to understand movies. It is the sound engineer version of &amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re holding it wrong&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>jaywalk</author><text>I enjoyed this quote:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I was at a matinee with a lot of elderly people because I took my mom, and I&amp;#x27;m like, &amp;#x27;None of these people can hear what&amp;#x27;s happening.&amp;#x27; The manager, who was probably all of 22 years old, said, &amp;#x27;Well, that&amp;#x27;s how the film was done.&amp;#x27; And I said, &amp;#x27;No, I did the sound on the film. That&amp;#x27;s not how it was done.&amp;#x27;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been in a meeting where a third-party vendor was explaining how I was incorrect about how some particular functionality in an application worked, and I had to stop him and inform him that I was the one who &lt;i&gt;developed&lt;/i&gt; that functionality and knew exactly how it worked.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbigelow76</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I like how that quote actually reflects the hubris and disconnection to reality of the sound engineer. That is exactly &amp;quot;how it was done&amp;quot;, how he mixed it, the fact that it didn&amp;#x27;t sound good in a real life matinee (as opposed to the ideal conditions of his sound lab) is a fact of life.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d be really surprised if sound engineers working in film never bother to listen to a cut of the movie in a theater. But then again the number of times I&amp;#x27;ve seen &amp;quot;you didn&amp;#x27;t try compiling before committing did you?&amp;quot; crop up in chat while discussing a broken build that maybe they don&amp;#x27;t :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand</title><url>https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SkeuomorphicBee</author><text>I like how that quote actually reflects the hubris and disconnection to reality of the sound engineer. That is exactly &amp;quot;how it was done&amp;quot;, how he mixed it, the fact that it didn&amp;#x27;t sound good in a real life matinee (as opposed to the ideal conditions of his sound lab) is a fact of life. That is the target he should be mixing for, for the real life matinees with imperfect equipment and acoustics (or for the even worse real life living rooms with crappy sound system and acoustics), but instead he mixes to sound perfect in his perfect lab. He is doing it wrong, optimizing for the wrong metrics, but he can&amp;#x27;t fathom being wrong, so he will keep screwing up and people will keep not being able to understand movies. It is the sound engineer version of &amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re holding it wrong&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>jaywalk</author><text>I enjoyed this quote:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I was at a matinee with a lot of elderly people because I took my mom, and I&amp;#x27;m like, &amp;#x27;None of these people can hear what&amp;#x27;s happening.&amp;#x27; The manager, who was probably all of 22 years old, said, &amp;#x27;Well, that&amp;#x27;s how the film was done.&amp;#x27; And I said, &amp;#x27;No, I did the sound on the film. That&amp;#x27;s not how it was done.&amp;#x27;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been in a meeting where a third-party vendor was explaining how I was incorrect about how some particular functionality in an application worked, and I had to stop him and inform him that I was the one who &lt;i&gt;developed&lt;/i&gt; that functionality and knew exactly how it worked.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vondur</author><text>Going off topic a bit, when I was in a hardcore band back in the early 90s, and we went into the studio to record, the engineer would give us rough mix downs of the music to go play in our car stereo as a quick check on it. In the recording studio with those high end studio monitors, it can make things sound far different then the more average sound system most people have access to.</text></comment>