The topic of having to constantly readjust your volume level comes up a lot. This is a topic I understand in great detail so I made a post yesterday that may have been worded poorly and misunderstood by most so I quickly pulled it down because it became useless trying to reply to everyone and re-explain it. I'm going to take a different approach here. Background: I am a re-recording mixer for TV and Movies. I've been doing that for 12 years, and have been an audio professional for 20.
To clarify right off the bat I am talking about dynamic range in movies, and not about movies that have a bad mix. If the issue is that the music and effects are so loud that you can't understand the dialog over it, then that is not the topic at hand. Bad mixes do exist and I acknowledge that. The topic at hand is when you feel that you are constantly adjusting your volume when you watch movies, and you're doing it with most movies you watch. You have to turn up the volume to understand the dialog on the quiet parts and the BAM, the loud parts are too loud for you to bare so you turn it down. The first reaction is to blame the mix and wonder why the hell all us mixing engineers are making the dynamics so drastic. While it's true that we do mix movies with a wide dynamic range, it is also true that a highly reflective acoustic environment can exacerbate this issue. Every room in the world is different and we can't escape the physics of sound, no matter what we do in the mix process. Similarly to how we can't escape the physics of light so no matter what the colorists do in the final color correction process, they can't control the light coming in from your window and fucking it all up.
When it comes to dialog clarity, it is a fact that reverberation reduces intelligibility. If you have a room that's highly reflective you are going to struggle to understand what's being said at low volumes so you are going to turn up the volume. Now when the loud parts hit they are going to be exponentially too loud for two reasons. One, you've just turned up the volume a bit high to compensate for the low intelligibility. And two, reflective rooms will tend to amplify loud noises even more. So a reflective room has virtually increased the dynamic range. For me personally, My downstairs TV is in a large open space and I don't have much acoustic treatment there. I find myself constantly adjusting the volume when I'm watching on that TV. However when I watch on my ipad with my air pods pro (noise cancellation on), I set the volume once and rarely touch it again for the rest of the movie.
Movies are purposefully mixed with a large dynamic range and it's always going to be that way. On my post yesterday I provided some suggestions on how to reduce this problem in your own home and I got assaulted with aggressive comments about how I'm "blaming the consumer" instead of taking responsibility for delivering a mix that's compatible on all systems. In response to that complaint, we do try to deliver maximum compatibility on all mediums but we can't account for the rooms. The physical nature of acoustics is far too variable. I'll refer back to my parallel example of light affecting the brightness and color. The colorists have no control over what the light is doing in your room as we have no control over what the sound is doing in your room. I'm not blaming the consumer, I'm blaming physics. This time instead of me giving suggestions on how you can vastly improve this issue in your home, I found an article that has laid it out in much better detail than I did. Here it is..
https://usabilitygeek.com/improve-sound-understanding-room-acoustics/
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/ouqnz6/how_dialog_clarity_and_harsh_fluctuations_in/
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