Netzwelt knowledge: why is it often difficult to understand the sound of films on television?

AUDIO

July 02, 2022 at 7:00 p.m

Dialogues are too quiet, action scenes and advertising too loud – you constantly have to adjust the volume when watching TV. But why is that? Netzwelt tells you and has a solution.

You probably know this: the relaxed evening in front of the TV ends with a long press on the volume control on the remote control. If you want to listen at a comfortable room volume, the dialogues have to be made louder all the time, which means that the action scenes are too loud, which you then have to turn down manually if you don’t want to annoy those around you with too loud a sound.

1. The type of sound recording directly on the set

2. The difficult decision for or against music and effects

3. Films are produced for the cinema, not for the living room at home

Why is that and doesn’t seem to be improving for years, but instead seems to be getting worse? There are different reasons for this. We describe a few of them:

The type of sound recording directly on the set

Elaborate blockbusters work with opulent images in which there is a lot of movement. The sound crew has a hard time positioning their equipment in such a way that the sound quality is perfect. The picture is in the foreground and microphones, for example, cannot be attached directly to the actors because then you would see them.

So there is usually a distance between the recording device and the actors, which also leads to unwanted noises being recorded, which are difficult to remove from the soundtrack. Despite the wide range of post-processing options, it can happen that speech intelligibility is not perfect even during production.

The difficult decision for or against music and effects

Today’s films usually contain significantly more music and effects than films from the 1970s or 80s, for example. That’s because it was technically more complex and expensive to produce the sound for the film back then. So the focus was more on dialogue intelligibility to tell the story, while music and effects were used more sparingly.

Thanks to today’s digital production possibilities, there are practically no longer any limits to the number of available audio tracks. These are much more time- and cost-effective to use. This has led to the fact that more and more music and effects accompanying the dialogues are brought into the films, with which there is always the danger that they make the dialogues more incomprehensible by overlaying too much sound information.