Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Blue
Why have the scores of movies and TV shows become so increasingly loud over the past several decades that you can't hear the dialog? It should be background music for goodness sake. 
I like to watch nature, history and science shows on TV, but the background music overpowers the narration so much that you can't hear half of what's being said. Same goes for movies. 
Now, if I can hear the voices in my head over the ringing in my ears, I can see no reason why they can't do the same on TV. They have a much bigger budget, after all.  |
+1. +2 if you count my spouse. We cannot understand why some of the British shows
still have such incredibly lousy sound, (they apparently have never tried using sound studios to re-record the voice tracks) and why Barrington Pheloung's (sp?) music has to overpower shows like Inspector Lewis. And it's not confined to that show; almost all the newer shows have the same problem. Between overpowering background music and (in the case of British shows) no sound-board management to dampen background noises, it's just nearly impossible to hear dialogue. Broadchurch, for example....music swells to big moment, and we're cranking up the center channel on our sound system in a (usually) unsuccessful attempt to hear whatever's said. Very frustrating.
The same thing is true of movies--the whole "smother them with noise" issue is really disturbing. I think that studies have shown that a human can really only hear (decipher) 3 sounds at any given time, so scenes with bombastic music, gunfire, bombs, alien weapons, other weird sounds AND dialogue? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Hitch