Are Modern Action Films Sound Mixes Really Muddy and Overblown

Price believes the problem is partly that modern directors have so many more tracks to play with, causing “track overload”, the result being that “the dialogue gets short shrift a lot of the time”. When he watches films or TV shows at home, he turns on the subtitles in case of clarity issues – he is far from the only one – and will limit the TV’s dynamic range.(In cinemas the dynamic range – the range between the loudest and quietest sounds – is wider than on home TV screens, and, although the sound is compressed in the transition to TV, the range can still be so wide that you are forced to turn up the volume for dialogue, then down again for action.)

But since there's no industry standard in how to measure audio for streaming, other platforms base their levels on other parts of the sound mix. Case in point: Mann recently worked on Joe Carnahan's "Boss Level," which was originally meant to be a theatrical release. "For a variety of reasons, it ended up at Hulu, and when we got a look at that spec, they require it to be based on the overall [volume] of the film, not on the dialogue level of the film. Consequently, that's a big action movie with shooting and cars and big music, and the result of that is that you have a much more squashed up, un-impactful mix ...

Anything newer then X-files sucks, star trek is ok dialog. id say everything is pretty muddy./ When I got a new amp the chase and explosion screens are much better but before that I was always panic to turn it down. One thing for example is th prologue is EPIC LOUD with so many tracks at once, the voices the music the ambient its all so freaking much at once. Then when the opening credits go and the horrible ambient EPIC track fades then its ok but I use subtitles. Sounds to me that your L&R channels are set to higher volume than your C.

It's just how everything is mixed nowadays. Audio engineers target a specific mix, usually based on what it would sound like in a larger theater, and it doesn't transfer well to home viewing (especially basic setups). As mentioned, the way I deal with it is to bump the center channel by like ...

Here’s one I didn’t expect. Vehicle sounds in action films have declined by 16% since 2000. This neatly tracks with my past research showing that the fastest declining cliché in movies is “Follow that [vehicle]”. In the 1970s, action ...

Sound design, in particular, plays a massive part in giving the players' actions weight and is therefore quite loud in the mix. TV, unlike film, is mixed primarily for home viewing and is very dialogue-heavy with less sound design (although with TV becoming increasingly more cinematic the difference in mixing is getting less and less).

You might also consider adding the TC Electronic loudness radar option to your hardware loudness meter. The radar histogram is very helpful in giving a sense of where loudness trends in your mix are heading, especially because the radar display effectively folds the histogram back on itself.

Nolan, it was later revealed, had deliberately mixed the sound in a muddy, soupy, music-dominating way that made it awfully difficult to hear the dialogue. I watched it twice inside Hollywood’s TCL Chinese and had trouble with the dialogue both times. I also read that it drove many others crazy.

“The worst mix was The Dark Knight Rises,” he said. “The studio realized that nobody could understand him so at the last minute they remixed it and they made him literally painfully loud.