What they’re apparently doing is hitting the exceptional case, changing the volume, and then leaving it there forevermore — so effectively picking the lowest common denominator. So every movie is screwed, except the movie with the most egregious violations
What they should be doing is running their sound through a volume normalizer. A system that might be set at "7" or "4" is the problem. Set the system to the number of decibels you want, not the amount of amplification you want.
That seems to be the problem mentioned in the "Mixing For Streaming" portion of the article.
> 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 ... there are only a couple different ways of measuring these things these days, and I can only imagine that it's somebody just not understanding the reason why it should be this and not that."
Not in itself; the question of "how loud is the soundtrack overall?" is not the same as the question of "what's the difference between the soundtrack at its loudest and the soundtrack at its quietest?". (That second question is about "compression".)
The normalizer will ensure that if you were trying to have explosions that are too loud, what happens instead is that your dialogue will be too quiet. But that's a good thing. Mann thinks that volume should be set at a level appropriate for the dialogue, even if that means suffering hearing loss from exposure to non-dialogue parts of the soundtrack, and Mann is wrong about that. Hulu is doing the correct thing.