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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.

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The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.

What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.

That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1

I've always set up my center channel volume using the test mode (by ear many years ago, and more recently automatically with Yamaha's YPAO).

Am I meant to then override that by increasing the center channel volume so it's louder than the other speakers?

Or raise the system volume?

I have a decent[1] system with a dedicated center channel. Everybody complains that the mix is too loud if we tune for audible dialog on anything made in the past decade or so (MI3 bluray is fine, and I suspect that Transformers would be too).

1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.

remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"

hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for

Physical media is dying, so that's a strange conclusion to draw.

Anecdotally, I have gotten many compliments on my small Unihertz phones that I've owned over the years, particularly from women.

As far as revealed preference goes, those who complimented me on it all had the smallest iPhone available when purchased.

There are probably 100 times more people listening to billboards hot 100 on crappy headphones if not phone speakers than people who know what "dynamic range" means…

You're false. Research has shown that if people like sound A, they will like it even better when you play sound A louder.

The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.

> No one likes it, except for those guys.

This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.

Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.

Hard data can lead you astray.

When people listen to two pieces of audio they generally prefer the louder of the two. That doesn't mean they want you to turn up the volume dial for them. They can adjust the volume dial themselves, and if everything gets louder they'll turn down the volume dial to compensate.

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