- Fitted sheet must have label on bottom right seam
- Salted butter wrapping text must be red. Unsalted blue.
It may seem slightly above inconsequential, but parking. Parking is a great example of arbitrary rules having longstanding effects. (Really neat video on parking regulations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8)
As for more inconsequential. Leafblowers Leafblowers immediately banned unless they are
- Less than 20db
- Zero emission
- ONLY USED AFTER 9AM WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY
Gender separated bathrooms, they’re an unnecessary way to increase cost for no real benefit
Have you ever noticed the line outside the woman’s bathroom at an event? I prefer the two bathroom system.
Urinals still exist
deleted by creator
Packaging for supermarket products should have what the product is big and the branding small. Not the other way around.
Oh. Sound mixing on movies/tv shows should be such that voice lines are always perfectly audible even on shitty speakers. Make actors e n u n c i a t e like they did in the 30s. Christopher Nolan has a lot to answer for, turning all of media into mumblecore chief among those things.
Movies (and even most video games) make me so angry with that kind of stuff. You want an artificially tailored experience that only works with a zillion-dollar sound system? Fine, you can make it an optional soundtrack that only kicks in with those systems. But the default audio mix needs to be intelligible even on my phone’s speakers.
Video games are annoying because often you can’t hear anything over the explosions music during the opening cutscenes, but at least you CAN fix it in the settings. Movies, yeesh, you have to rely on your TV’s crap postprocessing.
The technology for this has existed for 20+ years and is actually fairly common. It’s often referred to as dynamic range compression. I think the chief complaint here is that it needs to be more accessible. Pre-applying it would mess up too many use cases.
Audio compression is much older than 20 years! Though you’re probably right about it becoming available on consumer A/V devices more recently.
And you’re definitely correct that “pre-applying” compression and generally overdoing it will fuck up the sound for too many people.
The dynamic ranges that are possible (and arguably desirable) to achieve in a movie theater are much greater than what one could (or would even want to) achieve from some crappy TV speakers or cheap ear buds.
From what I understand, mastering for film is going to aim for the greatest dynamic range possible, because it’s always theoretically possible to narrow the range after the fact but not really vice-versa.
I think the direction to go with OP’s suggested regulation would be to require all consumer TV sets and home theater boxes to have a built-in compressor that can be accessed and adjusted by the user. This would probably entail allowing the user to blow their speakers if they set it incorrectly, but in careful hands, it could solve OP’s problem.
That said, my limited experience in this world is exclusive to mixing and mastering music and not film, so grain of salt and all that.
I thought it would be simple: just make the mono/stereo/etc mixes easier to understand, and leave the advanced stuff to people with a million speakers.
I guess that’s too simple?
I would bet there is one mix created in surround sound (7.1 or Dolby Atmos or whatever), and then the end-user hardware does the down-mixing part, i.e. from Atmos with ~20 speakers to a pair of airpods.
In the music world, we usually make stereo mixes. Even though the software that I use has a button to downmix the stereo output to mono, I only print stereo files.
It’s defintely good practice to listen to the mix in mono for technical reasons and also because you just never know who’s going to be listening on what device—the ultimate goal being to make it sound as good as possible in as many listening environments as possible. Ironically, switching the output to mono is a great way to check for balance between instruments (including the vocals) in a stereo mix.
At any rate, I think the problem of dynamics control—and for that matter, equalization—for fine-tuning the listening experience at home is going to vary wildly from place to place and setup to setup. Therefore the hypothetical regulations should help consumers help themselves by requiring compression and eq controls on consumer devices!
Side tip: if your tv or home theater box has an equalizer, try cutting around 200-250hz and bring the overall volume up a tad to reduce the muddiness of vocals/dialogue. You could also try boosting around 2khz, but as a sound engineer primarily dealing with live performances, I tend to cut more often than I boost.
My TV is insulting like that. It technically has an EQ, but it makes no perceivable difference no matter what I do in it.
But assuming it worked, wouldn’t doing that strictly with sound frequencies cause issues? Like, okay, most voices are louder because I boosted their frequency, but now that one dude with a super low voice is quieter, plus any music in the show is distorted. Or something like that.
I wish they just provided separate tracks that you could control. One track for dialogue, one track for music, one track for sound effects, and maybe one track for less important voices. Then let us adjust the volume of each. That would help so much. And they basically HAVE to do it at some point in the process anyway if they want multilingual dubbing to work.
Speaking of dubbing: recently I’ve taken to watching more content dubbed in French strictly because it’s almost always intelligible, contrary to the aRtIsT aCcUrAtE volumes of the original. Pretty sad that I have to do that though.
My TV is insulting like that. It technically has an EQ, but it makes no perceivable difference no matter what I do in it.
What the hell!
But assuming it worked, wouldn’t doing that strictly with sound frequencies cause issues? Like, okay, most voices are louder because I boosted their frequency, but now that one dude with a super low voice is quieter, plus any music in the show is distorted. Or something like that.
Not necessarily. Regardless of vocal range, around 400hz-2000hz makes up the body of what you hear in human speech, or the notes for instryments carrying a melody. Below that, say, 160-315hz is going to be the “warmth” and “fullness” of the sound, while 2.5khz-8khz is going to be the enunciation and clarity (think ch-sounds, ess-es, tee-s, etc).
Sure, if you start really going hard on an EQ, you could absolutely throw everything out of balance — if you cut out 12db at 250hz, all the warmth will be gone and everything will sound thin. If you scoop a bunch of 400hz-1.6khz, it will sound like a walkie-talkie, and if you make a large boost around 3khz-8khz, then everything will probably sound harsh and scratchy.
This is where, the listening environment becomes important to consider. Do you live near a busy highway or do you have a loud air conditioner? You don’t need to answer these questions in public, but those kinds of ambient sounds can compete with the enunciation frequencies, or add to the buildup of “mud” in the lower part of the spectrum.
The size, shape, material properties etc. of your room and furniture also play a role here. For example, a bunch of bare walls and hard surfaces will cause a lot of the high frequencies to bounce around, potentially causing a buildup of harshness. This is why recording studios and your high school band hall probably have those oddly-shaped, cloth-covered wall “decorations” that serve to neutralize the cavernous sound you’d get in a large, bare room.
Overall, compensating for the environment is where you should probably aim your EQ. That is, even if source material varies wildly, it’s probably best to try to EQ to the room you’re in rather than each, individual program.
The way to do it is to find a song you know by heart, that you know how it sounds in the best way possible (there are a few that, to me, sound great in my car and on my favorite pair of headphones, so I use those), and play that through your TV. Then, fiddle with the EQ until it’s as close to the ideal sound in your head as you can get it.
