That seems like the only solid solution. I got a budget 5.1 with rear satellites because not only did I want a dedicated center channel for dialog but I wanted to avoid the 5.1 to stereo downmixing issues (such as in Plex) where the center channel gets incorrectly divided with a volume decrease (jellyfin didnât seem to have the issue), but this way I can just sidestep those issues by being able to directly play 5.1.
This has helped a ton but there are still some movies that donât cooperate, like dune part 1 during the Paul and his mother breakfast scene at the beginning. Even though I have the truehd 7.1 atmos and DD 5.1 (which direct plays without conversion), the only way to make that scene audible without blowing out the speakers the rest of the movie is to crank up the voice boost EQ which ruins the balance.
Itâs not just psychological. Youâre expecting a loud experience in a theater. Everyone around you is, too. And the building is designed for it. Versus at home, where I have neighbors, potentially other housemates who arenât watching, etc.
Sometimes, idk if dune is oneâŠ. Shows/movies have scenes with intentionally difficult to hear dialog. Itâs like, sure, theyâre talking⊠but we want you to just watch and donât worry youâll get everything from visuals
Then maybe shut up a bit? Let the vibes just go, why you gotta keep talking over em? If you put words in a movie, Iâm going to try to interpret those words. If theyâre not important, I dare say they can be removed.
Tenet is the ultimate example of this. Lots of dialogue is drowned out by other sounds. Couldnât hear fuck all of what the actors were saying. Wish Iâd known before going in that Nolan was going for vibes over dialogue. I probably wouldnât have bothered.
Why Include the dialogue if itâs not meant to be there? Why have the subtitles written out instead of [unintelligible speaking]? Why waste my mental energy on trying to parse which pieces of the talking are important, and which are just, what? Vibe checks? You put those words in your movie for a REASON Christopher, and damnit, Iâm going to uncover it.
Absolutely. I spent the film straining to hear the actors unsure if I was missing anything important. I was so distracted that the only âvibeâ I got was frustration
If the problem is bad 5.1 to stereo downmix, then youâd be trying to use software tricks to separate out dialog that has already been merged with the other audio tracks, which wonât do a great job.
That software needs to run on some kind of hardware, so if youâre playing your media from a streaming box that doesnât run custom software (Chromecast for example) then you will need to add an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this processing, such as a DSP.
This essentially amounts to trying to fix it with EQ when you can just not merge the center channel with the other channels in the first place. Having a dedicated center channel speaker lets you use the ultimate software regulation trick - simply turning up the volume on the center channel.
Unfortunately volume normalization only works on the overall volume. If spoken dialog happens during sound effects that are supposed to play on a separate speaker (but got mixed into the dialog due to downmixing to stereo), no amount of fiddling with EQ or volume normalization will boost just the dialog without also boosting the background noise (in the case of using even a 30 band EQ, it wonât work if thereâs any background music, vocals, or sound effects in the same frequency range as speech).
If you want to boost dialog with only software, the best route to go is to get in before downmixing so you can boost the center channel before it gets irreversibly mixed with unwanted sound effects from other channels. Some players might have that option, but like I said if youâre playing from a set top box or streaming stick, youâre gonna need an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this. If you have the video file itself, you can use ffmpegâs audio filter to do a custom downmix using the -af flag. This way, you can use a downmixing algorithm like the Robert Collier night mode dialog downmix mapping which preserves original dialog volume (which actually is an improvement in some cases since some algorithms erroneously lower the dialog volume when downmixing to stereo) while slightly reducing music and other channel volume - you can adjust the weights used to boost center channel volume further as well.