What SHOULD An HT Center Channel Speaker Sound Like?

[milotrain]

Thanks for this. This is what movie sound recordists and post sound editors strive for. None of them, that I know, record and process for effects over intelligibility. It's why they uniformly refer to any captured center channel as the "dialog channel." Dialog is very commonly captured, on set, by a monaural microphone. Later, it is mixed into the tracks.

If the movie viewer cannot clearly understand the actors' spoken lines, the scene audio won't be salvaged by the exact aural image of some footsteps or a passing truck. The Oscar goes for the actors' lines, foremost. The paying audience cares about them.

What is a "movie sound recordist"? Do you mean the production mixer? A field effects recordist? A recordist? (I've been all of them). A Recordist (IATSE, MPEG Y-9) is a post position, not an on set position. I was one for 8 years. Which post sound editor? The Dialog editor? (I've been that too). What about the Dialog mixer? That's the person who has the most to do with dialog intelligibility but you leave that out of your description. Have you worked in film or is your entire attitude one of consumption and DVD extras on "sound"?

I agree with you 100% that if the viewer cannot understand the dialog, then the scene cannot be saved by anything else. But you've never heard a center channel with just dialog, and if you did you wouldn't like it. In fact I'd wager you wouldn't be able to believe in the story at all. If I can get it cleared I'll mix you an example. You are right, we don't process for effect over intelligibility (for the most part), but there are times where the show runner wants to obfuscate the dialog because they want chaos over intelligibility as a creative choice. There have been several times during a fire on Chicago Fire, that the dialog of the firefighters isn't as important as conveying the intensity of the scene, at those times the stress of their voice is all that is needed, not the words. The same has been true of scenes in For All Mankind when astronauts or cosmonauts are on radios. I am an FX mixer, so my job is generally to stay out of the way of Dialog, while building the world you hear. If I play my stuff too low you will absolutely have a problem with that mix, and as you noted, if I play it too hot then you can't understand what the actor is saying.

Again, no one in this industry (that I've worked in for two decades) has ever called it a dialog channel. You can look at my IMDB if you want, I use my real name. The reasons that intelligibility has gone down hill are complex and multifaceted, but from experience I can give you an at home test. Go watch old episodes of House in 5.1 (which were mixed natively in 5.1, as most shows of the time were). Those are some of the clearest mixes, in terms of dialog, in a contemporary show, but they were the end of an era. I'm happy to explain why the dialog in that show is easy to understand.

If you are ever out in Los Angeles you are welcome to come by NBCUniversal Studios and I'll show you the stage. You can play with some mixing if you want.

That comment suggests you weren't even around in the 1980s. No idea.

I assure you I was, but I see we are done here. The statement was specific, not all 80s mixes, but the ones made to sound good on car speakers, of which there are plenty and which do not hold up on contemporary playback equipment.

 

[Jim Shaw]

What is a "movie sound recordist"? Do you mean the production mixer? A field effects recordist? A recordist? (I've been all of them). A Recordist (IATSE, MPEG Y-9) is a post position, not an on set position. I was one for 8 years. Which post sound editor? The Dialog editor? (I've been that too). What about the Dialog mixer? That's the person who has the most to do with dialog intelligibility but you leave that out of your description. Have you worked in film or is your entire attitude one of consumption and DVD extras on "sound"?

I agree with you 100% that if the viewer cannot understand the dialog, then the scene cannot be saved by anything else. But you've never heard a center channel with just dialog, and if you did you wouldn't like it. In fact I'd wager you wouldn't be able to believe in the story at all. If I can get it cleared I'll mix you an example. You are right, we don't process for effect over intelligibility (for the most part), but there are times where the show runner wants to obfuscate the dialog because they want chaos over intelligibility as a creative choice. There have been several times during a fire on Chicago Fire, that the dialog of the firefighters isn't as important as conveying the intensity of the scene, at those times the stress of their voice is all that is needed, not the words. The same has been true of scenes in For All Mankind when astronauts or cosmonauts are on radios. I am an FX mixer, so my job is generally to stay out of the way of Dialog, while building the world you hear. If I play my stuff too low you will absolutely have a problem with that mix, and as you noted, if I play it too hot then you can't understand what the actor is saying.

Again, no one in this industry (that I've worked in for two decades) has ever called it a dialog channel. You can look at my IMDB if you want, I use my real name. The reasons that intelligibility has gone down hill are complex and multifaceted, but from experience I can give you an at home test. Go watch old episodes of House in 5.1 (which were mixed natively in 5.1, as most shows of the time were). Those are some of the clearest mixes, in terms of dialog, in a contemporary show, but they were the end of an era. I'm happy to explain why the dialog in that show is easy to understand.

If you are ever out in Los Angeles you are welcome to come by NBCUniversal Studios and I'll show you the stage. You can play with some mixing if you want.


I assure you I was, but I see we are done here. The statement was specific, not all 80s mixes, but the ones made to sound good on car speakers, of which there are plenty and which do not hold up on contemporary playback equipment.

If you don't know the industry standard job title 'sound recordist' you don't even watch film credits let alone work on a location crew.

 

[milotrain]

Read it again. I spent 8 years as one, but it's not the job you think it is. It doesn't sound like there is any progress to be made in this conversation.

 

[Andretti60]

If the movie viewer cannot clearly understand the actors' spoken lines, the scene audio won't be salvaged by the exact aural image of some footsteps or a passing truck. The Oscar goes for the actors' lines, foremost. The paying audience cares about them.

Sorry but I cannot agree with that.
Dialogs must be understandable, but not every time and every minute, some dialogs are more important than others, and usually when a dialog IS important is between very few actors, and in that case the cameras pan close to them and everything else is in the background.
But most important, according with what you are saying if ALL you are interested is the dialog, you are looking at a different form or Art (caps intentional), you can just turn the television screen off, or read the script or the novel that inspired the movie. Cinematography is a very complex art that has evolved (and still is) a lot during our generation, it is not only dialogs, like many other entertainment forms like Opera, theater or broadway musicals, art that is not only perceived by our hearing, but our other senses as well.

Home Theater systems and big screen tv are just a way to “emulate” a big avenue at home, they are not perfect (they will never be) but for sure they made huge improvement during the last twenty years or so.

 

[dshreter]

Home Theater systems and big screen tv are just a way to “emulate” a big avenue at home, they are not perfect (they will never be) but for sure they made huge improvement during the last twenty years or so.

The systems have come a long way, but our homes have not. Swapping carpets and softer furnishings for hard floors and minimal Scandinavian furnishings.

We have gotten older in the last twenty years as well. It’s not a comforting thought, but our ears AND brains don’t work as well to hear speech as they did when we were younger.

So intelligibility is a real and noticeable issue for many.

 

[milotrain]

So intelligibility is a real and noticeable issue for many.

Without a doubt. There are solutions, but none are easy. Center speakers really help, as long as they are good.

 

[Andretti60]

So intelligibility is a real and noticeable issue for many.

Agree.
this is why nowadays almost all AVR and sound bars have a “clear voice” (or whatever is called) setting (and even in that case the technology is improving). And it is a good thing.
But, as everything else goes, “garbage in, garbage out”. It all depends on the post production sound mixing. Sometimes at the end of the shooting there is not much left in the budget and they have just one day to mix it. Sometimes the producers don’t like the results and ask for “more explosions, more noise, who cares what Jim is saying!” Sometimes it’s just the directors themselves that decide “what is good for the audience”, and if you look who is going now at the movie theaters is just younger than 40 years old with perfect hearings. Therefore the fault is not in the center channel speakers, that is only a “messenger”, the problem is in what is recorded in the center channel.

 

[milotrain]

It's also an issue with production. To take my earlier example (and everyone should go watch it) House was old school. One camera, the directors would rehearses the scene (meaning the boom could figure out how to get closer, and the actors could work their lines), the production mixer is amazing and he'd do lots of plant mics as well as double boom many shots, the lead actor is a classically trained stage actor who could hit the sixth row as if he was next to you. Today we run multiple cameras (less room for the boom), no one rehearses scenes, many actors don't have classical training, many production mixers can't or won't double boom or plant (kit rentals have gone way down), sound "slows down" the process and with COVID zones this is very expensive, many shows are ensemble casts (just a contemporary storytelling style) which makes booming harder and we end up leaning on lav mics which sound thinner and usually covered with cloth sound. Lots of "we will fix it in post" but the problem with a lot of the de-noising tools we have is that the resulting sound can require a lot of environmental support sound to hide the processing (especially if it's been done heavily). We are also making a lot more TV than we once did, so there are a lot of new people in the industry who don't have the years and years of technique built up.

 

[norman bates]

I am curious.

In stereo, Interaural crosstalk is already compensated for.

See figures 38 vs 39 for an example of stereo speakers freq response vs separated so left ear only hears left speaker and vise versa.

The Effects of Interaural Crosstalk on Stereo Reproduction and Minimizing Interaural Crosstalk in Nearfield Monitoring by the Use of a Physical Barrier: Part 2 | Semantic Scholar

A study of the effects of interaural crosstalk on normal spaced-speaker stereo listening environments is presented. Interaural crosstalk detrimentally affects both imaging and frequency response. Imaging is affected by restriction of the sound stage to between the speakers and by the loss of...

www.semanticscholar.org

But in a movie, voice is assumed for 1 speaker (center).


If you force the 5.1 to stereo, can we assume the voice is processed, or boosted to make up for this phenomenon ?

 

[milotrain]

For the most part 5.1 to stereo fold downs (in TV) are done with either PLII encoders (not so common anymore) or a standard LR down mix topology (center pulled 3dB and sent to the L and R, surrounds pulled between 3dB and 6dB and sent to their respective sides, and the LFE muted or pulled around 12dB). From an acoustic energy perspective I can AB a 5.1 and a stereo mix in my room with the above fold downs and the dialog doesn't "bump". There isn't any processing applied in a standard LR down mix, and with a PLII encoder there isn't any processing applied to the center channel.

 

[MattHooper]

What audio stream are you pulling then? The stereo? Or are you taking a 5.1 mix and multing the center channel to the L+R?


1. You don't mix to the lowest common denominator, that's how you get the crappy music mixes of the 80s that were made to sound good on car speakers. You trust that your work will outlive today's technology.
2. Explain to me how you would approach this with a bussing structure and a pan law in any current DAW. Pro Tip: I suspect you'll end up defining a 4.1 system, but of course you know that such doesn't exist, which means it's not possible to deliver to the end user.


If you want a "tell me" medium you go to theatre or radio plays. TV/Film is a "show me" medium; as such the visual world must be justified with sound. That sound isn't as important as dialog, but it is more than just icing.

Yes, obviously every speaker in the front array is the same. This has been covered.

Yup.

I think this is a case of some people not knowing what they don't know

(Sound Effects Editor/Designer here...currently working on a Netflix series. Cheers!)

 

[Doodski]

Yup.

I think this is a case of some people not knowing what they don't know

(Sound Effects Editor/Designer here...currently working on a Netflix series. Cheers!)

Have you used the Wilhelm Scream in movies? Lol... That scream cracks me up.

The Wilhelm Scream — Origins and Iconic Examples

The Wilhelm Scream is an iconic sound effect that has been used in countless movies, becoming an inside joke for filmmakers and fans alike.

www.studiobinder.com

 

[MattHooper]

Have you used the Wilhelm Scream in movies? Lol... That scream cracks me up.

The Wilhelm Scream — Origins and Iconic Examples

The Wilhelm Scream is an iconic sound effect that has been used in countless movies, becoming an inside joke for filmmakers and fans alike.

www.studiobinder.com

gawd no. Not my department, though.

I am amazed when some really old library sounds, including screams, shows up in even pretty big movies. And some baby tracks have been used forever too.
When you've been around for many years you recognize the library stuff.

 

[mj30250]

The children laughing sound effect is always immersion breaking to me for some reason.

Could paying a 6 year royalties on occasion be that bad!?

 

[milotrain]

The children laughing sound effect is always immersion breaking to me for some reason.

Could paying a 6 year royalties on occasion be that bad!?

It's not the royalties, it's that 6 year olds are TERRIBLE at taking direction. You never want to be doing group coverage with kids, the few who are good are worth their weight in gold.

 

[MattHooper]

It's not the royalties, it's that 6 year olds are TERRIBLE at taking direction. You never want to be doing group coverage with kids, the few who are good are worth their weight in gold.

The thing with babies and very small children is that stuff is often left to us sound effects editors. We have to use whatever baby/kid sounds we have, so we are in effect “dialogue editing” without the benefit of the “actor” ever having been recorded or done ADR! Imagine taking the image of an actor talking, then being handed a track of wild gibberish, and now “make it look like the actor is saying it.” Always fun. (Not to mention I’ve done a number of series where they barely budgeted for group so I was constantly covering for dialogue - the last one had almost zero group coverage for kids of almost any age).

BTW as a sound editor good mixers are gold too. The most disappointing are what I think of as the “faders down mixers.” The ones whose reaction to any apparent conflict between music/dialogue/effects is to just drop the levels on one of them (usually sound effects which are the 3rd priority after dialogue and music). That results in really flat mixes. (And I hear TONS of flat mixes especially for TV series). So often actors seem to be in complex environments and they are mixed so low it’s like they are only hinted at. A mixer who works at a track to dig things out and make it all work makes a huge difference to the tracks IMO.

I watched a show recently where the director/producers clearly really cared about sound - Ron Howard’s recent 13 Lives movie. That is an IMMERSIVE mix where the atmospherics are played bold and up front yet the dialogue is intelligible. So it was either a mixer who had decent time or a talented mixer. It’s a tour de force just for the variety of water sound.

 

[alitomr1979]

Why do we test home theatre dialog (center channel) speakers as if they are expected to be like mains?

Is it unreasonable to expect HTCC speakers to be optimized for human speech? Yet we persist in expecting them to have the same quality and character as the main front channel speakers. We know the range for intelligibility of the human voice, and it ISN'T 20 Hz to 20 kHz. It's more like 150 Hz to 5kHz. And it should be cardioid, not all beamy with 2 woofers and two tweeters.
.....
Further, why doesn't anybody make a powered center channel speaker for HT? In adding a center channel to a 2.1 system to accommodate HT, why can't we just take the high-level lines to the main channel speakers, feed them as signals into an amp in the center channel, and use bandwidth shaping to accommodate dialog, not all the music and car crash sounds? Is Atmos a law of nature?

As a crowd of one, but possibly more, I would like very much to buy a single box, place it dead center in front of the TV, plug it in, connect a couple of small signal leads to the main channel speakers, tune it up, and voila! have better dialog. And not have to step back to a sound bar, or up to a rack of hardware, MDF boxes, and more remote controls to do it.

Klipsch, Polk, Emotiva, and all the rest: why is there no such product?

-Just one guy's view, who's anti-wire clutter and 7.1.1 contraptions.
[stepping aside and awaiting all the it-can't-be-done testimonies.]

I think all center channels should sound like the KEF R2C. They could sound like the Q600C which is also very very nice sounding.

Both CC speakers have that thing that concerns you covered, as you won’t have to make ANY effort to understand dialogue/human speech with any of those speakers. When I uñgraded to the R2C what I noticed immediately was how I was getting a better sense of the acoustics in the scene. Now I dont notice it often. It’s more that I miss it when I go to other systems.

What center speakers have you experienced? Even the Klipsch RC 62II was really good and speech was clear:

 

[restorer-john]

I watched a show recently where the director/producers clearly really cared about sound - Ron Howard’s recent 13 Lives movie. That is an IMMERSIVE mix where the atmospherics are played bold and up front yet the dialogue is intelligible. So it was either a mixer who had decent time or a talented mixer. It’s a tour de force just for the variety of water sound.

Shot and recorded where I live. The 'cave' and the set was just up the road from us.

 

[milotrain]

Ron Howard always cares. Apollo 13 still sounds amazing.

 

[HeadDoc12]

ah Jim, trouble with dialog? Sorry, but it's old age. We just turn on the subtitles ...

Not so fast, it is also a widely recognized problem:

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It) - SlashFilm

/Film spoke with several Oscar-winning sound designers, editors, and mixers to learn why it has become tougher to understand what characters are saying.

www.slashfilm.com