SOUND LEVELS ON SKY MOVIES

A regular complaint on the Sky+ forum is that the dialogue on Sky Movies channels is much quieter than that on other channels.

Films on Sky Movies usually have Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks. The problem is that some of these films are designed to be heard in a cinema, with really loud effects such as explosions etc. You may have noticed that the loudest bits in cinemas can be almost deafening. To keep the dialogue at a reasonable level it is mixed a lot quieter than the noisy effects. You are getting the same mix at home, where most people don't want to listen anything like that loud. The result is that when you turn the effects down to a reasonable level the dialogue is much too quiet. There isn't much you can do about this, I'm afraid: what you need is some sort of automatic level control, which I don't suppose any TVs offer. Older films don't have anything like the range between dialogue and loud effects, so that's why they are easier to listen to.

Another problem is actors mumbling - and there is what is called 'the director's mix', where the director, who knows the dialogue backwards, insists on it being held down with the effects - so that the ordinary punter can't hear half of it. Sometimes I can't hear the dialogue clearly, on a first-class hi-fi set-up. 1930s and 1940s films by contrast are always perfectly clear, because their producers knew they would be heard in all sorts of cinemas, some with poor acoustics, so every effort was made to make the dialogue clear.

For the most part ordinary Sky boxes don't usually have this problem: there are two separate sound tracks, one PCM (stereo) for normal boxes and one Dolby Digital for Sky+. Dolby Digital film prints carry both a Dolby Digital 5.1 and an analogue Dolby Surround track; so it's probable that the PCM track is derived from the latter, which might have a much smaller dynamic range: hence the difference. However I've seen complaints about the low levels referring to ordinary Sky boxes, so perhaps the PCM track is indeed being mixed down from the DD track, or the dynamic range on the Dolby Surround track may be very wide on some films.

Oddly enough, you are may have more problems with the wide dynamic on Sky than on DVDs, because Sky evidently broadcast the Dolby Digital track intended for cinemas: whereas I strongly suspect that at least some DVD issues have the tracks remixed to provide a less demanding sound for domestic listening: this sometimes involves not only reducing the dynamic range but also reducing the amount of specific sounds in the rear channels.