Bram Stoker's Dracula - Dialog

[gvortex7]

Originally Posted by Sir Terrence

Whenever I read problems like this, a few things come to mind.

First, on the dubbing stage, these kinds of problems do not crop up at all. The dialog mixer, music mixer, and the effects mixer all work very hard to keep things balanced, and to keep things from being buried.

When I hear of this at home, background noise, horizontally mounted center speaker, center speakers that cannot dynamically keep up with the L/R pair, or room resonances all come to mind.

Almost everyone that has complained about this has issues with background noise covering up the dialog. When you boost the center channel to compensate, everything else goes out of balance. When you try to boost the master volume control, then the effects kick in and knock you out of your seat. The best thing to do is to try and reduce the background noise level, and this will reduce the problem considerably.

Almost everyone who has complained of this problem has their center speaker horizontally mounted in between vertically mounted L/R mains. It is usually sitting on top of the television which is seen by the speaker as a baffle, or surface, that it will interact with. Place a speaker near a wall, and the lower and mid bass is boosted. Place a speaker on top of the television, the same effect appears.

A different effect happens when you dissimularly place three speaker in the front stage. Because the center is mounted horizontally, it will have a different dispersion pattern than the left right mains. Instead of having a wide horizontal dispersion pattern like the L/R mains, it will have a wide vertical narrow horizontal pattern that is opposite of both speakers to the left and right of it. This changes the frequency response heard at the ears, and when combined with the center speaker on the television, will change the frequency response of the speaker itself. Dialog problem galore will happen.

The last reason this happens is purely acoustical. If the center speaker is placed in a room null(suckout), or your ears are placed in one as well, dialog will become hard to hear even if you took care of the other things I mentioned. Center speaker placed on televisions make them closer to the ceiling. This becomes a reflective surface that the speaker sees, just like the television below it. Cancellation and boosts in the mid to lower bass will occur effecting what you here at your seat.

You will reduce or eliminate this dialog problem if you orient all of your front speakers simularly(all vertical is best), use a speaker stand instead of your television, and keep your speaker as far from reflective surfaces as you can.

Those are some great points. However, I don't really have this problem anymore, as I've been using a projector and large screen for over a year now and all of my speakers are placed in the most optimal position because of this setup. My sound distribution has been very efficient since the change and I couldn't be happier.

My agreement with one of the previous poster came from the fact that I, like many other people here, used to place my speakers next to and on top of my television thereby causing all kind of sound reflections and distortions. That contributed to the muffled or muted dialog in movies, particularly when viewing DVD's.

[Knight-Errant]

I agree with the gist of this thread that I'd rather have the levels as the film makers intended at the mix than have normalization effects and the like applied.
I generally don't have problems understanding dialogue in my setup but my dream is one day to have a home cinema built from the ground up for the best effect. Ahhh one day!