I saw Inglorious Bastards last night. It’s an awesome movie but not historically accurate. I suppose there was never a claim that it was but I’m used to historical fiction being at least based on actual events. Also, having recently seen Der Untergang, it was strange seeing such a different visualization of Hitler.
Now for my rant.
I rarely go to the cinema these days and you know what, the thing I hate most about the cinema experience is the ear-splitting volume they subject you to. It’s not that I expect a cinema to tune their audio the way I do at home, it’s just that I like being able to hear well and going to a cinema is ruining my hearing.
At home, the acceptable volume range of a movie goes from “above ambient” to “loud”. Unless you’ve got a dedicated, sound-proofed movie viewing room there will be a certain amount of ambient noise so the minimum volume you can have at home is higher than what you can have in a cinema. On the other end of the spectrum, you can’t have gun shots scaring the neighbors so the maximum volume you can have at home is less than you can have in a cinema.
There are 2 ways to deal with this, direct scaling of the film volume levels to match your minimum and maximums and compression (where the lower sound levels are played as-is and the louder ones are made quieter than they would otherwise be. I would much prefer the scaling although there does not seem to be any support for this in any equipment I’ve seen and most movies broadcast for TV do not seem to have had this done to them. Luckily, my amplifier supports compression, otherwise even this would not be available to me.
So when you’re watching a movie in a cinema you expect greater dynamic range. This means that whispers are hard to hear and gun shots near the camera will be painfully loud (as they are in real life). What you don’t expect is scenes with painfully loud background music or having the director insist on putting the camera right next to all the loud noises they can find. Sustained loud noises are bad for your ears and when I watched the movie last night, that’s what I got. I don’t appreciate this. It detracts from the movie and causes long-term damage. Maybe older people and people who frequent cinemas or rock concerts (all of whom will have sustained hearing loss) can’t tell that the cinema volume levels are too loud but I can.
Turn down the volume already!
