In an age where the consumer industry thinks we all need to download an app to operate a “smart” toaster, I wonder if my idea is just another example of Tech No One Asked For, or is actually rather innovative.
I would like to be able to mix my own sound on my TV. For example, I could turn down to barely audible the inane banter of the Fox Baseball announcers* and turn up the crowd noise. Or I could turn down the sound of the studio audience in favor of the sound of the actors. Or disable the music. Or whatever.
If this were a feature available to you, would you use it?
*Back during the 2016 World Series, as The Flying Spaghetti Monster is my witness, I told Mrs. Homie that I was going to throw my TV out the window if Joe Buck said one more motherfucking word about Bartman Balls or Billy Goats.
If such a thing existed, I would definitely get rid of the laugh track as well as drastically reducing, if not eliminating, the sound track much of the time.
I’d certainly like to be able to boost dialogue to where it can be HEARD clearly around music and other sound. Would be nice to be able to follow dialogue without using subtitles, which is very difficult in some cases where the “professional” sound people decided the dialogue is the least important sound in a scene.
I’ve found that Peace Equalizer APO does a pretty good job of doing everything mentioned. I run the TV digital audio through a cheap Windows laptop and then to my A/V amp. Peace allows me to almost instantly switch between my defined profiles for 2.1, 5.1, and 7.1 streams for various programs. Equalizer APO has quite a few useful filters available to emphasize voice, reduce background noise, or eliminate complete channels. In lots of cases, for example, YT videos of police stops, simply using “left channel on both channels” makes a huge difference. But I do usually notice a very slight processing time delay. May not bother you at all.
Yes I would like a feature like that. Because I live alone and hate loud TV, I almost exclusively watch with the sound provided by headphones. This gets around most of the mumbled dialogue problems.
Unfortunately Australia has the worst sports commentators on the face of the earth. Nearly all of them believe that shouting substitutes for intelligent calling of the play. So I would like to quieten them and get more crowd atmosphere. Many grounds now have DJs (?) that pump out obnoxiously loud snippets of bad music at every break in play so I often end up just watching in silence.
I have Tivo and it has greatly improved my viewing. On commercials, Tivo has an automatic commercial skip feature that takes about 2 seconds to eliminate commercials on about 95% of shows I record and I record everything I watch.
On sports shows (for me, football), Tivo has a 30 seconds advance feature I use between plays, fouls, injuries, interviews, color commentary, etc. I fast forward through halftime reducing the time spent watching the entire game to about an hour.
On audio, my TV has a ‘clear voice’ setting emphasizing dialog and reducing background music.
I’d like a sound feature that takes a hard to understand accent (say Stephen Gerrard) and tones it down, giving a much milder version( say Paul McCartney)
I’d like an option that zeroes the sound level every time the TV is powered on. I’m married to someone who listens at a fairly high volume and won’t turn it down before powering it off for the night. So I get startled by some news vapor-brain yelling at me in the early morning when I first turn it on.
FTR: Some “smart” TVs are apparently busy with BIT or some other startup housekeeping, and ignore volume/mute requests from the remote for the first 45 seconds. I truly, absolutely, hate this.
The obvious problem with this is that you only get one sound channel on a TV signal.
So unless you can persuade all the broadcasters to start sending different components of the sound on separate audio channels, you are limited in what you could do. And then of course: how many audio channels? Who decides what goes on which channel?
Mind you, ‘stem splitters’ for music which deconstruct a mix into separate instruments are starting to get quite good. Though still far from perfect, and they don’t currently work in real time: you have to run them over the whole recording first.
With advances in computer power and audio processing, this might become possible in the fairly near future…
I do skip or mute adverts as much as possible. And I’d quite like to block irrelevant background music - the kind of off the peg “vamp till ready” urbleburble some ill-paid intern has been told to slap on to cheap documentaries. (I don’t mean specially commissioned music, as for many dramas as well -that usually works with the dialogue and visuals)
In the midst of my ongoing middle-of-the-night insomnia, I watch eternal Seinfeld re-runs with the sound turned down (or closed caption on) and a finger on the mute button. To drown out the loud dozen prescription commercials in between the 5 minute segments of the program. I live in an apartment building quiet as a tomb and don’t want to be ‘that’ tenant.
Back to the OP:
I’d really like that feature and would use it often. Being able to turn down everything except the dialog would be real handy for me. Sportscasts where the crowd noise drowns out the commentation, or movies where the music and action sounds are much louder than the dialog drive me nuts.
Of course a really good version of this would require changes in how the sound portion of a video is transmitted and would also require changes in production processes going all the way back to the original live action.
It’d also be neat if any form of advertising had to be flagged with a special ID code and any cheating on that would be punished severely.
I already routinely use the “speech enhancement” and “night mode” options of my devices, which amplify dialogue and normalize the super-soft and super-loud sounds in movies and games (smoothing out the high and low volumes). Even then, most movies today are incomprehensible to me without subtitles on — despite having perfect hearing (“best I’d ever seen in my career” is what the last audiologist told me). Going to the theater these days is such a terrible experience without captions that I end up missing 50% of the dialogue or more. My local theater has started having open caption nights for people like me (and the bigger chains usually have special glasses with heads-up subtitle displays that you can borrow for free, or cupholder-mounted ones).
A lot of video games these days have special sliders you can use to individually adjust the volume for everything from the soundtrack to weapons fire to cutscenes to ambient background sound to of, course, dialogue. But of course, there you have separate tracks, unlike some TV mixes.
Sometimes TV does have adjustable mixes, e.g. 5.1 audio where you can independently turn up the center channel that the dialogue often comes out of, but that’s not a perfect solution.
It should be possible to use signal processing + machine learning to filter out certain things (like laugh tracks), but I suspect that this was never really a technical hurdle to begin with, but a creative one. For every person who likes a sensory-reasonable experience, there’s probably ten or hundred who want their big bassy explosions and thumping pop-rap soundtracks. The mixes seem to get more extreme with every generation. Maybe we’re just old-fashioned
I hope that somebody makes active noise-cancellation headphones someday that can dynamically cancel out certain parts of movies. It should theoretically be possible to get an audio fingerprint of what you’re listening to, line up the timings, and then play the inverse waveform of just a part of it (like the soundtrack) while keeping the rest of it intact. That’d only affect the headphone-wearer and not other audience members. Somebody please go invent one?
