Why Is Everything So Loud?

The short answer, before the long one

Your ears do not measure peaks. They measure how much energy arrives over a stretch of time, which is why a steady drone feels louder than a single gunshot even when the gunshot is higher on a meter.

Hold on to this, because everything below runs on it. Almost nothing you find annoying got there by breaking a limit. It got there by sitting close to the limit for longer.

A film peaks hard and then backs off. A trailer sits near its ceiling for two solid minutes. An advert is squashed so flat it has no quiet parts at all. On a meter reading peaks, the film wins. In your chest, the trailer wins.

A cinema is a calibrated instrument, in theory

Theatrical sound has a reference level, and it is a real number rather than a preference. Send pink noise at 20 decibels below full scale into one speaker, stand at the mixing position, and the meter should read 85 dB SPL, C-weighted, slow. On a Dolby cinema processor the setting is fader 7.0.

Two consequences follow. A mixing stage anywhere in the world reproduces the film the same way. And a cinema running at 7.0 gives you what the mixer heard.

The people who mix at reference every day are aware of how unusual their listening position is.

Then the film leaves the building.

The twist: your cinema is likely too quiet

Here is the part surprising most people, including me the first time I read it. Cinemas do not usually run hot. They run cold, because a complaint about loud sound is louder than a complaint about quiet sound.

To translate the numbers, you need one more fact.

Do the arithmetic. A room at 4.5 instead of 7.0 is two and a half digits down, so roughly seven or eight decibels below the level the film was built at. Seven decibels is enormous. It is the difference between hearing a whispered line and watching lips move.

And it explains the thing driving everybody mad, a film feeling too quiet and too loud in the same sitting. Turn the whole mix down by eight decibels and the quiet parts fall under the noise of the room, the air conditioning and the people eating. The loud parts started so far above everything else, so they survive the drop and still hit you. You lose the dialogue and keep the explosions.

Trailers are the one thing genuinely built to be louder

You are not imagining this one. Trailers are engineered to sit above the film around them, and there is an organisation whose whole job is stopping it getting worse.

In 1999, after enough complaints, the National Association of Theatre Owners asked for a standard. The Trailer Audio Standards Association came out of it. The ceiling started at 93 and came down in stages to 85 Leq(m), where it sits now.

Leq(m) deserves a moment, because it is a lovely piece of engineering. It is defined in ISO 21727, and it does not measure loudness in the plain sense. It weights the frequencies audiences report as most annoying, then averages. The industry built a meter for irritation.

So why do trailers still feel louder than the feature? Three reasons, none of them cheating.

• The ceiling is an average across the whole trailer, so the winning move is to live at the ceiling the entire time. No quiet parts, no dynamic range, no relief.
• A feature has to save headroom for its own climax. A trailer has no third act to protect.
• An action trailer often runs directly before a quiet drama. Your ears calibrate to whatever came before, so the contrast does half the work.

Worth knowing: the standard is voluntary. It is a recommendation from a trade body, not a regulation, and it holds because distributors and exhibitors both want it to.

Adverts on television, where the law got involved

Television took the other route. In the United States, Congress passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act in 2010, and the FCC rules took effect on 13 December 2012. Adverts have to follow ATSC A/85, which targets -24 LKFS and anchors the measurement on dialogue. Europe landed in the same place through EBU R128 at -23 LUFS.

It worked, in the narrow sense. Adverts no longer arrive ten decibels above the programme.

It also produced the flattest audio ever broadcast. The rule caps an average over the spot, so the response was obvious to anyone with a compressor. Remove every quiet moment. Push the whole thing against the ceiling and hold it there. The number complies and the advert still feels like someone leaning into your face.

This is the recurring lesson of loudness regulation. Cap the peak and people raise the average. Cap the average and people remove the dynamics. The meter is satisfied either way.

Streaming, and the room you are sitting in

Netflix asks for dialogue at -27 LKFS with two units of tolerance either side, measured to ITU-R BS.1770-1 with dialogue gating.

Dialogue gating is the interesting part. The meter tries to identify speech and measures only speech, ignoring music and effects. It answers a better question than overall loudness does, which is whether the voices land in the same place from one programme to the next. A film with forty minutes of storm still has to put its dialogue where yours is.

The gap between the spec and your living room is where the trouble lives. A theatrical mix assumes a calibrated room, a real centre speaker and no background noise. You have a television, possibly a soundbar, a dishwasher and a street outside.

Note what he is saying. The near-field mix, the one made for homes with tighter dynamics and dialogue sitting higher, is the version most people know. The theatrical mix is the unfamiliar one. When a big film feels punishing in a cinema, part of it is a room at the wrong fader, and part of it is your ear being used to something gentler.

The other places: restaurants, bars, shops

Leave the cinema and the same principle follows you around, minus the standards body.

Restaurants are the clearest case, because nobody set out to make them loud. Acoustic guidance puts a comfortable room around 60 to 65 decibels. Plenty of dining rooms run between 70 and 85. The cause is a design fashion rather than a sound system. Hard surfaces reflect as much as 95 percent of the sound hitting them, and the modern look is built from exactly those: bare concrete, glass, exposed ceilings, no soft furnishing, an open kitchen adding its own clatter. Every conversation bounces back into the room and everyone raises their voice to be heard over the reflections of everyone else.

Music then goes up to sit above the crowd, the crowd goes up to sit above the music, and the room finds a new equilibrium a good deal higher than where it started. Nobody chose the level. The surfaces did.

Venues playing amplified music have gone further. The World Health Organization suggests a ceiling of 100 decibels averaged over any fifteen minutes, and says the level should stay below 110 at all times. Most nightclubs measure between 100 and 110 at the dance floor, so the guidance describes the top of current practice rather than a limit anyone is enforcing.

The pattern is the same one running through this whole article. Where a number exists, it caps an average. Where no number exists, the level drifts upward until somebody complains.

The dialogue argument, which is an argument about intent

Now the part everybody has an opinion on. Sometimes you cannot hear the dialogue because a room is misaligned. Sometimes you cannot hear it because the director decided so.

Christopher Nolan has been explicit about this for a decade.

And when pressed on whether an audience needs to catch the words:

His supervising sound editor puts the intent plainly.

Worth saying: mixers do adjust for the kind of film in front of them.

You are allowed to dislike Nolan’s approach. Plenty of working mixers do. What is worth separating is the artistic choice from the delivery failure, because they produce the same symptom and need opposite responses. A deliberately buried line played in a room eight decibels down is buried twice. The choice was made for one condition and heard in another.

Which is why the most useful sentence in this entire article comes from a mixer rather than a director.

This is a design principle. Build the mix so the important information survives a listener who turns it down, because a listener will.

So about your -29

If you like dialogue sitting around -29 LUFS, your ears have found the edge of a real specification without being told about it.

Netflix wants -27 LKFS with two units of slack, so the compliant window runs from -29 to -25. You are sitting at the quiet end of it. The quiet end buys you headroom, and headroom is what lets a door slam land without the dialogue having to shout to keep up.

Your comedy exception is right too, and for a reason built into the measurement. Dialogue gating measures speech, and shouted speech is speech. A film where people yell for ninety minutes measures hotter than a film where they talk, at the same perceived level, because the meter has more loud speech to average. Setting the same target for both would leave the comedy feeling flat and the drama feeling thin. Trusting the number over your ears is how you end up with a mix nobody enjoys.

The general rule underneath: a loudness target is a delivery requirement, not a mixing instruction. Mix the thing so it works, then check the number, then adjust the whole programme rather than fixing it inside the mix.

What to do with all of this

If you make things, four habits come out of the above.

• Measure dialogue, not the programme. A dialogue-gated reading tells you whether your voices sit where everyone else’s do. An overall figure tells you how much music you used.
• Run the turn-it-down test. Drop the monitoring by eight or ten decibels and play the scene. Anything vanishing at the lower level vanishes for a real audience in a badly aligned room, and most rooms are badly aligned.
• Check on the worst speaker you own. A phone, a laptop, a cheap soundbar. If the plot survives there, it survives anywhere.
• Do not fix dynamics with a limiter at the end. Squashing the master to hit a number is how adverts got their reputation. Fix the balance where the problem started.

And if you only watch things, one habit. When a film sounds wrong in a cinema, it is worth telling the staff, because the fader is a setting somebody chose and a number they are able to change. Enough people mentioning it is the only pressure in the system.