#ben pearson

"It seems to be a little bit of a fad with some actors to do the sort of soft delivery or under your breath delivery of some lines," Curley says. "That's a personal choice for them. Our job is to record it as well as we can regardless."

Mangini says that in the old days, "you could count on an actor's theatricality to deliver a line to the back seats." But acting styles have changed so dramatically over the years that it has become much more difficult to capture great sound on the set. When actors adopt that more naturalistic style, "it's even harder for the production sound mixer to capture really quality sound. Now we get those compromised microphone positions here in post-production, reaching for a dialogue line that is barely intelligible or maybe even mumbled because it's an acting style, and already, we're behind the 8-ball in trying to figure out a way to make all of those words intelligible."

Karen Baker Landers, whose credits include "Gladiator," "Skyfall," and "Heat," among many others, has her own term for it. "Mumbling, breathy, I call it self-conscious type of acting, is so frustrating," she says. "I would say a lot of the younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus also falls on the directors to say, 'I can't understand a word you're saying. I'm listening to dailies, and I can't understand.' No amount of volume is going to fix that."

That naturalistic performance style might feel right for actors in the moment on set, but it can be hell for the sound professionals who have to clean it up afterward. "We're very careful to make sure there's clarity," Baker Landers says. "You go in and you volume-graph up a vowel, or one letter. You go in and you surgically – maybe if it's not right on camera, you slow it down. There's all kinds of things we spend hours trying to do that may help a performance. We really strive for that."

But they can only do so much.

"Very often, the streamed audio is a compressed version that you wouldn't get on a Blu-ray," Mangini explains:

"On Blu-ray, if you select 7.1, that is our full fidelity, 48 kilohertz, 24-bit master audio, just as it came from the mixing studio. You can get that on a Blu-ray, and you can get that on certain premium platforms. I think you have to pay extra money for that. But otherwise, it's most common that when you stream, you get a degraded version of what you mix that even we didn't approve. It's done after the fact, after we ship the masters. The only way [streamers] can get the bandwidth they need for you to see image and sound in sync is to compress everything."

"You mix it at your level in the mixing room, and theoretically, that is supposed to be the same level that is represented in the movie theaters on the Dolby Cinema processors, therefore giving you an exact translation, more or less, of what you've done on the mixing stage. But what's happened is, particularly in the '90s, because that felt like the time when they were doing the loudest mixes – I didn't mix in those times, but the stories were that mixers and maybe directors would want stuff mixed at a level that was just ear-bleeding. And what would happen is, that would get to the theater, there would be complaints from the patrons, and the theater would be compelled to turn down the mix. And when the next feature came in the next week, the level was never reset, and now that level is playing way low for the regularly mixed movie. That's a problem that vendors have been dealing with for many years. I know [it's still happening]. For example, the Landmark Theater chain does not play their theaters above 5.5 on the cinema processor, where the set standard is supposed to be 7 on that processor."

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Meanwhile, Baker Landers thinks part of the trouble may have begun when theaters shifted away from projecting movies on film. In that transition, union projectionists — the people who knew the ins and outs of how to properly present a movie with care — were largely kicked to the curb in favor of inexperienced employees who essentially pressed play on a digital system and could then busy themselves doing other tasks. She tells me a story about how she went to see one of her own movies at a big multiplex and the auditory experience was so bad, she was compelled to point it out to the manager.

"I did a film that was [played] at a 4 [out of 7 on the processor scale]," she says, still appalled by the memory. "I was at a matinee with a lot of elderly people because I took my mom, and I'm like, 'None of these people can hear what's happening.' The manager, who was probably all of 22 years old, said, 'Well, that's how the film was done.' And I said, 'No, I did the sound on the film. That's not how it was done.'"

When sound pros encounter those dumbfounding levels of separation between the mixing stages and theaters, Mann says there can be a schism about the best way to move forward:

"You're going to have some people on the mixing stage who want to turn [up that volume higher than the standard of 7] to compensate for the fact that theaters are playing it low. But [if you do that,] when you go to those theaters that are calibrated correctly, you're going to blow the doors off that theater because it's going to be ripping loud. So one thing we always try to tell our people is that you have to be happy with the mix in the properly calibrated environment, and when you go down to your local movieplex, the speaker could be blown, the level could be low, God knows what's going to happen when you're out in the wild, and we can't control all of that."

Baker Landers knows on which side of that divide she falls. "We mix and release the film for the best case scenario, saying, 'This is how it should be.' A lot of times, we'll hear people say, 'They're not going to be able to hear this in certain theaters in the Midwest, so should we do this louder?' But then you don't have a standard any longer. You have to say, 'This is the standard. We're doing it for the optimum viewing experience.' And hopefully theaters and everyone else rise to that."

For audio mixers, the theatrical mix comes first, followed by a streaming mix. Then, a stereo mix will often be created, funneling the full scope of the sound mix through just two simple speakers in a process Donald Sylvester likens to "taking a beautiful steak and dragging it through the dirt."

"A lot of people watch it on their flatscreen with their sound bar and they think it's going to be an improved sound situation, but it may not translate," says Sylvester:

 "Some TVs take the 5.1 [surround sound mix] and they turn it into a stereo. They have algorithms inside the TV. It's not even our mix. We don't even know what it sounds like. I think a lot of tuners do that, if you have a receiver — I know they have algorithms, and they also put coloring on it, like 'cinema approach' that adds reflection and noise and stuff that you don't want in the mix. That's another problem. You don't know how it's being presented in the home."