Cinema Sound Playback Level and Audience Satisfaction

Over 25 years ago, loan Allen presented a paper asking “Are Movies too Loud?”. He described the then-current situation, highlighting many issues and symptoms including: audience complaints, concerns reported in the press, theater operators playing films below Reference Level, trailer loudness wars, and excessive trailer loudness pushing down feature playback level. Decades later, despite some progress (notably the TASA standard), these issues remain. More recently we've seen evidence of movies being mixed at below Reference Level to align the mix environment with the reduced playback levels in cinemas. One might argue that cinema operators have adequately addressed loudness by simply turning down the playback level. However, the situation remains unsatisfactory to audiences, theater operators, mixers and directors. Playing a movie at below the intended level does more than simply reduce loudness. The timbre, the spatial balance, and the balance between the audio elements within the mix are distorted. With a loss of Reference Level directors can no longer be confident that their vision and artistry will be faithfully reproduced in theaters, movie-goers are less engaged and remain unsatisfied with playback levels, and exhibitors are caught in the middle. Previous investigations focused on deriving objective loudness metrics (variations on weighted Leq) and associated thresholds. For this paper we take a different approach; rather than devise or adopt an objective measure, we measure loudness using the subjective impression of listeners. Does the audience believe cinema sound is too loud, and if so, by how much? We present research in real-world and controlled environments to explore the causes and consequences of reduced playback level, and propose some changes to current practice.

Published

2024-10-21

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

cinema sound, loudness

DOI

10.5594/MOO/3015

ISBN

978-1-61482-965-2