It’s called Dolby 2.0 and a lot of Blu-ray movies actually do have a track (though not all). Though it’s been my experience that the native 2.0 usually sounds worse than the 2.0 that I compress down from the 5.1 or 7.1 when I make a backup of my movies. I am unsure as to why this is. I’m guessing it’s cause, as OP stated, the studio sound mixers just don’t give a shit to make a 2 speaker system sound good.
Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.
Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.
The problem is that there are “default” weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don’t care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you’re using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie’s problem.
![Volume [Mr Lovenstein]](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/579/944/976/646/219/original/e93a9a49d1ddc0df.png){kind=link}
We have movies with multiple audio streams. So you can choose English, or French, or crew commentary.
Why not have a mix for “standard home TV setup” and a mix for “5.1 ultimate surround sound system” and keep both groups of people happy?
It’s called Dolby 2.0 and a lot of Blu-ray movies actually do have a track (though not all). Though it’s been my experience that the native 2.0 usually sounds worse than the 2.0 that I compress down from the 5.1 or 7.1 when I make a backup of my movies. I am unsure as to why this is. I’m guessing it’s cause, as OP stated, the studio sound mixers just don’t give a shit to make a 2 speaker system sound good.
Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.
Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.
The problem is that there are “default” weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don’t care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you’re using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie’s problem.