Pointless Topics

Anybody here use a projector at home instead of a TV / monitor?

Yeah a guy I work with. He’s constantly banging on about how he doesn’t own a TV yet watches absolute shite on his living room wall instead.

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Sounds like what I’m aspiring to.

Yeah I had one for a while, it’s really good, but the novelty wears off pretty quick.

Re: payrises…

It’s Thursday, there’s gonna be a sick sesh at the indoor park in Lausanne tonight and I had planned on going there but the weather is autumnal as fuck and I looove that and might go for an outdoors solo skate at my shitty local park this afternoon instead.

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Yep. I think a big TV in the living room looks awful. We have a small 32" right now to keep daughter happy. But before that I had to remove 2 large framed pictures off the wall before using it, so only used for movies and to treat myself to a skate video.

And Ex on the Beach, of course.

Yep, got a 34" 21x9 monitor in the fireplace, thinking of an upgrade over winter. Just have to sort out some better speakers first, which won’t be cheap.

We watch very little TV, it’s nearly all YT, Plex and Netflix - the vast majority of films fill the screen with no letter/pillarboxes. Hook it up to a laptop or Chromecast and it’s sorted. We recently stayed in an apartment with a decent projector and holy fuck, minds were blown.

We got given a projector for our Mini ramp barn, one night we projected a porno on the side of it to the pleasure/displeasure of the adjacent farmer.

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Nah, that was a post-modernist art show with an erotic theme.

Have my TV connected to Sonos. But only a few (the expensive ones) have the 3.5mm line in jack. And the soundbar is wider than the 32" TV so that option is out.

Got some 2.1 JBL desktop speakers donkeys years back, still working fine, but fail with the old classic of crushing dialog to a whisper while raising explosions loud enough to wake the dead. So yeah, gotta find a spare €1k or so for 5.1 speakers and a receiver - first world problems, etc.

I make adverts and docs for TV quite a lot for work, and a few years back everyone in my industry had to start working to loudness standards for broadcast, R128 LUFS. The board were trying to bring back dynamics into advertising and TV shows rather than slamming everything into an audio compressor and then limiting the bejesus out of it afterwards, like a lot of people do for radio. This has meant that there’s now more controlled dynamics in everything, which is great in one way; like when an advert comes on, it doesn’t come in like a harrier jump jet taking off, and scare your cat, after you’ve been watching a serene wildlife doc. The small problem is you have some mixing engineers who don’t account for scenes with whispered dialogue and the like and are mixing for that one scene rather than the overall context of the programme loudness. Leading people to complain that they can’t hear shit.

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I think there has to be a happy medium that people can reach. Dynamics are all well and good but I think people confuse it with a softer overall level. You can still mix to the right level and get dynamics in.
There are a few albums that spring to mind where the artist tries to say that the album was mixed with dynamics in mind so you may need to turn up the volume. The albums always sound shitter than previous where they were running pretty hot.
It’s an odd grey area.

The initiative was originally brought in to stop the adverts or explosions coming in so hot after watching a softer section/program. So you now have to work to an overall median of loudness rather than a one time peak limit. This brings the loudness of all the ads and really loud sections of programs down in relation to quieter sections, but because it’s a median, some mixing engineers are leaving whole sections far too quiet in relation to some of the other sections, meaning you can’t hear shit if you’ve set your volume on your box to deal with the super loud bits.

Yeah that makes sense with TV.

Did not know about this at all.
My personal problem usually comes from encoding a video file for home use to an mp4 via Handbrake, where I have the option to take 5.1 audio and mash it into 2.1, which doesn’t work. Major trial and error over the years now has me usually outputting a few different audio channels to an mp4 - mixed down to Dolboy Pro logic (for 5.1) and AC3 passthru (seems to work fine for 2.1) does the job.
TV ads though are always louder though, the bastards.
And Plex, for some reason, seems to play series and film audio lower than the system’s full volume - Netflix and Iplayer are always fine, but it’s home encodes that have problems!

Ah, I see mate. Most dvds have a stereo mix and well as a 5.1, why do you want to use the 5.1 to make a new one?

Future-proofing for when I eventually hook myself up with 5.1 speakers!

Do streaming sites, Netflix, NOW Tv etc output in 5.1? I used to have a rad 5.1 set up years ago, but thought it was a thing of the past tbh!