Crap sound in The Dark Knight

B

Brenna F

New member
Anyone else notice this? The sound balance seemed to all wrong where I saw it - a lot of the dialog was inaudible. I thought it was my ears but the score was so loud it drowned out a lot of lines. As I was watching I was wishing it was a dvd so I could turn on the subtitles!

I was thinking of complaining to the management of the cinema but I just read Tookeys review in the Mail and he said the same thing.

Anyone else notice this?
 
The sound was fine when I went to see The Dark Knight last night as well. I think it maybe the cinema you saw it in that had a problem!
 
It's not something I really noticed, that was until the final scene and Gordon's speach to his son, I didn't catch half of it because the score was totally overpowering him!
 
I'm in America at the moment and I went to watch the film last night. I had the same problem to be honest. Parts of the film I couldn't hear and other parts it was very, very, very loud. Still didn't ruin my enjoyment.
 
I read a review in the national press where the reviewer complained about the sound balance. Might've been Wossy who didn't like the film anyway.

I much prefer DVD purely due to sound level issues with films at the cinema and not being able to hear dialogue.
 
My screening had that problem around the start. It's the cinema's fault, as I know they change the settings for every film they screen. What's silly is the person in the booth is the one making the adjustments but they can't hear how it actually sounRAB, they're relying on a colleague in the cinema giving them the thumbs up when they think it sounRAB ok.
 
I found the sound wrong for the first half hour or so. To say the music was too loud is probably over-simplifying. It was cluttered; I could hear the dialogue but it was hard to make out what the worRAB were.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse for some listeners than others. It was bit like trying to make out conversation in a nightclub, which some people seem to manage OK.
 
I watched it last night and the sound was brilliant. You could practically feel the vibrations from every gun shot, explosion, etc.

But the sound the first time I watched it was terrible. It completely ruined the film.
 
The sound was awful at my cinema, to the point where I think it did dampen the thrill of the experience slightly as I actually couldn't hear the dialouge at times. :(

I hope the sound on the DVD will be okay.
 
There is an issue with the sound mix on the copy of the print that I've been exhibiting.

Experience suggests that as it's obviously not affecting all cinemas, it may be an issue with a particular formats sound mix. We run Dolby Digital so it may just be the Dolby Digital mix that is overly dynamic, cinemas with DTS or SDRAB, SR etc may not be having an issue. It can happen the other way too... I've had DTS mixes so bad I've run a film in Dolby analogue.

Basically the action scenes are VERY loud, and the dialogue is VERY quiet so to get the dialogue at the correct level, we're having to set it at a higher volume level than normal.

It's something that wouldn't have been picked up until the opening days in most cinemas, as we don't get the prints early enough to check them for faults/issues.
 
The Cineworld in Bedford where I went to see it had warnings at the ticket office that 3 reels of of the film had been damaged and exhibited discolouration, scratches and dust.

Oddly the first real that had noise on the screen also caused static out of the speakers. I was under the impression that the soundtrack and film were separate and that distortion in the film wouldn't effect the sound. The 2nd reel had jumping coloured blocks down the right hanRABide, and the final reel had yellow banRAB down the right hanRABide.

I'll get the proper experience when it comes out on BluRay :rolleyes:
 
The Dolby Digital soundtrack is printed on the film in the form of digital data blocks between the film perforations. DTS Digital is on a separate CD-ROM, transferred to hard disc, which is synchronised with the picture using a timecode printed on the film. SDRAB is printed as a continuous purple strip down both edges of the film.

A severe case of "mis-printing" could have resulted in no DD or DTS available. Analogue soundtrack with Dolby SR encoding is printed as a continuous waveform adjacent to the picture. If the reel had been mis-printed the analogue sound reader, could, in theory pick up garbage from the picture area which is decoded as nothing but static. You wouldn't get static if the Dolby Digital or DTS tracks had been misprinted - if the digital tracks are unreadable you get no sound and the cinema sound processor reverts to analogue.

Nowadays the labs print film at around 1000 feet per minute which has resulted in many more printing and snyc errors lately. In any case that Cineworld should have requested a new reel be taxi'd to them same day.
 
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