Like I said it depends on what you’re getting the sound out of. Headphones plugged into your PC for Netflix? You are probably boned unless they’re decent headphones and your soundcard/software offers some decent filters or equalizer options. TV? If you’ve got decent media speakers hooked up and set up right you’re probably fine. For watching at high volume with a bunch of people. Trying to keep it quieter? You have some tweaking to do. And your sound system if its any good will allow that. Most people don’t realize their TV, or even cable box will let them do that. Built in TV speakers? All the ones I’ve seen lately suck balls even with good audio and tweaking.
Honestly a lot of the time it might not even be the movie’s fault. If the people I know who had media hosted there are to be believed, Netflix’s encoding created this problem for a long time. Questionably acquired downloads frequently have this, and other audio issues. Even where the official materials they’re created from don’t. I suspect the people encoding them use bad audio settings to keep the file size or export time down.
Or user error. A lot of people don’t realize that their TVs and audio set ups are full of presets and setting options. All of which come out of the box in demo or “movie” modes which fuck everything up. Stretched pictures, fucked contrast. Along with excessive base and really jacked up sound levels. All of that is intended to make the TVs and equipment more impressive when you walk by them in the store. They need to “pop” more than the item sitting next to them. But they suck suck suck for actually watching something through in a smaller room with human lighting.
I had this problem with everything for quite a while on my PC. And I blamed the source. Encoding. The movie business. And while that was often plenty true as well (the trend was much worse a few years back, and like I said Netflix had an issue with it). I was also getting it on stuff where I shouldn’t have. Reasonably sure the issue was the bone cheap mobo I was using with its finicky, not very good on board audio. When I built a new PC. And used a better, more expensive, mobo with a decent but still on board and pretty standard audio card. Well the problem largely went away.
But like I said. This one, I’m betting it was mixed to sound good/impressive on mobile. Its a short video hosted online for streaming. Most of that sort of thing is consumed on mobile these days.
