The design, technical considerations, and specifications that went into the digital sound track are to provide a medium that theoretically has no limitation. The digital medium is not the restrictive part of the process anymore.
– Robert Warren, Dolby engineer
When the digital format came out. . . . there were, in my opinion, a series of not very good and just painful mixes. Directors thought it was good: “My movie is going to be the best movie ever” . . . it was the big action pictures, they used to have to be loud.
– Anonymous interview with Kerins
You may think it’s great and exciting and normal, but it’s not. . . . about 90 percent of America just doesn’t want to listen to stuff that loud at any time.
– Thom Ehle, Dolby Consultant
A lot of movies are just loud all the time. . . . Underworld was probably the loudest movie I’ve seen in a long time. Every single kick, punch, whatever it was—everything had to be as loud as possible. Whereas a movie like that could have been a lot more effective had it been quieter in scenes instead of just loud all the time.
– Anonymous sound editor, interview with Kerins
The well-known fact that nearly all theaters play films at a lower level than they were mixed ironically causes many directors to insist that their films be mixed even louder in a desperate effort to compensate for the anticipated reduction, which of course causes the theaters to turn the sound down even more, etc., etc. ad infinitum.
– Randy Thom (Ratatouille, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Cast Away)
You could listen to a symphony played at full blast with all the instruments at the same level for about ten minutes, and then it would begin to pall on you. What the musicians of the nineteenth century began to discover . . . was the idea of dynamics within each movement, of shrink- ing the orchestration down to a single instrument and then expanding it outward again at the right moment. It’s an approach that generally characterizes nineteenth-century music and is well suited to film. – Walter Murch