Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1492834
P H OT O : D I S N E Y + 43 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E T E C H All Mankind," "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law," "Outlander," "Project Blue Book," and the newly released Disney+ series "National Treasure: Edge of History." She said, "There are so many playback devices, and when you play a mix on these different devices, you hear different flavors of sound reproduction immediately. How does one combat that? That's a big problem. We are now mixing for a cornucopia of devices and acoustics." Creating nearfield mixes from theatrical ones requires rebalancing the theatrical mix stems. Hirschberg starts with the dialogue track, making sure it's understandable and plays consistently before adding in the other stems around it. All the while, she's thinking about the director's intent and how to make that translate at a lower volume with less dynamic range. "We have to consider the content itself. For instance, action movies are tricky because the experi- ence is much bigger in the theater but when you dial it down for home theater, you're really relying only on the dialogue track. That skews the mix in a way that wasn't necessarily the filmmaker's intention, so you're not getting the full theatrical experi- ence at home. You have to go back and forth between hitting the expectations of the home audience member who's watching it for the first time and somebody who has this knowledge of what the intention was when we mixed it theatrically," Hirschberg said. R e b a l a n c i n g s t e m s i s a n a r t t h a t requires the hands (and ears) of a skilled mixer to make sure the integrity of the original mix isn't lost. It's not just about hitting different loudness specs; therefore, it's not a task that should be left to an algorithm. But according to Hirschberg, streaming services are now asking for only one nearfield mix. She said, "They want the Atmos mix and they fold it down into whatever. That's a huge problem because that is way out of our control. A lot of people are hearing the worst possible mix because they're getting some kind of downmix that we can't control and didn't create. If the mixer who mixed the Atmos version does the nearfield versions, they know where the attention should be sonically, and what the feel was supposed to be. A good mixer can recreate the experience of the original mix so the listener will be hearing what they should be at any given time in the home theater Atmos, 5.1, or stereo mix. But that also requires the streaming service to actually provide the end user their choice of the mix – so they can chose the right one for their listening environment – and they don't routinely do that. " Hirschberg feels that "it's super-import- ant to spend time making a stereo mix. We used to make that as an afterthought and let a formula crash it down, but now I spend three days making that stereo mix, trying Lora Hirschberg. Benedict Cumberbatch in "Dr. Strange."