From a post by “Adam” on rec.arts.movies.production: (ADR is “Additional Dialogue Recording”).
> That’s a lovely story, Darrell.
Most US TV sound guys are probably in a navel-gazing clique entirely of their own, these days. Like, Bowie 30 years ago had mics at different distances to enable a seamless in-synch transition to shouting. Those were the proud analogue days, not populated by kids twiddling knobs as today.These days ADR is often done with a headset, which effectively eliminates inherent nuances such as dynamics, head movement effects, distance cues etc etc, and has the problem of unreal or too-consistent quality. In other words, what started as a simple desire or need for good voice quality, has resulted in a homogeneous voice sound, equivalent for all speaking characters, always perfect, and this detracts from the “suspension of disbelief” which arguably these media are all about.
My point is, that US TV sound in particular, and US film sound secondarily, is mostly homogenous pre-digested pap. The excessive use of feeble underscores (Lucas films, et al), laugh tracks (all US comedy), over-explanatory dumbed-down scripts, are all peculiarly unattractive American qualities. Murch and a few others are great, of course.
Interesting story though, Darrell.
I don’t blame the sound guys for uncreative boring unreal work, its the mindless producers that ask for it, and they’re often glossy simplistic ex-advertising types. How that execrable Numb3rs ever got off the ground,I’ll never know.
Its certainly no Art, its a mass market product targeted solely at teens after all, and no-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the target market.