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.