Hello everyone, first off a big thank you to all the mixers who responded to this survey. The reason I set off on this personal endeavor is to be able to get movie playback levels back to Dolby Fader 7, with sensible mixes (sensible does not mean flat, dull, or whatnot, it just means that the movie plays back in an enjoyable manner to a broad audience when the playback is set to 7 in the theater). Now I know that this might be a pipe dream, but I prefer that we all get our heads together before we get hit by legislation that could impact the way we work, and hobble our artistic intentions. To that purpose, I am part of a workshop with our French sound associations AFSI and ADM. I will also be presenting my results at a CST seminar in June, and Eelco Grimm will be using the results in an upcoming AES presentation. However, as I stated above, even though I am an active member of AFSI and the AES, this survey is not done on their behalf. I urge my fellow mixers around the world to get in contact with their local sound organisations (ie. CAS in the US, AMPS in the UK) to get the ball rolling.
I will be preparing a summary of the Survey, with a focus on the US, the UK, France, South America, Asia and Eastern Europe. I'll post it when finished (in a week or so).
Edit: some people might be surprised that this is posted on the yellowcabstudios.com website. YELLOW CAB Studios is my company, and it is more convenient for me to post it here. I am not using this as a publicity stunt.
A few notes about the charts below:
- I used AwesomeTables to add filters to show different ranges of results, however, the charts that appear sometimes change format/type unexpectedly so beware.
- Load times for the charts below can be quite long, so please be patient!
- The Predub and Mix Monitor Level AVG always show 81 and 82.5 respectively. These are the average values for the entire survey response range (387 responses). The value for the filtered ranges is show after ("on average xx.x"). In some cases the average value is not shown, and in it's place there is the SUM of all the dB readings (weird bug). You can easily calculate the average by dividing this amount by the number of responses shown (this number is the 1 - x / x value just below the filters).