Because the fuckers producing the shows make the music and sound effects 5x louder than it needs to be but the dialogue half as loud as it needs to be.
It’s because they’re mixing dialogue for the center channel speaker. Most people don’t have a center channel on their TV or sound bar, but some "Dialogue Mode"s will exclusively play the center channel and drown out the sound effects. It’s a trade off, but one that most manufacturers don’t even give the option for.
I have 5.1 and still encounter tons of shows where I need to crank the volume for dialog and then hurriedly lower it during explosions or fight scenes. This wasn’t much of an issue a few years ago on the exact same surround sound setup.
I have a 5.1 as well, and I use software normalization (Plex and through my Shield) to fix it. I know there’s a way to tune it via hardware, but my setup is an ancient Yamaha receiver and I prefer the software normalization.
Mixing can be a mixed bag, as everyone uses different hardware to master their sound, but normalization or boosting center fixes it 99% of the time.
Hm. I’ve got a basic 5.1 setup via sound bar and have dialed center up to max. It sorta works, but it makes the “surround” a lot less impactful because of the disproportionate levels (eg explosions straight ahead still boom).
I always though this was a deliberate mixing decision for “immersion”
I should give this a shot too as my setup uses all the same hardware (including the Yamaha receiver). I’ve been hesitant to have Plex level audio since it can reduce quality, but mixes are getting so bad that it’d probably improve the quality above all else.
There’s a couple reasons why I use subtitles all time. Firstly I’m getting older and can’t hear as well with background noise. If my wife is banging around in the kitchen I can’t hear dialog from the TV. With subtitles on I don’t have to mess with the volume.
Another issue is media producers (TV and film) have this idea they need to blast you out of your chair with sound effects and music. So if you turn up the volume enough to hear the dialog clearly, you’re going to get blasted by everything else. Trying to manage that with the volume control is damn near impossible. Interestingly I’ve noticed “dialog boost” appear on occasion in sound track options from my streaming provider. I use it when the option is there. That kind of indicates a global problem.
An issue related to sound leveling is actors used to come out of theater where they learned to annunciate loudly and clearly. It seems actors don’t get proper stage training anymore and now it’s okay to mumble and fail to annunciate. A decent director should never allow that.
Interesting to hear people have the opposite experience as me. I have a home theater and love dynamic audio (loud when supposed to be loud, quiet when supposed to be quiet) but have noticed more and more that movies seem to be mixed for iPads and sound dead. Disney/Pixar is a great example of home theater enthusiasts finding their movies just aren’t acoustically exciting anymore.
The only time I hate dynamic audio is when I’m trying to fall asleep
Music loud as fuck, voices soft as fuck, turn volume down and put on subtitles
Yep the sound mixing is dogshit in 99% of movies and tv shows. Also where i come from everything was always subtitled anyway so im used to it
For me, at least, it’s the fucking bad audio. So goddamn often the sound makes someone difficult to understand so I watch most things with subtitles.
I don’t have to do that with games. Why? Because I get separate volume sliders for music, sound effects, and speech. Trouble understanding just means I need to adjust those to make the speech louder over music and fx.
Why in the hells tv and movie audio tracks don’t have this separation I don’t understand at all.
With a surround system you can boost the center speaker, it’s basically the ‘voice’ volume control
When watching The Expanse on Prime Video, some episodes have an option to select an audio channel with boosted dialogue. Pretty neat feature but unfortunately not for every episode, inexplicably.
I always use them, otherwise I have to hold the remote the whole time and keep changing the volume. Watching Silo right now and there’s so many whispering scenes I’d never be able to make out.
On 24 Kiefer used to alternate between talking and whispering multiple times in the same sentence. Made me effing crazy.
And a few minutes after dead silent dialog, movies start blasting explosions and gunshots loud enough to wake up the whole neighborhood.
I started watching with my noise canceling AirPods through the roku app. Or just turning on subtitles.
deleted by creator
Yeah, it bothers me when people say the speakers are subpar rather than criticize the creators for making better mixes for the average household. It doesn’t help when every TV tries to pretend like it has surround and tells the streaming service it is 5.1 surround when the service doesn’t have a way to manually swap the audio.
Also it annoys me that dialogue only captions aren’t a more common option.
The best closed captioning I have seen is the most recent season of Stranger Things. They describe the sounds like “wet squelching” and the mood of the music like “hope synth crescendos” and stuff. So much better than “[music]”.
For the perfect example of the whisper problem watch any episode of Star trek discovery. The main character whispers almost every line and it’s very disturbing.
I’m just deaf and happy y’all’re seeing the light. My father was annoyed with mom’s captions. My wife used them before we met
I’m also hearing impaired and am just really glad that captions are becoming so popular.
It used to be that YouTube was rarely accessible to me. There would be a tiny amount of content that had subtitles (sometimes baked in, like epic rap battles of history does), but the vast majority of videos just weren’t fun for me because I’d miss too much. These days a good chunk of popular YouTubers have curated captions and another good chunk are clear enough speakers that the automatic captions work.
I’ve actually been watching more YouTube in recent times than ever before specifically because I’ve been discovering all this content I previously wrote off. There was recently a post somewhere that introduced me to Technology Connections. And from there, I figured I’d check out some other names I had heard about that might be interesting, Linus’s tech tips and ElectroBOOM, and both had captions, too.
My wife and I actually just finished the newest technology connections video. I watched it enough that she got interested in what her dork wife was enjoying. But yeah I really love the rise of captioned YouTube. TC is extra great because he’s been captioning his videos explicitly to be accessible for the deaf/hoh community because he cares about accessibility and I really just want more people to seriously consider that.
I have a whole ass rant about how people think of hearing aid users as all old folks and that hinders my ability to get flashy ones both for style and signaling purposes. But it also comes into play in contexts like this where content aimed at 20-30 somethings will historically just not bother accommodating us as much as stuff aimed at older people.
Alec is a total bro. I have no particular need for subtitles myself, but recommend his channel to people learning English because I know we can totally trust the subtitles, they’re not autogenerated.
He really is. Though I do warn people that if they watch him they will develop a firm understanding and appreciation of the refrigeration cycle
And strong opinions on car signal lights
The degradation of TV audio was inevitable once flatscreen monitors started to get really thin and big. We now sit farther than ever from our screens, which leads to higher pitched dialog getting quieter (since it attenuates faster than low pitched sounds - think about how you can hear a car stereo from around the block, but can’t hear your neighbor’s baby crying). In addition, our quest to eliminate speaker grills has led to designs that either point speakers straight down (obviously bad), or use complex sound piping to reorient sound through small openings (sorta bad).
When you add in the fact that most TV and films are now designed explicitly for surround sound and/or good headphones, you can imagine how bad things get for most people.
Ever since my first apartment, I’ve always routed my TV and my computers through a stereo system. Idk how people can stand integrated speakers.
My stereo setup is a garbage low end early 2000s bookshelf situation, but it’s still miles better than a anything I’ve heard that gets pumped out the back (the back??!) of even super expensive flat screens.
Isn’t it a possibility these expensive tvs have very little effort put into the acoustics, assuming the consumer will purchase a sound bar?
yeah, probably 🤷🏾♀️
I’d argue, that lower frequencies (male voices) are harder to understand, because built in tv speaker struggle to reproduce them. The attenuation should not really matter in a closed room, a size that normal people can afford.
Other than that I think you are totally right.
Am I the only one that has always had a surround system? We got our first one with our first HDTV for 80 bucks now we have a 7.2 for the 4k and unless the audio mixing is bad we don’t use them and most of the time we only use the temporary ones. I don’t like the visual experience to be interrupted by floating words.
Whatever the reason, a lot of people struggle to hear dialogue now, so turning on closed captioning to decipher what people are saying has become a no brainer move.
Good to realize I am not going deaf.
Many shows are mixed for surround sound where there’s a dedicated centre channel where the dialogue comes from. This is the main reason people can’t hear the dialogue.
Film producers are intentionally mixing for theaters and refusing to mix for home devices.
Mumble mumble whisper EXPLOSION!
Are theaters still relevant today? I honestly don’t know. Have not been in one for many years, everything is just way too expensive.
I literally can’t hear some words occasionally in newer shows. I don’t need them for older shows though.
I feel you. Watched the first spider verse movie today, and I barely understood a word. It’s either whispering, or BANG CACHOW POW POWwhisperPOW.
And yes, I could just manually “fix” the sound, but that requires that I pirate or buy a physical copy first.
There was a video essay going viral about this some time ago.
That was super informative! Thank you!
I got fucking kids and now never have any peace anymore. That’s how that happened for me at least.
Same. I also watch tv while they’re asleep and I have to keep the volume low.
- I’ve got kids, so I’m not gonna hear shit bc no one can keep their mouths shut long enough to let me watch in peace, and 2. Depending on what I’m watching, sound levels are all over the place. Loud action sequences followed by whisper quiet dialogue, I need subtitles as a way to not constantly have to fiddle with the volume.
I think the now-universal ability to pause video contributed to that. 25 years ago you’d be a jerk interrupting a line we wouldn’t hear again until reruns.
Because the mixing is usually ass on these shows
Mixing is ass on shows and movies these days.
