Can’t Understand the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.

[Mikey Radio]

This is from the NY Times. It's behind a paywall for some, so the link below is for the Yahoo version:

Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.​

Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.

“What did he just say?” Those are some of the most commonly uttered words in my home. No matter how much my wife and I crank up the TV volume, the actors in streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. We usually end up turning on the subtitles, even though we...

news.yahoo.com

“What did he just say?”
Those are some of the most commonly uttered words in my home. No matter how much my wife and I crank up the TV volume, the actors in streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. We usually end up turning on the subtitles, even though we aren’t hard of hearing.
We’re not alone. In the streaming era, as video consumption shifts from movie theaters toward content shrunk down for televisions, tablets and smartphones, making dialogue crisp and clear has become the entertainment world’s toughest technology challenge. About 50% of Americans — and the majority of young people — watch videos with subtitles on most of the time, according to surveys, in large part because they are struggling to decipher what actors are saying.

The garbled prattle in TV shows and movies is now a widely discussed problem that tech and media companies are just beginning to unravel with solutions such as speech-boosting software algorithms, which I tested.

 

[Mikey Radio]

The TL;DR version is basically that cinematic releases spend a lot of time and $$ on audio editing and finishing that's not done for lower budget streaming shows, the speakers in many flat screen TVs are crappy, and it's sometimes a case where audio is optimized for theaters, but when you play content on your home TV it sounds quite different and can also be the reason you struggle to hear dialog and spoken word, but then gun shots, explosions and music is so loud it rattles the walls.

 

[landtuna]

Guess it wasn't my hearing going bad after all.

Seriously, I have noticed this past year I've been fiddling with the sound on my digital flat screens more and more to be able to understand the different modes. The 'news' setting seems to work out best for dialog but then it tends to muffle the background music. And the sound bar seems to work better than the host TV sound.

Also, I watched the NBC national news program on Phoenix 12 tonight (which I haven't done in years) and the sound was AWFUL! Each segment seemed to be a different level and the commercials were LOUD!

 

[Mikey Radio]

The two things I've noticed, especially within the past few years are 1) Spoken word and banter getting buried in the effects, music and what should be "background" audio, making it difficult to understand what the actors are saying at times, and 2) Exactly as the article mentions, especially when streaming or watching some movies, one needs to turn up the TV audio to hear the lines they're speaking, but then as soon as a song plays or gunfire happens or an explosion detonates, it's so loud you need to quickly reach for the remote to lower the audio. Yes, the different audio settings/modes do help a bit, but most times I just run our TV in standard mode as it's the most natural sounding and our TV produces really solid audio otherwise with plenty of low end, which many flat screens tend to be lacking in.