One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog.
Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the volume low and turn on subtitles--easy but shitty solution.
Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie. Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
There's an article that's been floating around that notes this phenomenon started after Nolan's movies became the style to emulate, and there are various sound engineers who state they would like to do what you want but they have to produce what the paying entity asks for. Someone should feel free to link it here - I'm mobile at the moment so can't dig it up.
But anyway, I just wanted to jump in and say... all the time on this site we see programmers complaining about management/etc forcing things to happen that you don't want happening. Sound engineers may be in a similar boat here. ;P
I had this issue recently watching Rings of Power, so much so that I have to keep the remote nearby to change every few minutes. Dialogue volume is so low you have to turn it up, then action scenes happen and the house is shaking.
I have also been doing this for years already. I only watch with subtitles -- no subtitles, no movie -- but I still like the dialogue to be audible without explosions bothering my neighbours.
One of the reasons why I bought an Apple TV was the ability to pair it with my airpods. Makes is super convenient to hear everything if you live in an apartment, also some shows take advantage of the spatial audio which is neat if you don't have a proper sound setup.
I still turn on subtitles tho. On that front I've been noticing some subtitles will not match the english dialogue at all. This is noticeable on the Netflix shows Cyberpunk Edgerunners and Aggretsuko. I'm guessing these shows had their scripts written in non-english languages and that was what the translation teams worked with.
I don't remember the exact lines but I do remember them different enough where you can tell the translations were "strict" whereas the dialogue was more "natural" sounding if that makes sense.
> some subtitles will not match the english dialogue at all
I have the same issues when watching shows and movies translated into German. Trying to improve my level of the language, but with both the dubbed soundtrack and the subs turned on almost every line of dialogue differs between the two. I assume it's because the subtitles generally reflect the original script very closely but the dubbed version requires more rewriting to match the sounds to the lips.
I have this in Spanish and it's frustrating. I assumed that at some point it was subtitled by one group and then later maybe dubbed by another company. I know in places like Italy, most foreign things are dubbed, and in other places in latin america most things are subtitled at least and dubbed second which leads me to this theory. But really I have no clue. A quick google search turned up the first result talking about your idea of matching the lips better and also this "Translators/subtitlers are often given scripts which don’t match exactly what was shot. The subtitling team often has no contact with the sound team, so they may have two different translations. "
German is a bit of a special case. I'm not German, just a learner of the language, but I've noticed they often change the perfekt tense into präteritum. I assume this is because it tends to be shorter than the more commonly spoken perfect tense and is, of course, understandable for Germans, but not so great for language learners.
I mostly watch native German content if I can, not dubbed. There might be additional oddities that you run into with the dubbing for the reasons you mention.
There are also separate devices that take an audio feed from the TV/monitor and feed it to (multiple) bluetooth earbuds. Very nice for viewing after the rest of the family has gone to bed.
Good to know! I love this feature a lot and only thought apple did it. Does it also work for game consoles too? Like playing switch on the tv but feeling audio to your earphones?
It's weird to me to hear people talk about this as a feature because I've always just had a computer hooked up to my TV and I can use whatever audio output I want, headphones, Bluetooth, you name it
It does for ps5, but only if you use Airpods Max (with a lightning to 3.5mm cable) or any other headphones that support a 3.5mm jack. It is actually rather convenient, because you plug into into the front middle bottom of the gamepad, so the cable doesn't get in the way of anything. No bluetooth, unfortunately, unless you are using a 3.5mm bluetooth adapter.
Wait it isn’t because 5.1 became the norm for recording movies bust most people have a 2.0 or a 2.1 setup at most? I thought that was the conventional wisedom.
It’s honestly ridiculous how bad the stereo (aka what 99% of viewers will experience) mixes are.
The explosions can be heard by my neighbors yet I can barely hear the dialogue at the same volume.
Find myself basically doing half the mix work myself with the volume control. Too many audiophiles in the production chain focusing on something that barely matters at the expense of most viewers.
Theory: Because distribution companies for movies made having DTS/Dolby Atmos/Whatever mandatory in the theater, sound engineers primarily focus on that because that takes 99% of the time. Because theaters with just optical stereo (yes I'm aware most theaters use digital distribution and projectors now, that just hammers home the point) aren't really a thing any more they don't really bother optimizing it because "nobody will hear that anyway". Then when the film goes to home distribution the distribution company takes the automatic downmix that is the existing stereo track for the optical stereo on a print and use that because they don't want to second guess the sound engineers or the director.
Long theory short: it's the same reason the Beatles mono album versions sound a ton better than the stereo versions, because that was the optimized version because that's what people listened too at the time. Sound engineers aren't being paid to optimize the stereo or even 5.1 versions of the audio, only the theater version in whatever multi-channel standard is popular at the moment, so they don't bother they let the standard downmix stand.
Yeah but this is 2022 are there even movie theaters anymore? The box office sales are deep in the red and many theaters are going bankrupt. Most of What I watch are tv shows
> Yeah but this is 2022 are there even movie theaters anymore?
My uninformed and probably stupid thoughts:
Hollywood was doing some amazing movies in the 90ish (think Seven, The Matrix, Requiem for a Dream etc). It was a mix of new and established players that were allowed to innovate and be creative. Then Hollywood became more risk averse, I assume because sales were unpredictable and production companies wanted guarantees similar to other industries' large investments. So they started recycling ideas, produce sequels and trading IP rights for dudes in specifically colored spandex suits, which came with a guaranteed fanbase that would watch anything with the brand. This eventually became the MCU-type of crap where everything is a 4th wall joke packed with references to current events, leading to a shelf life less than a year and plots became an afterthought. The sales mindset went as far as putting stuff in the movie for the sake of producing a compelling trailer. At the same time TV was taking the Hollywood's lunch money, but for some reason they doubled down on the approach and blamed streaming for their failures.
The issue isn't the format though, or that everyone has Netflix on their microwave display now. There are still great movies today, and if you get a chance to watch one in a good theatre it's a mesmerizing experience. Me and my partner watched The Joker, 1917 and Dune in Alamo Drafthouse (a theater that has zero-tolerance to texting/talking and serves food & drinks). It's an experience that trumps even great TV shows, when done right. It's just sad that it's so rare.
People have been saying cinema is dying since Netflix took off. It's not true and still isn't true. Movies continue to set box office records.
Covid caused a lot of smaller cinemas and chains high in debt to shut. But a lot of them are still going.
Cinemas are pivoting more to the luxury experience rather than just being the place you watch new movies. So they will get bigger screens, better projectors, better audio, etc. It's already started near me.
I mean that works for the theater companies but itv doesn’t really generate more revenue for studios. Their audience is shifting to the home experience
What a travesty it must be to realize your personal behavior has no bearing on the rest of what the public is doing. Movies are doing pretty well still. Lots of people are still going out, but there are still some trailing pandemic effects. Still, it's really not that far off from pre pandemic, especially when there is a big marvel / franchise film
I like both the big screen and the small screen. Sometimes, a 21" 1080p display or an iPhone at home just doesn't compete with a proper cinema experience.
And before someone says "go build yourself a home cinema": this is the UK. There's no such thing as "free space" in most homes.
What is your setup like? I feel like your comment better describes a problem with subwoofers. I've had plenty of enjoyment from bass throughout my life, but I still don't see the need for a sub anywhere near watching TV or movies. Never mind the related issue of highly-resonant perfunctory ones bundled with cheap consumer gear.
Just the other day I was helping a relative who had gotten a soundbar because her TV's speakers broke. She was complaining the sound carried too far to other rooms. I found the equalizer settings and turned down "woofer" which seemed to help, but then I read the manual that it only applied to an external subwoofer so I was left wondering if it was the placebo effect. Turns out there was a wireless subwoofer placed some distance away. I showed her the equalizer settings if she wanted to turn it down even more, and told her she could also just unplug the subwoofer if she wanted. To her, the inclusion of that box was actually an anti-feature.
And for other frequencies, I'd say middle-cost "prosumer" gear generally exacerbates dynamic range problems, being decent at low levels but distorted at higher levels. My Thinkpad speakers sound like crap all the time, and my receiver+speaker setup handles higher volumes without sounding louder due to distortion.
I mean they do, I purposefully select stereo on Netflix, but I get the feeling the sound engineers don't change it and just hammer the 5.1 down in a way that sounds bad.
Maybe when downmixing it to stereo. If you play it on a real 5.1 system (not a soundbar or other "Dolby Atmos" gimmick with less speakers) your dialogues will come out of the dedicated center speaker which will make it easier to follow. (most home cinema receivers even have a 'boost dialogue' function if you want to know what's happening in the latest Nolan film...)
Can you recommend a good explanation of the different types, how they are recorded encoded etc.? From a naive sonar perspective it seems like two mics one on each side of a head sized camera would do fine for encoding all the angle information. But then you would have to register and apply that knowledge to each boom mic input, and synthesize it for every sound effect that wasn't there at recording. Tl;dr Why isnt two channels enough to generate the correct output for N speakers spread around me?
Left/right sound localization is partially a function of "shadow" created by the head. However more important to localization is the pinna, the outer ear.
Sound enters the earhole directly AND reflects off the folds in the pinna.
This causes complex comb filtering. (cancellation) Our brain learns how to correlate sound direction with these complex filterings. It's quite amazing.
Some audio workstations (Logic) have "binaural" processing to try and emulate this effect. It can never be perfect because everyone's ears are shaped a little different.
Right, that is how we do it. But isn't all the phase information present in two channels of audio to know how to map all the signals to an arbitrary number of angles? You'd need to know the spacing of the mics, but that could be a standard.
About the pinna, a fun way to demonstrate this is to have someone close their eyes, then you snap or jangle keys at various locations and have them point. Then tape their ears to their head and repeat. They will be way off in the vertical. We can do left right-ish (with coning error) without the outer ear. But up down is impossible.
The 5.1 vs 2.0 is a bit of a red herring, it used to be a big problem a decade or two ago, but today it is just a small to insignificant contributor to the problem.
The real problem now a days is not technical, it is 100% director's choice. Having deafening "wooooon" organ music, and ear popping explosions is simply in vogue, so all directors want that in their movie, and mix like that on purpose.
And it is not about theatrical mix vs home mix either. The cinema experience also changed with this latest mixing trend, watching a modern movie in the cinema also became uncomfortable with much louder explosions/music/"wooon" than two decades ago. (To the point where I'm considering using ear protection if ever going back to a cinema).
This is 100% a manufactured problem created on purpose by misguided (sound) directors.
The last time I went to a theather was before the pandemic, and frankly, I didn't bother going back exactly because the audio became almost an agression to my senses.
Fwiw, I just wish more systems had built in dynamics controls.
I both sympathize with the problem that people are having (and sometimes have it myself), but I also really enjoy focused movie listening time on a nice Atmos system with subwoofers that has a huge dynamic range. Most people don’t enjoy watching films this way however, or not most of the time
> Also, it is now fashionable for actors to mumble.
Why does it matter that actors are mumbling, though? Don't most lines in Hollywood movies (that aren't already recorded on a soundstage with a boom mic inches from the actor's face) get ADRed these days?
If the actor's intention is to mumble instead of enunciatiting clearly (presumably because of some notion of authenticity), then they will also mumble the studio takes. It's not a problem of sound volume/background noise, which ADR can fix, it's a problem of style over ease of understanding the dialogue. This mirrors the problem of TV series sometimes becoming too dark to easily follow the action on a TV screen in usual conditions (infamously so in the Long Night episode of Game of Thrones).
99.9% of the audience will strain to see what is going on, but let's blame their screen buying acumen (and their viewing practices - even the best screen will not make those scenes easily watchable in a sunny room, which is how most people watch TV) instead of making them actually watchable.
What part of “seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve” makes it seem like this is blaming the people who buy the screens and not the people that make the screens.
Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.
James Stephanie Sterling did a video a long time ago (which I currently cannot find) about "the best game for your HD TV" and concluded (IIRC) that it was Viva Pinata because of the ludicrous colourfulness of the game which really showed off the power of HD TVs. Contrasted with the "intangible sludge" of the Dooms, Quakes, etc.
> Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.
A big part of this is the viewing conditions. The best screen in the world will not make a dark scene watchable in a bright sunny room. And lots of people watch TV in bright sunny rooms.
Also, better screens = more money. A lot of the time, people just bought a cheap screen, and they would still like to know what happens in the series or movies they watch.
I am absolutely for quality interesting dark scenes in cinema, where both the screen and viewing conditions are normalized. But TV is not the same (and HBO and Netflix are TV).
Dark scenes tend to look better on bad TVs because they tend to brighten everything too much with LCD bloom. I feel like it's an opposite problem with OLEDs, they're the one with scenes that are too dark.
Good, sounds like we agree that the problem is the way they’re displayed, not the way they’re mastered.
If you want to watch a dark scene in bright light then you should have a button on your display/remote that adjusts the settings to make that possible. Tons of people have produced brightened versions of those scenes and put them on YouTube, it’s definitely possible. You can always remove dynamic range in post, hard to create it if the source material doesn’t have it though.
You should not need to adjust anything, volume or brightness, in the middle of episodes/movies.
These scenes are poorly edited. I should not have to live-edit them with my remote while watching. I'll do a poor job, and it takes me out of the experience.
These edits don't "take advantage of" dynamic range; they abuse it.
> Yeah; playing 5.1 mixes on stereo equipment make the side and back channels too loud and the center channel too quiet.
I thought the equipment selected the stereo mix (or did a perfectly compatible mixdown) when playing back a 5.1 mix in a stereo system. Is that not what happens? If it isn't, is it because user error?
Not a sound guy, and have struggled for a while w/ this for my plex setup @ home, so grain of salt.
If there's not a separate track for e.g 2.0, then the mixing down from 5.1 -> 2.0 will not have a human who validates the output. An automatic conversion can't accurately confirm that "this is legible for human ears at the right levels"
The conversion isn't so much as "automatic" or opinionated, but clearly defined in a spec. And it _is_ mathematically correct in terms of sound energy entering the ears. A device may be doing the conversion incorrectly of course.
But there is still an omission, which is the introduction of the centre speaker was (as I understand it) to "pin" dialogue to the screen more effectively. That implies there _is_ some physical phenomenon takes place (eg. phasing/interference) which is not compensated for in the spec.
My own system is set up to deliberately boost the centre channel in the mix and it does help a lot, however I'm interested to know how to define this amount of compensation in terms of an actual physics or acoustics phenomenon.
The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations.
Having dialog in a center speaker means it comes from a different location than the music/fx, so it's easy to hone in on it even if it's a little quieter than the music/fx. Having dialog in the same speakers as music/fx makes it much harder. The specified 5.1 to 2.x mixdown ratios might be good or might be inadequate depending on how correlated the original left track is with the original right track. A ridiculously loud blast only on the 5.1 left means your brain can hear dialog from your 2.1 right unimpeded. A medium volume explosion on the 5.1 left and right (but not center!) leaves you with no 2.1 speaker producing dialog without it being masked by the explosion, especially if the explosion sound is mono-ish.
> The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations.
That's because a human is not 1 microphone. It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2, which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area.
The open source hardware "ReSpeaker" allows to start experimenting how a microphone array works, including why the cocktail party effect doesn't really affect us in most cases.
The notable exception is if there's a signal that is generated perfectly on the plane perpendicular to the 2 ears. Then, humans have a hard time localizing it between front or back (180deg swap). We can still get an angular vector where the sound is. However simply turning your head removes this constraint exception.
(Also bring able to your your head and move your body also shows a visual-acoustic SLAM algorithm going on in your brain.)
1. "That's because a human is not 1 microphone." true
2. "It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2"
3. "which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area"
#3 does not follow from statement #2.
The missing element is that 3D localization is due to the pinna.
I have a 3.1 set-up with the center boosted by the maximum amount allowable. Will eventually upgrade to 5.1 once the kids are old enough to not climb on the rear speakers.
At least Dolby Digital takes the scenario into account, applying dynamic range control on 5.1 downmixing. Be sure to set the DD decoder to RF mode (as opposed to line mode) to adapt the range for stereo.
With DTS there's no such feature that I know of. Depending on the setup, though, I guess one could always tweak the mix coefficients (privileging the center channel, where most of the voices should end up) and apply a DRC effect somewhere on the audio chain. TVs and receivers sometimes have this last bit built in and exposed as "night mode".
I don't think that's true. In fact movie producers are notorious for "phoning in" the 5.1 mixes for the streaming platforms, focusing most of their energy on the theatre mix with Dolby atmos and what not. Usually the 5.1 mix you get on netflix is hurriedly put together as an afterthought.
That would be plausible except I miss much of the dialog in theaters, too.
I am not a 20-something, but I always turn on subtitles. I never could make out most of song lyrics, either, with some exceptions. Most usually, only the chorus.
That's basically the same point though - it's not that special attention is given to specifically 5.1, it's that a) more separate speakers helps in itself; b) it's primarily mixed for such a multi-separate-speaker system.
I have a 5.0 system, and the dynamic range mumble voice + super loud explosion is still very present, even when I artificially boost the center channel. I think voices are actually better on a typical tv speaker 2.0 setup.
The only fix I found was to rip all tracks, apply normalization + compression filters to the audio tracks in Audacity, finally to repackage everything as MKV.
I've noticed some streaming platforms (eg Paramount Plus) occasionally fail to make use of the center speaker entirely when supposedly in 5.1; this makes the dialog nearly inaudible. I only get this issue with some content sources, and forcing the mixer into stereo mode alleviates the problem.
There are almost surely a whole host of bugs just outputting in the format the user has, never mind mixing issues, copyright protection, and similar.
So it’s similar to when a developer great an Electron app that works great on a 24 core machine with 32GB of RAM. It’s not going to be great unless we’re forced to test it on the average dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM?
Wait, is this true? I’ve always thought I was in the minority for “still” having “just” 2.0. I’ve been needing to upgrade my receiver for a while, but mostly putting it off since I can’t find a decent 2.0 one with a good number of inputs. Almost every receiver is (5+2n).1 these days (where n >= 0).
I feel so behind the times in my simple 2.0 system, even though I think it sounds better than almost any other setup I’ve heard — and my speakers are probably 30 years old!
So I really don’t care if I’m behind the times, but would still be nice to find someone produce a first-class 2.0 receiver.
A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer.
A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that.
Most of my extended family is decently well off in the US. Among a dozen or so households, I'm one of I think two with an actual receiver, and I've only got a 5.1 setup. A few have a sound bar on their fancy movie watching setup. Most of my friends rely on the included speakers on their TVs. Its just not a priority for a lot of people, even people with enough income to afford vacation homes and boats and what not.
That pretty much sums it up. I wouldn't even be surprised if the percentage of households with anything over 2.0 has dropped in the past two decades.
Of those people with an external receiver, a significant percentage will deliberately have a stereo setup, often used for listening to music. Good speakers, but no surround sound.
I used to watch movies on an absurdly excessive 3000-watt sound system, equipped with dual 18" subwoofers... but I never bothered to get a surround decoder.
What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup.
Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that!
I know people who have as their primary method of watching movies and TV is on an iPad.
Its not that the tech is stuck so far behind, its a matter of priorities. They just don't care to invest the time/space/effort/money into a fancy sound system. Not even always that they couldn't, just that they don't bother doing so. Sure, many could easily afford a fancy sound system. But they don't care enough to bother figuring out what to buy, figuring out how to connect it all together, going through the whole effort of making sure to use the right remote to get the sound working right, etc. They just want to press play on the one device when they feel like watching a movie, even if its not the best experience possible.
I know a few couples who do own a nice sound system. One partner never bothers to turn on the receiver or use any of the extra devices, they'll just use the built-in apps on the TV and turn the TV speakers up instead of bothering to turn on the fancy sound system already plugged in and otherwise ready to go. Its just not worth it to them to figure it out, so they don't bother using it.
Mine's on my laptop with headphones. I don't even have a TV, let alone a fancy sound system setup (and have no clue what those numbers everyone's throwing around even refer to).
X.Y (e.g. 5.1) means X wide range speakers and Y subwoofers. You also sometimes see it like S/T.Y where S+T = X, and it refers to front/surround speakers.
There are standard values and configurations, such as 2.0 (aka stereo) both at the front, 2.1, 3.1 adds a centre channel mostly for on-screen dialogue positioned close to screen, 5.1 (3/2.1) adds a second stereo pair behind you, 7.1 - adds an extra surround stereo pair between the others, etc.
For real enthusiasts, also X.Y.Z, adding ceiling/bounce speakers for vertical spatial audio.
The real "stuck so far behind" that I don't get is why we use speaker arrays at all -- instead of binaural stereo tech. That virtual haircut demo, apparently from the 90s,[0] sounds incredible on my cheap headphones, yet the technology seems to have gone nowhere since. Is there even spatial audio in VR setups?
If the difficulty is in simulating the head/ears, then existing spatial recordings can at least be converted using a binaural microphone in a surround sound setup, no? Though, I guess with headphones any visceral sensation of bass is still lost, so you'd need to keep the subwoofer or a seat shaker.
I don't much about audio, but wouldn't binaural stereo only work if the two speakers are to the sides of you, like with headphones? Would this work from a TV that's an ambiguous distance in front of you?
As a side note, Windows (and Xbox) support Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos for Headphones, and DTS:X, all of which simulate spatial audio for headphones. It'll simulate a 5.1 (and 7.1?) setup through the headphones. Some games have spatial audio simulation built-in as well, such as Elite Dangerous. I believe UE5 also has a spatial audio engine. Finally, I believe PlayStation emphasized spatial audio for the PS5, but I don't really know the details of that.
I think it only works/is a lot easier with head/earphones? Since you know exactly where the ears are w.r.t. the speakers in that case.
Not that that's really an explanation - if that was the best sound and it was available on Blu-rays and streaming platforms, and legacy 5.1 content upmixed nicely, then yeah why wouldn't I use headphones even at home in front of the television. Less obvious for joint/family viewing I suppose.
Binaural audio starts to really fall apart when you don't have the sound exactly as the microphone setup was. Moving the speakers even a couple of feet away, and then not having them exactly lines up with your ears, it ruins the effect.
Wondered this too. That video along with the millions of ASMR videos on YouTube have very nice binaural stereo sound, but I don't see this being done anywhere else.
And that's perfectly fine, don't get me wrong. If that gets you enjoyment from the media you watch, that's great. You definitely don't need a fancy theater room to be happy.
And honestly if it's a nice laptop and a good pair of headphones you're probably ahead of a lot of people watching on a cheap TV with built in speakers. Once again, not that it truly matters.
I upgraded my receiver and TV recently and it was a pleasant surprise that Apple TV remote now switches the receiver on and off automatically so the setup really requires no tech awareness to use.
I watch movies for the story. 480p and my laptop speakers are enough for that. I enjoyed movies just the same when they were 700mb DivX with 128kps mp3 sound.
Yep, same here. Most of the movies which depend on "immersion" are just horrible. It doesn't matter if the dinosaur in "Jurrasic World Dominion" sounds realistic if I already want to quit the movie after seeing the first 10 minutes.
Speaking as someone with a 5.1 system they haven't set up:
Getting the rear speakers' cables installed into your walls is expensive, and requires you own your home.
Getting a room large enough you can get several guests between the speakers without some of them ending up much closer to the speakers than others is even moreso.
One big downside of 5.1 is that you now have 6 speakers to place all around you. Depending on the room and layout, that can be hard to impossible to do without looking ugly, or even to do at all.
In my case I have a great receiver, but only 2 speakers. To get surround I'll need to put speakers in places that get in the way and run cables in place where I don't want to see them.
It's a pain though, you have to take the time to setup the extra speakers, cable them and etc and have the space to do this, and of course the extra expense.
Yes, it's cheap to some software developer on HN, but if you are on an average income it's harder to justify.
> What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup.
It takes up space that some of us honestly don't have, especially people living in city apartments (like I do).
And I used to have a separate sound system at a past place, some many years ago, I don't think I'd be able to set it up again, it felt like black magic to set it up back then, it will surely feel the same (and more) now.
Well for one I'm not going to run cables everywhere and the other solutions have their faults: wireless satellite lag sound, and still need a power cable; battery operated satellites require constant maintenance.
Yea, unfortunately, my old 5.1 surround system of my bachelor days fails the “wife test.” Currently, to get all the channels the sound mixers give you, you need 6 ugly black boxes with speakers in them spread around your living room and another big black box receiver. And all the speaker wire everywhere. Yuck! Even if you hide the wires in the wall and use ceiling mounted speakers it’s still intrusive and ugly.
I think our auditory system just isn't great. Compressed formats with bitrate of 320kbps is borderline indistinguishable from raw formats in audio, while it will be borderline unbearable in video.
That's a really insightful way of putting it. My first reaction was, 'well, duh...', but then I realized that I'd taken for granted the fact that digital video of (arbitrarily defined) adequate quality must have a much higher information rate than audio of the same. But surely there are animals for which the opposite is true!
I'm with you. After having a nice 5.1 system 20 years ago, and a space set up for it, I now have fallen back to nice 2.0 or 2.1 systems.
Decent amp with a DAC to some quality speakers and a sub and poof: really great audio in a simple system that doesn't require running wires everywhere.
With the advent of cheap, decent, small single-channel amps it's really easy to do something like Apple TV -> HDMI -> TV -> TOSLINK -> Amp -> Speakers and be done with it. (I know I could go Apple TV right to the Amp, but passing it through the TV mitigates image-audio delay.)
It’s a form of product advertising: “You should hear Steve’s 5.1 system, he can hear the movie properly, the sound is so great!”, “He also has a 1:500000 contrast ratio so he can see faces on his screen that we can’t see on our pitch-dark screens. He can actually see the orcs on LOTR!”
And when half the consumers will be done with this upgrade, we’ll invent something new.
It's hard to believe that TVs are still so buggy that they would intentionally play 5.1 in an unusable way on regular TVs.
Of all the ways to deal with the situation, just adding up all the channels equally and dumping them out has to be the stupidest. It's ruined so many people's experiences over the years.
I'm just fed up with modern sound. It never sounds right, and it's just too complicated. I use captions on a lot of shows where there is dialog that is too quiet, etc. I'm pretty sure my sound system is not set up right, but I just don't want to figure it out. I debug software for a living. I just want my entertainment system to be plug and play.
This is the idea of Atmos. They deliver the source with an absurd number of channels. Your local player knows your room and speaker arrangement (from setup tuning ahead of time) and remaps the stupid number of channels into the right playback based on the equipment available. Got 20 speakers all around the room? Cool. Have a 5.1 setup? No problem. Just have the stereo speakers on your TV? Supposedly, no problem.
Whether they actually achieved that depends a lot on your equipment and its tuning.
Yes, on Netflix you can choose. Choosing the stereo mix does offer a significant improvement on hearing dialogue. Regrettably, it has no idea of sensible default or even choice of default, so it always goes to 5.1 even if your setup doesn't have it.
Yes, but audio tracks used to take up valuable space on physical media, so you might indeed sometimes find distinct 5.1 and 2.0 tracks, but usually for the main language only. And of course this duplication is one of the first things pirate releases do away with, in order to reduce the final file size, so you won't find them on most mainstream scene releases either.
Yes that was going to be my suggestion. I rarely have this issue with my own (5.1) system, which I also use a lot more, but often struggle on others' (TV speakers, or external but <5.1).
I'm very much outside of the age range mentioned in the article but +100 for crappy audio mixing.
When my family was going through all the Marvel movies at first I tried to control the volume by making it higher during the dialog and lower during the battles etc but it was an exercise in futility, as I'm only human and there would be some delay in volume change and we would still miss what the guy/gal said or my house would start noticeably shaking from the unexpected explosion happening during a scene where a guy was intensely whispering his rescue plan to his compatriots or whatever. Plus it started feeling like I'm working instead of enjoying the movie. So lower volume and subtitles it is.
I have home theater with 5.2 and 5 speakers, all it does is that when stuff in the movie goes boom my house starts to shake.
> when stuff in the movie goes boom my house starts to shake.
That’s how it’s supposed to sound. Explosions are loud.
This is not a problem with the source material, it’s a problem with the setup of the playback equipment. The source contains all the original data, it’s the playback equipment’s job to render that information in the appropriate way considering the space and circumstances where it’s played.
The ‘problem’ is that the sound is mixed to a cinema-level dynamic range. If you don’t want the full dynamic range you can compress it at playback. They store it at the full range since you can’t exactly un-compress it and the exact amount of compression depends on your setup and situation anyway.
Any half-decent A/V receiver has this capability. If your receiver has Audyssey you may want to look into the “dynamic eq” and “dynamic volume” settings.
Apple TV had to introduce a feature that makes exactly that for you. Apparently this problem is that systematic. Movie makers ruin sound that the streamer device have to correct.
> Movie makers ruin sound that the streamer device have to correct.
It’s not the movie maker’s job to adjust the sound to your particular environment and taste. That is the job of the playback equipment and the person configuring it. The movie should be, and is, stored at the highest fidelity and with as much information as possible. This includes the original intended dynamic range. If your situation or taste calls for a smaller dynamic range you can easily adjust that at playback.
You can hardly expect movies to include hundreds of different soundtracks to cover all possible playback scenarios.
Previously movie makers found the ways good for most of the people, sound effect and discussions being in balance so to enjoy the work, lately they lost their way in many cases (not all) and instead of enjoying the movie the adjustments of volume is required or just turning on the subtitles.
The problem is that dialouges are incomprehensible, inarticulate, while the sound effects and the musics blow your head off in the next second. Lately, not that much previously. Previously this was not a problem, recently they lost their ability to make it well. Many of the movies became not entertaining but agitating this way.
It was never a requirement that everyone will have their own particular personal taste satisfied and that is not something that is missed. More like the ability to be able to follow the story! Which is ruined in more and more cases by bad sound.
When I had a 5.1 setup, I had the center channel volume set higher than the side/rear channels and it made speech understandable while explosions weren't overpowering. Maybe the receiver you have allows the same?
The problem with night mode is that it compresses the dynamic range of the audio which undermines one of the main benefits of having a home theater system. It's a poor compromise for bad audio mixing.
Most home theater systems are in a home where the noise floor is significantly higher than a theater, which the audio mix was targeting. Dynamic range compression is often appropriate and when applied correctly improves the experience in homes.
Things became worse in the past 10 or something years (I am a 40 something btw.).
As the article states we used subtitles in movies to learn language and to understand thick accent. However throughout time while we got better and better in comprehension the use of subtitles remained the same in overall. But very uneven too.
Old movies (not yet seen) and movies for children are never a problem. Also some properly made movies. The atmosphere and sound effects are fine as well as the dialogs.
But it became too much of a trend to make muttery a mushy dialogs where people seemingly unable to articulate. To the level never heard in real life (where muttering may be more common due to the more causal and mood or situation affected nature of conversations, unlike the carefully created and heavily controlled ones in movies). Also it is uneven. Some movies are still fine, but others (perhaps the newest Batman comes to mind, unsure, forgot that movie mostly, being so obscure) are a struggle, not fun at all. Aggrevated by the loud bangs and muttery dialog combo.
A sign that this is a systematic and intentionally manufactured problem, that sound engineers and directors lost their touch completely, is the existence of a feature in the newest Apple TV for equalizing the sound level in a movie. Streaming hardware manufacturers had to come up with solution to correct what sound engineers ruined or unable to get right nowadays.
Older movies are almost never a problem. New movies are in an uncomfortable amount.
I use that feature on Apple TV (normalize audio levels) and it's STILL too dramatic for watching unless you want to wake everyone in the house up. I have a 5.1 setup with the center channel even increased (to try and boost talking) and I still have to play the volume game at times.
SUBTITLES: The film industry makes high art as well as common fare. The high art is what the artists want to make and enjoy but it has a very small market. The common fare is what pays the bills, because it sells like 100x more tickets than high art. High art = caviar, Shakespeare "caviar for the general" whereas common fare is hamburgers, flipping burgers, which is a real business, many more servings of hamburgers than caviar.
Sounds like a parallel topic to the poor sound mixing trouble to me. High art existed before muffled conversations mixed with loud sound effects or music. Also high art can coexist with balanced sound and articulate conversation. Or balanced sound can be used for 'burger' movies for their benefit.
Well back then just making a movie was cool, now you gotta make it better, use all the technology available, leave nothing on the table. They're trying to impress each other, stedda making good movies everybody can enjoy.
You too-frequently convey your ideas through the use of obscure metaphor and convoluted sentence structure. Yet you clearly know how to write plainly, as you just demonstrated in your subsequent replies.
It is odd that you apparently wish to be understood, but more often than not choose opacity instead of clarity. Which is a bit of a shame, because if a person makes the effort to decipher your posts, they often do say something meaningful or insightful.
But others also have insights and useful information, and are much, much easier to understand; given this competition, of course your illucid rambling is skipped and downvoted.
There plenty of films made by very creative film makers that had plenty of artistic freedom, but still have muddy dialogue so I don’t see how any of that is relevant to the particular issue.
The account you replied to replied to a comment of mine on another thread with a weird word salad. It was suggested to me that said account may be a bot...
I’m convinced they’re not a bot. I believe they’re either deliberately engaged in “artistically” expressing themselves, or have mental health issues of the schizophrenic variety.
Yeah pretty much. Am in fact expressing myself in a very "flowery" manner, artistically. I'm elevating the HN comment to an artform. I actually was thought to be schizophrenic by doctors once upon a time. Diagnosed secretly. Then they walked back on the diagnosis. Rescinded. I still get treated for it, because you don't need to stop taking the medication for it if you don't want to. Loophole.
I wouldn't say mental health issues, either. I pay a lot for psychiatry and get my money's worth, have a handle on it, pretty good patient according to many doctors. Often the favorite. Alpha in the psych ward always, alpha in rehab. Hey somebody gets dealt this hand, what if he plays his cards right?
>Perhaps you'll think my comments are unthinkable. My only response to that is that they were legibly written, not by a machine, but by a writer with a soul.
Interesting. Yeah that's cool, am I intelligible or not? Well I can say for certain the malpractice, the lobotomy, didn't help with that. Lost the ability to express clever ideas. Like I can no longer think that way.
The sound mixes today are so far off a pleasant experience that the people who do make them should feel ashamed - How do many actually have a home cinema room with soundproofing and 20 speakers ?
Most people watch movies with a headset / a TV / 2.1 / 5.1 surround system and they may even be limited by other factors like neighbours and you know real life..
And the the voice levels is obnoxiously low and way (negatively) beyond what i would call a good experience.
The slurred dialog is obnoxious and a sign of laziness on everyone's part. The miking, the post processing, the overdubbing (if there's any at all - recent film makers don't seem to know that this is a thing). The actor's speech pattern, where they direct their speech while acting, even how they stand and where. The choice of location and additional preparation of the stage so the speech can be picked up clearly.
It's not your hearing, it's the mix. Source: I'm a mastering engineer with a monitoring setup worth six figures and I use closed captions too.
Speakers in TVs used to be tailored to making speech intelligible. Nowadays it's... well whatever it is, it's not really meant to do anything. Not even the more high-end popular speaker systems are meant to do anything at all, really. They all just kinda sorta make whatever is coming out of them sound flashy and whooshy. That's another reason why movies are even more difficult to understand.
And let's be honest - a lot of it nowadays is just not _worth_ hearing... Staple tv shows form the 70s that fell into obscurity for being extremely pedestrian had better writing than nearly all big-budget movies nowadays. I remember when Pig came out recently, it was the only good movie during a span of maybe 3 months. That's how dire it is nowadays.
Good to know this isn't just my ears or my setup. This was most noticeable to me recently in Dune. So much whispering dialogue, with massive dynamic range and BRAAAM [0]. Using night mode on my receiver and cranking the center channel to +10dB works pretty well for me, though.
That article kind of confuses a few different kinds of sounds. Just because there's a staccato ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9v-UpM9flY ) sound happening doesn't mean it serves the same function. The loud meme they're talking about is a loud horn meant to overwhelm. The sound at 0:40 in the video is clearly a meant to create suspense: it's an earlier trope in movies and other media: scary staccato strings backed by all sorts of random sybilant string sounds that create a nervous atmosphere (like starting at 2:52 here https://youtu.be/_nVkHXTeiOg?list=PL7F72E09D4C28FECD&t=172 ). My favourite use of these is in the Dead Space soundtrack. Note that in the clip I linked you first get the sybilant strings building nervous tension, then some overwhelming loud bangs, but then at 3:50 you get slower sounds which are not meant to overwhelm, just maintain a scary atmosphere. You get both of those uses of sound in one passage.
I recommend people watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) to test that. I was impressed with the sound in general and the fact that I felt no need to turn on subtitles. But in particular there's a least one scene where characters are whispering to each other. I didn't need subtitles or to adjust the audio, every word was perfectly intelligble.
It's also a clear sign that it's not my ears, it's not my setup, it's the sound mix of modern movies.
Dune sounds great on my 2.0 system at home (low mid-range receiver and ~$200 yamaha floorstanders). Sicario too, from the same director, I generally think he does a fantastic job with audio mixes.
Strange that article doesn’t talk about the tripod noise from the ‘05 War of the Worlds.
V1 sound comes from the pulse jet engine that runs with a "batch mode" cycle, ie there's a valve at the front that opens and closes at something like 30 Hz.
The Stuka had the scare sound siren and it had a much higher pitch.
A little off topic but it’s really surprising how so few of the shows and movies these days give off any vibe of sincerity. From the acting to the writing to the CGI, everything seems to be winking at the audience and trying to tell them that they are all actors and its all make believe.
The perfect example is Lord of the Rings vs The Rings of Power. I had no problems believing that Aragorn really lived in Middle Earth. But every single actor in Rings of Power feels like…an actor - just someone playing a part.
Maybe its the overuse of bad CGI, but so few of the worlds feel “lived in”.
A lot of the new 4K TVs by default have some 'video enhancement' processing steps turned on by default which ends up making everything look fake. If you go into the TV settings and turn all of those things off it should make the world look more natural.
this processing can create desync issues where the audio is in front of the video by just a bit. this creates a lip sync issue which makes people feel the audio is dubbed over and can tear you out of suspense of disbelief. but i don't think that's what they mean here. rings is just bad acting - or rather, bad direction that forces bad acting. i have no doubt the actors are capable of much more than what they're being confined to.
I find all of these TV shows have the same pattern that breaks the immersion: too many close up face shots, and the characters look too clean. Watch the original LOTR and see the composition of the shots ("every scene a painting"): it's not just a close up of a face with a bokeh behind it; there is a visual composition and blocking like a scene designed for a play. The characters looking too clean is another issue, and the Wheel of Time series on Amazon has this problem as well. Every character is perfectly manicured, no dirt or grime despite the setting... it breaks the immersion!
I remember... maybe 10 years ago? seeing a big OLED screen playing a very high def version of LOTR. You could see that the props were made of styrofoam.
Of course there is a lot of other stuff going on, but I do think that high fidelity really makes stuff hard. That combined with much more pressure to cut corners in post production (on top of more stuff needing to actually happen in post!) just makes it all fall apart.
Part of the problem when every story has to be the biggest thing ever, and a problem that other industries have hit (games in the PS3/PS4 generation).
With something like that new LOTR show, the budgets are so astronomical but where’s the auteur? It’s a series so presumably directors are not consistent.
Might be an issue that there isn’t a single person pushing the world, aesthetic, vibe and vision making the actors immersed in their roles. In the end getting all dressed up and standing against a green screen probably feels a bit silly without someone selling it to you.
The majority of Netflix series produced in Europe are actually a pleasant surprise in that regard. When to comes to writing and acting as well as production, and yes, sound mixing.
I consider myself a fantasy and sci-fi nerd, binge read the Lord of The Rings, starting with the Hobbit, between Christmas Eve and when the first movie came out. Read the Simarilion. Loved the LotR triology. Like the Hobbit, ehich already strechted the source material a lot, but in a way that could be justified as a lead up to LotR. I did not manage to dare whatching the Amazon series, and propably never will. Thr LotR films, The Expense and the Star Wars series and first two triologies are the last movie ftanchises I still get immersion and suspenson of disbelieve from, I'm not taking any risks eith LotR.
Agreed. But then comes along something like The Expanse with impeccable writing, a gripping, high-octane story, with every episode being pretty much perfect, and great set design, and it falls into obscurity and gets prematurely cancelled because it's not being shoved down people's throats.
I shoupd have been more precise: I didn't read the books before, I knew they would be my Christmas gift. So I started with the Hobbit on, if memory serves well, on Dec. 23rd. Was finished in time for the unpacking of the triology on 24th. And was through, for go one, with all three books before going to see the first movie. I never read as many pages in as little time before or after. And I totally loved it!
Would a soundbar help the situation or make it worse? With two kids 90% of the time I'm watching kids movies but I still turn on the closed captions. Any background noise and it's nearly impossible to hear the dialogue without cranking up the volume to an undesirable level.
I don't know your current setup, but I'd highly recommend external speakers with most modern TVs.
Back in the day with CRTs and projection screens, the TV would be pretty big regardless. They didn't have to worry about bundling in some nice speakers with a TV, because hey the TV is going to be quite large and that cavity can be a nice resonance chamber if done right.
Now, all TVs need to be super thin which can be a nice thing don't get me wrong. But their packaging means their speakers are often very compromised. Sure, they're OK in a pinch, but even a cheap sound bar will often out perform most TV's built in speakers. So unless you're using the TV in a space where you just don't care about the sound quality, you'll get a lot out from having at least a sound bar or some other external speaker setup.
Many devices have a night mode to help keep the range of volumes small. The Sonos one is perfect for my use case. It changed my evening life when I found this.
I wish my Denon AVR had a usable night mode. Instead it has a setting called "dynamic volume" that makes it so all dialog right after an explosion is inaudible...
I have a 3.1 setup and the center channel helps, but it's still really bad with many mixes. If you happen to use an ffmpeg based player, and are targeting a stereo, this audio-filter helps a lot (I stole this from someone somewhere on the internet). I use it for encoding movies for car-trips (where there is both no center channel and a lot of background noise).
If you have one speaker reproducing both speech and other sound, this is what happens:
1. additional sound output means heightened distortion
2. when two sounds come from two places, our brains can separate them due to phase differences and spatial perception, so those two sounds mask each other less than if the same two sounds come out of a single speaker, even if it's perfect, with no distortion etc
3. the speaker is made for broad range reproduction and not voice reproduction, so it'll de-emphasize speech frequencies, which are exactly those frequencies that also make music sound like it's coming out of a cardboard box. ultimately the applied eq (equalizer) curve will create speech that's slightly muddy, like someone talking from behind a blanket.
4. sound bars use tiny transducers which are woefully underpowered compared to the SPL (sound pressure level) they're tasked with producing. This is done by using multi-band compression and limiting. This sometimes creates situations where the limiting might be recovering after a slightly louder sound, and the very next syllable will be muted.
However, having a dedicated speaker for the center channel is none the less way better than not having one at all. If that's all you can try, you can try your luck. But be aware that getting a cheap one will probably not get you where you want to be - you'll have to spend a pretty penny. At that point if you have the space you might want to get a 3.1 bookshelf speaker setup. They don't have to be very large to provide great value-for-space-used.
I've had a few 5.1 systems in the past (energy, Polk audio speakers) but I found while the center channel quality is excellent there's just too much bass. Even at low volumes the bass disturbed others in the home (even after playing with eq, boosting center channel, and enabling night mode on the receiver). Currently I have an LG Gallery TV. I like the ease of just using TV for audio and even after raising the volume it doesn't vibrate the whole house.
It's not from the speakers - it's from your room. Read up on standing modes. Placing the bass producing speaker (usually the subwoofer) in a different spot can help alleviate this tremendously.
Eh, I've seen worse films from him, and worse acclaimed films this past couple years. In fact, 2 of the 6 movies I've watched the past couple years have been with Nicholas Cage, and I'm not even a fan of his.
I don't know if it's just me but cinema has become really shit, unless you're into superhero movies. It's like nothing matters any more to executives and moviegoers of all ages than superheroes. Are we living in Idiocracy?
No, we’re living in a world where piracy and exploded budgets mean every movie needs to be a hit. One flop and the studio is gone. So the studios produce movies that are certain to be not flops, like the endless sequels, and that will draw people to cinemas where there is no piracy, which means impressive spectacles with explosions.
I'm sorry but piracy is not to blame for a 100 million movie budget. I live in a small country and we're able to produce very enjoyable films for far less than 10 million.
Pig is a great example because it essentially could have been a student project. The only thing you really needed was one good main actor, and who's to say a student of art couldn't have done a good job just as well. The location shots, the various scenes are all ultra low budget.
> The sound mixes today are so far off a pleasant experience that the people who do make them should feel ashamed - How do many actually have a home cinema room with soundproofing and 20 speakers ?
Also, digital camera manufacturers should be feel ashamed for cameras providing photos that don't even fit on my monitor. My 24MP Sony camera outputs photo's at 6000x4000 pixel resolution! Who the hell has a monitor that big ? I can only see a small part of the photo at one time.
Oh way, no, that's absolutely crazy. Because maybe some people do have a monitor that high-res, or maybe they want to print it or edit it or.., or... And guess what, there is no need to have the photos be smaller to display them, you can simply use a viewer that scales them to fit on your display. There is absolutely no need to throw away that extra information and you might want it in the future.
Same goes for audio in a movie. If it doesn't fit the dynamic range suitable for your setup, then scale it to whatever you need it to be. You may not have a setup to enjoy that, but others might, and they shouldn't have to deal with sub-par mixes because other people don't know how to configure their playback equipment.
Christopher Nolan is one of the biggest offenders in this regard, often having barely audible dialog drowned out by music or background noise by stylistic choice. I understand the intent is to let it wash over you but I can’t help but struggle to understand and it ends up just making me feel frustrated and taking me out of the film.
watched it in imax the first time and i thought it sounded terrible as well. watching at home with subtitles on the second time around really helped clear up a few things.
it doesn't help that they also have masks on for most of the movie, or they're having to talk over the sound of loud speedboat, or the accents are foreign, either russian or indian
In Switzerland every movie has German and French sub-titles. Sadly you can't turn them off in the theater but it's helpful id you can't understand what the actors are mumbling.
Reminds me my dad said when he first moved abroad before he learned the local language, everyone would read the subtitles and laugh at the joke and then he couldn't hear what they had just laughed at.
I feel the same way, it's strangely mixed. You look at movies that are 30 years old and the music is very quiet or in different bands than speech, very carefully done. You can still hear speech in Jurassic Park or The Matrix. A Marvel Movie? Good luck...
Maybe it's a lost art. I have found that turning off subtitles and forcing myself to get used to their accents does improve my listening comprehension, but it's a much easier choice when you can't otherwise understand it just due to mixing.
I don't know that it helps me focus, if anything I have to focus harder when they're talking so I can hope that their lips will be enough to figure it out. But it does mean that if I'm watching something in a place with roomates I can use a much lower volume and figure out what is going on by combining the text with the low SNR audio I hear.
Listening at a low volume should mean better overall hearing over time too right? My default volume went from like -20dB to -45dB on the same system over the last decade, I think either I'm being polite to roomates or just more careful with my hearing.
The Apple TV has a setting called "reduce loud sounds" which helps with this problem. I'm sure you can find it on other devices too. My Sony TV also has a sound setting for enhanced dialogue which might help as well.
Can't really help with the actors thing, though I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.
> I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.
You can have both though. A great example is Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s never mumbled a line in his life and you can understand everything he says during quiet dialog. You can be true to life, quiet AND understandable.
Jean-Luc Picard is quite intelligible even when he is soft spoken like you said. There's quite a few reasons for this. One is obvious. Patrick Stewart is a shakespearean actor so he learned how to speak in such a way. The other thing is his accent. It's an accent that lends itself well to intelligibility. Pidgin or Mountain talk or bayou certainly do not if you want something credible or authentic, for example. Thirdly, the character Jean-Luc Picard is one who has always carried himself properly and with dignity, so a voice that is loud and properly enunciated matches him perfectly.
I think that you can have both, but you can't always have both. Because it doesn't always make sense to.
> He’s never mumbled a line in his life and you can understand everything he says during quiet dialog. You can be true to life, quiet AND understandable.
Its almost all about projection. You can come across as a "quiet" speaker and still manage to be heard when you're projecting and enunciating properly. Projecting isn't about being loud, its about being heard.
I have a tendency to mumble a lot when I'm not thinking about it. Thinking about projecting my voice brings things across better, and its not really all about being louder.
I do think Stewart's stage training shines through quite a lot. He does dial it back, but his performance is hardly realistic. (I'd also note how important recurring locations are even set up like a stage -- open with a clear unobstructed focus point for action to happen in; the bridge, ten forward and engineering especially notable).
On the other hand, I'm not sure what hyper-realism would contribute to something like Star Trek. The show confidently embraces the fact that it's basically a bunch of fairy tales for nerds. That's what allows it to be as great as it is.
Not everything needs to be The Wire (even though that was great too, if you enabled subtitles).
Wow I don't agree at all (haven't seen the latest series, talking about TNG and the movies).
But, if I hadn't seen maybe two episodes, I might have the same impression.
How often do you see Captain (!) Picard out of uniform? The character of Picard-as-officer is constantly on stage, he's the master and commander of an entire starship!
Second most often, we see him on the Holodeck, where he's playing a captain playing an actor playing a role! Of course he chews the scenery there.
But when we see Jean-Luc, the civilian, something changes. All the Royal Shakespeare is invisible, he's an old man who carries a great burden, and has put it down for just a moment.
Patrick Steward is very, very good at what he does.
I don't deny he has range, but at the same time, it's hard to get way from the fact he is a stage actor playing a character that sounds and acts like a stage actor in almost every scene. He fits the role like a glove, and the role makes a lot of sense in the show (his dignity and gravitas is something that is arguably missing in the reboots and new takes on the show).
I recall an episode where it's all going to hell due to the holodeck, and Picard asks what happened. Geordie, I think, explains they asked the holodeck to create a character that could outsmart Data...at which point Picard lowers his head into his hands and mumbles "Merde!" (pretty clear, despite the mumble).
> The Apple TV has a setting called "reduce loud sounds"
This does help, but at some point Apple increased the compressor’s release time so that it’s far too quiet even 10-15s after the loud transient. I wish they would make it behave more like a brickwall limiter.
I had noticed that it had changed but wasn't sure what exactly the change was. Yes, far too quiet 10-15s after the loud transient is exactly why I ended up having to disable it.
Before that it worked perfectly and better than my Denon receiver :(
I’ve definitely noticed this change but couldn’t pick when exactly it happened. Super annoying because sometimes I start changing the volume then it starts changing the volume…
That option actually works great for resurrecting the speech in a movie, but makes all the music utterly flat and boring. With this option on you might as well throw out your expensive speaker setup and use the built in TV speaker.
If only there was a hotkey to toggle it on and off, instead of hidden 4 levels down the touch-and-swipe menu.
Even better would be for the compressor/limiter to detect whether the source is music, dialogue or explosion and adjust its parameters accordingly. Come on Apple, make it smarter!
I'm one of those people that mumble and/or struggle with speaking in real life, so I'm probably placing that burden more on other people than the other way around.
I just find that stage acting sounds very unnatural. So do news anchors and you will find the same sort of unnatural voice in older classic films. No one talks like that in real life so of course it's something that is going to detach the tv show or movie I'm watching from reality if they speak like that. Does that make it impossible for me to enjoy the classics? No, but they pretty much never pull me into the story in a way that makes me forget for a second that they're actors doing a performance.
When you are sitting at home, with perhaps a friend on your couch, do they constantly say "What?"
Or, if standing with a few people you know outside, is every sentence you speak replied to with a request to repeat yourself?
I bet not. Maybe it happens sometimes, but my point is, being able to understand what someone says, regardless of how they say it, is the key part here.
Yet it sounds as if you believe most people are barely understandable? Including yourself?
And for example, listening to much of the dialog out there, the Picard reference. The guy is in command of the flagship of a fleet, in the military, and would not be in command, in that position, if there was any inability to clearly issue orders, and to communicate fluently.
Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
A CEO? An ex-world class military retiree? Someone working in upper management of the NSA? These people will be heard.
There are indeed roles featuring the "regular person", but if you mumble, if you define your speach style as mumbling, that means you employ the word "mumble" to differentiate you, from how most people speak.
Otherwise you wouldn't be mumbling, you'd just be speakkng.
So that all said, I think your assertion is unfair.
The person I originally responded to was basically calling for actors to homogenize their speech in order to make them easier to understand. I disagree with this notion because I think that both altering how you enunciate things and how you "project" your voice alter them drastically and are not realistic for everyone to speak that way. They are inherently inauthentic, especially if you consider the speech patterns of various English accents and dialects. Certain accents are intrinsically linked to "mumbling." Certain types of voices are inherently not projected.
A great example is this video of Baltimoreans attempting to say "Aaron earned an iron urn." [1] The same person says it how they would naturally and with "proper" enunciation. With "proper" enunciation he was very easy to understand, but it was also not authentic to how he actually speaks.
> Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
Yes, but there's just as many, if not more, that aren't. I'm not saying it's unrealistic for say, a CEO or a news reporter to have adapted a "General American" accent. I don't think it's weird for even most characters to have an accent that is very understandable to most Americans. I just don't think you can or should expect that actors always speak in a certain way just to make it understandable to the most amount of Americans.
I have the same issue but instead of using subtitles I've embraced not knowing what's going on with the show. If it was important that I know for my enjoyment then I'm probably not watching the show anymore. Like if what the actor said was unintelligible I'm going to go with that's part of the plot, a puzzle for me to figure out on the show subreddit or something, but I'm not going to deal with the shitty blinding subtitles some shows display on blinding white over pitch OLED black, it's impossible.
That’s how I watch movies in general. Maybe it’s a symptom of ADHD or lack of interest but I find it hard to remember people’s names and plot reveals that require me to remember to specific locations or details. I just watch movies and enjoy them “generally”.
I hate that feeling. Not knowing if the name they just mentioned is someone important I forgot about or the director is going for a convoluted timeline and they are talking about someone we haven't seen yet.
I have better things to do than watch movies with the risk of not understanding them. It's like saying to read a book "generally." What a waste of time.
But it also depends on the genre. If you're a fan of blockbuster action movies, most dialogue is unimportant anyway. If you enjoy drama or more artsy movies, you probably need to follow what's going on.
I do some of that, because I'm bad with remembering names. If the plot involves talking about someone, I just learned to ignore it and consider non-important.
Just for reference: if you need Subtitles on an OLED, e.g. on Netflix you can set the subtitles to grey (only in the Web app, but is used on all other apps). Had that same problem with the OLED
While we are teaching actors to enunciate can we do the same with musicians? When I listen to music in German, I can almost completely understand it despite speaking German at a kindergarten level. When I listen to music in English, despite being fluent, it is almost impossible to discern the lyrics they are mumbling.
I suspect that a large part of this problem is Autotune. Singers need no training to hit the right pitches anymore, so they receive no training at all for any of the other skills as well.
AFAIK, there's only one audio mix done with theaters in mind, and studios don't do separate mixes for home viewing. It's down to the distributor do make sure that the average home viewer gets a good experience. That's why it boggles my mind that big players like Netflix don't have any dynamic range compression and surround downmixing options in their settings. Also the way most TVs handle surround downmixing is straight up broken. I watch my movies from mkv files on a PC, so for me it's not a problem because there's tons of options available for that in players like mpv, VLC and MPC-HC, but I do feel bad for your average person that has no business knowing about this stuff. They should just have a simple DRC setting available with maybe 3 levels and a clear explanation of what it does.
If you use MPV, you can pass it ffmpeg filters, and ffmpeg has many ways of compressing the dynamic range. See [1] for the set of audio filters. Here are the settings I use [2]. If you can't run your video through ffmpeg, I guess you could run your audio signal through a physical compressor if you use external speakers, but that can get quite involved.
I always thought it's the same problem as modern web design: razor thin fonts, "stylistically" low contrast ratios, hieroglyphic icons that don't show properly low resolution screens, slow loading times... because the designers and developers that made the thing are using maxxed-spec iMacs with 5k IPS color-accurate displays, so they never experience the "real world usage". I imagine the sound engineers have the "maxxed-spec" equivalent mixing studio, and the directors imagine everyone will experience the film in a theater or in a home theater, and not on the built-in Hisense TV speakers from across their living room.
When I was working at a transcription company I had to build my test kit with spare parts from the Bin. The Bin was full of old discard parts, early Celeron and Pentium machines with PS/2 KB/M.
Everything had to compile and run on that machine before I could ship builds to any of our transcriptionists. Our website needed to be able to load on it and so on.
What you say rings true, sound engineers are also mixing audio at 24 bits uncompressed, and while DVDs and Blu-Ray have the ability to play it back, I doubt the streaming services are sending it in full bit depth and also that most people buy hardware capable of decoding it if they did.
I know I'm in the minority here, but let me explain why it's not terrible audio mixes or bad actors.
The overall trend in TV and movies has been towards greater realism in all aspects. Less stage-audience sitcoms, more single-cam. Less "look at this actor" and more "look at this real person".
Actors aren't mumbling, they're speaking how real people speak. Trust me, screen actors have more stage training than ever -- they know how to enunciate but if they do, the director tells them to stop because they seem like they're giving a fake theatrical performance rather than being a slice of real life.
And because more and more people have huge TV's with great contrast, 5.1 surround systems, or are watching with AirPods with spatial audio... TV is becoming more film-like both in range of brightness and loudness. For many people (like myself) this is a godsend. It's like I'm at the cinema every time I watch an hour-long drama. It's amazing.
We could go back to low-contrast everything and overly enunciated actors, the way sitcom TV was, designed for small screens and terrible speakers. But that just feels so... backwards and limited and fake.
HOWEVER, I do firmly believe that modern TV content should be made more accessible, and that it's high time to build adjustable "end-user compression" into all TV's and video players. Let the user apply automatic volume equalization so quiet parts are just as loud as the loud parts when you're watching TV in your living room with lots of activity around. (And with 5.1 signals, you can even always keep dialog louder than sound effects and music.) And brightness equalization so you can see what's happening in the dark scenes of Game of Thrones when you're in a sunlit room.
> Actors aren't mumbling, they're speaking how real people speak. Trust me, screen actors have more stage training than ever -- they know how to enunciate but if they do, the director tells them to stop because they seem like they're giving a fake theatrical performance rather than being a slice of real life.
But if it translates into me not being able to understand them, that’s less realistic, because in a real-world scenario I’d be able to understand them, since our ears are adapted for the real world. A real world slurrer is about as easy to understand as an enunciator through movie speakers — at least, with how the meth-addled mixers do it now.
Bottom line: speech being incomprehensible is not realistic, and is not accomplishing some wonderfully artistic gritty realism.
Edit: To put it a different way: they may be speaking the way real people speak, but once you put it through a speaker, it will translate into something less comprehensible than that speech would be in a real-world scenario, and thus less true to how that situation would be in real life.
To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either. Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you.
My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show.
Decades ago, in an American TV show those characters would have been speaking an understandable American accent with just a few accent "suggestions" to indicate they were "foreign".
Today, it's considered absurd if they speak in anything else but their actual full accent.
It's realism. My mother can't understand it and has to use subtitles. I understand it all perfectly, but I've traveled a lot and learned other languages.
But that's what subtitles are there for. And not all TV/film has to be culturally accessible to everybody, with fake ways of speaking.
>To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either.
Yes, I absolutely would, because, in practice, people speak in a way that others can understand them, or else they have to quickly adapt. (If they’re not comprehensible, there will be a contextual reason why.)
>Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you.
That wasn’t what I was saying. My point was that conveying sound through speakers has inherent differences from a person actually being there, and our ears/auditory processing are optimized for the latter, taking advantage of things that aren’t present with speakers. So playing “the same” speech is going to be inherently less comprehensible, requiring some kind of compensation.
These brilliant sound engineers, as judged by actual audiences, are turning comprensible speech-situations into incomprensible ones, some way or another.
>My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show.
That’s a separate issue, whern there are genuine cultural differences with between the listener and the situation. That’s not what’s happening in Tenet.
> But that's what subtitles are there for.
No, it’s not. Most sound engineers would consider it a failure if someone had to use subtitles for their own dialect, and most cinemaphiles consider the presence of subtitles to be a failure in itself, and everyone agrees that having to read off the screen to follow worsens the experience.
I don't know what to tell you... but in real life people misunderstand each other all the time. And don't adjust.
Listening to dialog in a movie theater is generally crystal clear in terms of audio engineering, coming from dedicated center speakers with very little audio artifacts due to the space. Directional sound waves are directional sound waves, and no there's nothing our ears are optimized for that isn't reproduced by speakers, for dialog coming from a few feet or more away. Muddiness is introduced when downmixed into stereo on crappy TV speakers in living rooms with a lot of sonic reflection from hard surfaces. If you listen with spatial audio AirPods with noise cancellation, for example, you'll get something much clearer akin to a theater experience.
My point is that subtitles help people who have trouble understanding similar dialog in real life, or in bad acoustics. It's an accessibility option.
When I listen to content with my AirPods, I never need subtitles at all. The audio is perfect. When I watch a movie in a friend's living room with kids running around, we absolutely put on subtitles. Because it's a terrible audio environment. So it all works out.
>I don't know what to tell you... but in real life people misunderstand each other all the time. And don't adjust.
Anyone who consistently speaks incomprehensibly and doesn't correct is soon cut off.
Mishearing does happen, but is the exception, and having repeats will take away from the presentation for little narrative benefit. Therefore, when putting it on the big screen, they present the interaction in a way that avoids blowing time to have characters repeat themselves.
So yes, in a sense (that you weren't arguing), you are correct: in real life, there will be more mishearings (and repeats). But IRL, you also don't normally have to carry on after not hearing correctly. To the extent that movies are accomplishing that, it is a departure from realism.
>Listening to dialog in a movie theater is generally crystal clear in terms of audio engineering,
As judged by the repeated complaints of numerous people, to the point that periodicals are covering it, no, it's not, it's really really not. Perhaps you hear things okay but most people don't.
>My point is that subtitles help people who have trouble understanding similar dialog in real life, or in bad acoustics.
But these are people that have no trouble in similar dialog in real life! Hence why this is being covered, and why people are upset. Did you notice the title? "Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions..." You must have missed the subtext that, "20-somethings are not a special class with hearing disabilities". If they can't hear it, you can dismiss it was "lol hard of hearing" or some exceptional case.
>When I watch a movie in a friend's living room with kids running around, we absolutely put on subtitles. Because it's a terrible audio environment.
But people are using subtitles when there aren't distractions, and they didn't need to do this 20 years ago. I just watched Seinfeld on Netflix, and the dialog clarity was thousands of times better than any more recent production. I turned off subtitles, which was unusual for me. How come it wasn't such a "terrible audio environment" back then?
Because sound engineering practices have regressed, and you shouldn't be rationalizing them.
I'm sorry but that is just not true. That kind of naturalistic acting has been the dominant trend in movies since Brando. TV may have been more stage like but definitely not movies.
You're right that it started with Brando and has only come more recently to TV in past decades. But I don't think I said anything to the contrary. I even said "TV is becoming more film-like".
I don't watch a movie to get confused as I may in real life. The director is confused if they don't understand the fundamental rules of cinema - speak clearly and face the camera.
No matter the size of the screen, bad acting is bad.
> the fundamental rules of cinema - speak clearly and face the camera
You're literally describing the fundamental rules of cinema... in the 1940's. Back in the studio system, that was exactly with they did, so clearly they even used a fake "transatlantic accent" with heightened enunciation to do it.
And these rules (minus the accent) are still followed to a large degree in middlebrow TV fare like what you watch on ABC or the CW Network. It's also more present in comedies.
But if you're watching a prestige drama on HBO or Netflix? If you're watching The Wire or Succession? If a drug dealer or cop suddenly starts speaking clearly and facing the camera, all believability is instantly shattered.
Your rules for "bad acting" are outdated by about seven decades. In fact, "method acting" in the 1950's was precisely a reaction to the stilted "speak clearly and face the camera" acting of the 1940's. By your standard, Marlon Brando would be a bad actor, since "speak clearly and face the camera" is the polar opposite of what he did.
> Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
Watch some German shows (notably: Not Netflix’s Dark as that was untypical, I mean actually produced for the German market shows). It’s horrible. Everything sounds super fake. Yes, everything is easy to understand, but I (a German) can’t watch anything because nothing sounds real.
It’s usually claimed this is because German actors do more stage acting, but as Dark (or other German actors in US productions where they don’t sound fake) show, it goes much deeper.
I live in Germany and honestly it just seems to me from speaking to Germans that they have the worst mixture of a lack of sense of quality and also an uncaring-ness/sense of futility about it. I think it is kind of like the "poor service at restaurants" thing. It is a negative point that has become accepted and almost expected by Germans, so there is literally no desire to change it, which would take a lot of effort for very little gain.
Tangentially, it also reminds me of going back to the UK last week to visit a conference. The trains were just so much different to those in Germany, even the crappy "Stansted Express", those here in Germany feel very utilitarian and unfriendly (particularly the Deutsche Bahn "Bombardier Double-deck Coach") while in the UK similarly priced train services are more explicitly friendly and caring in their design.
I do think it is a systematic or cultural "problem", but also it's kind of one of the things I like about Germany. The emphasis is on things that are completely tangible to everyone rather than more removed concerns like aesthetics and friendliness. And, I think this bleeds into the cultural arts too. I have noticed the same thing with a lot of popular German music too. It just lacks the sense of "coolness" that there is in other countries, and feels almost like an cringey imitation of other countries popular music
>Tangentially, it also reminds me of going back to the UK last week to visit a conference. The trains were just so much different to those in Germany, even the crappy "Stansted Express", those here in Germany feel very utilitarian and unfriendly (particularly the Deutsche Bahn "Bombardier Double-deck Coach") while in the UK similarly priced train services are more explicitly friendly and caring in their design.
The friendliest thing a train can do is bloody show up on time, which National Rail seems to have had a problem with lately.
I don't think anyone can reasonably dispute that Germans don't value great customer service much -
but it's ridiculous to claim that the culture that produced Goethe, Schiller and, to a large part, the Romantic era doesn't value aesthetics.
I think that most "popular" (i.e. charts-topping) German music is rather bland, but I feel the same about chart hits from other countries. Meanwhile there is some German music that is really good - though of course whether you'll like what I like will depend on your taste.
Honestly, I disagree with pretty much everything you said. I don’t feel like I get poor service, trains aren’t designed unfriendly, and we certainly shouldn’t strive to make things less functional for some feeling of kindness.
Can’t talk about popular German music, as I don’t listen to that or to other popular music.
Have you spent much times in other countries? I just spent a week in the UK with a German who had culture shock that strangers were actually talking to each other, that waiters called him "sir", and that the trains were so high-tech.
Mainly I find that Germans who disagree with these things have not lived in other countries, and those that do immediately agree.
The fact that you think the friendliness of people in anglo countries is fake is very sad...
EDIT: trust me the banter between two strangers chatting in the UK is not fake. We are not americans. We are simply willing to talk to people we don't know. Germans do not do this. Isolating yourself from strangers is not something to be proud of.
Dynamic range compression is called different things on different platforms, "midnight mode", "reduce loud sounds", on Windows it's "loudness equalization".
> Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie.
And not just sound engineers! So many TV shows these days are filmed in nearly pitch black. If there are any lights on in the room (or it's still bright on a northern summer night and the living room doesn't have blackout curtains), I can't see the action. At first I thought I was just being cranky and old, but then we watched The Neverending Story with my kid and lo and behold, they film in "dark scenes" with torches etc so you can still see the actors well enough to read their lips! I'm sure it would be fine if I was watching it in a proper theater, but it's a frikkin TV show and who even goes to the cinema anymore?
I know Sonos are not loved here, and other companies probably do it too, but Sonos sound bars allow you to enhance speech and also go into night mode. Night mode reduces the dynamic range - louder quiet bits and quieter loud bits.
I like the tv on quietly relative to other people I know, and continually messing with the volume is tedious.
> "The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet [..]"
On YouTube the ads are the explosions. Ads are so loud compared to the regular videos that I often just turn the volume down and the captions on.
Does it reliably and persistently mute all the time?
On iOS specifically I have the problem that sometimes an ad starts to blare from a background tab (sometimes on another tab page) out of the blue. So I try to never leave YouTube open. I cannot imagine that YouTube wants me to keep it shut, but well... there we are.
What makes the whole thing even more ironic is that YouTube refuses to play in the background in any other case, even though it seems to be perfectly possible from a technical point of view.
When I turn the volume down on my phone I know what I get and it'd never let me down.
If I had a device that didn't mute when I told it to, I would consider it faulty and I would return it.
I was talking about watching youtube on my android phone or TV when I wrote the comment. So yes, mute always mutes. I don't know what happens for iOS hostages.
If you know a foreign language, an option that works is to watch the dubbed version. I sometimes do this, especially for action movies: the foreign dubbed version is often easier to understand than the original english, because people doing the dubbing want to be understood.
French version are always so clear (friends and family watch movies on laptop and phones). But I know enough English to notice that the movement of the actor's mouth does not correspond to the sound.
After watching The Boys season 3 I thought I was losing my listening comprehension of English. Glad to hear even native speakers struggle with modern movies. Karl Urban is great, but he just grumbles into his beard.
Whenever I'm watching a modern movie, sticking a compressor on the audio is a must. Open VLC settings, search for "compressor". It's programmer UI, but it does exactly what it says.
What kind of speakers do you have? Let me say that voices become greatly more intelligible with traditional speakers with a full midrange than modern speakers with exaggerated treble and bass.
What may be happening is that your speakers have a scooped profile, and audio mixes often have a scooped profile too. The sound effects and music tend to be bass and treble heavy, so you hear a lot of that.
But the lack of midrange means voices are hard to understand. You need range that to distinguish vowels, etc
I don’t understand how anyone can watch a movie with iPad or iPhone speakers. They are missing the exact part of the spectrum where important info in voices live. It’s just painful for me to pay attention with those speakers.
My parents were doing this, and I got them a simple Bluetooth speaker with midrange, and they immediately noticed the difference. Their faces lit up.
Judging by the comments here, it does seem there is a "double" race to the bottom of more treble and bass -- on the audio mix side and on the speaker side. So it's a compounding effect, which would explain a lot. So the least you can do is get some better speakers.
Or honestly if you have an EQ, you can just experiment with turning up the midrange and the treble/bass down, although with some speakers this will make things sound bad.
----
Also I just skimmed the original article!! Isn't it obvious that the problem is iPad and iPhone speakers ????
I see young people listening to MUSIC on these things and it boggles my mind
They can't understand dialogue out of these crappy tinny speakers, so they turned on closed captioning ?? Makes total sense.
Or are they also using them with ear buds, which shouldn't have the problem? I notice more people NOT using ear buds (annoying people on the train), which makes me think the problem is the speakers
10 years after I bought some pairs of wireless headphones to avoid waking our newborn baby while watching a movie, they still get daily use for exactly this reason. Having the drivers right by our ears with individual volume controls gives us each the best audio, but it is unfortunate we need to resort to it.
Agreed. Background levels higher than dialog are a chronic problem. Actors turned away from the camera, so you don't get any facial cues. Yelled or hurried or mumbled lines, which don't get re-shot because, cost.
Add all that to the usual nodding actors - they don't understand what they're supposed to be feeling so they just nod as they talk. Sorry to call that out, now you will never be able to un-see it again.
And whispering as a substitute for emotion! What the hell? Character is supposed to be feeling intense emotion, so the actor whispers. The director should slap them every time, and re-shoot.
That difference in loudness between voice and effects happens often when the stereo material is derived by a badly mixed down 5+1 material. Having control of the 6 channels levels before mixdown may help to eliminate it, otherwise some sort of compression/limiting is necessary.
Many TVs have the option to set the audio output level to automatic, which doesn't mean the volume can't be changed but that around a given volume the dynamics are less extreme so that faint sounds are amplified and loud ones are attenuated.
I don't think this is a new phenomenon. It annoyed my Dad so much in the 1980s that he build an audio compressor for the TV which quietened the loud parts and amplified the quiet parts.
> Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them
Most of this is a result of surround sound and people not setting it up. There are two main speakers, a center speaker, and various surround speakers depending on the setup.
Dialog is primarily mixed to come out of the center speaker. If you turn the center volume up and the main speakers down you can fix the problem where explosions/music are too loud but dialog is too quiet.
My old AV receiver had a "night mode" (I believe it was called) that did some really great, natural-sounding dynamic range compression. I ended up just keeping it on all the time, for the reasons the parent lists. Alas, the entire unit stopped working several years ago, and I learned it would cost more to repair it than replace it... and I didn't do great research when buying its replacement, so "night mode" is no more.
You accurately diagnose symptoms, but you blame the wrong people. Engineers and actors don't make creative choices, they merely obey directors and producers.
That's actually close to another very important point. Most movies come with a 5.1 mix nowadays, and people watch them on a stereo system. Most players use a very simple formula when converting 5.1 to stereo, something like say Lout = 1/2 Lin + 1/3 SLin, Rout = 1/2 Rin + 1/3 SRin, and leave out the center channel completely. This is also done inside of TVs etc. The center channel gets dropped completely! And sometimes dialogue is only in the center channel - not all of it, but there are some lines every now and then that just only ever come out of the center channel. Those are lost.
This sounds too stupid to actually be true, but it also seems to correspond to my experience. It makes me sad that there's an engineer or produce designer out there, anywhere, who would intentionally pull something like this. It's sadistic. Why ruin your product?
The issue is that most programmers think there's nothing to know about the non-programming-related engineering they're encoding into their programs. So we get crappy audio, we get cars driving into bollards, delivery robots driving over crime scenes, home automation destroying houses, smart locks that can be picked without tools, etc. People severely overestimate their knowledge of what's going on, and underestimate how much complexity there is to the phenomena they're dealing with.
If the information from the C channel is dropped, and the speech information was only in C or for the most part in C, it won't be in L+R, or it will be to some insufficient extent because it'll get obscured by whatever else is happening.
I have a home theater (do they still call it that?) with 5.1, 5 speakers and all that jazz. I tried everything but with many movies (esp. all the superhero stuff) the only option is to lower the volume and turn on the subtitles to be able to follow the dialog. I wish there was an option to make the loud parts less louder and quiet less quiet, but I couldn't't find it (it's an older onkyo).
I'm going to guess that most folks now-a-days go with a single soundbar that acts as the whole sound system, maybe there is still a center channel in the bar? Whether that be for; price, small living space or a partner doesn't want speakers around the world, its a convenient space saver that sits under the TV, sight mostly unseen.
I observed this in The Walking Dead, in the first seasons I could clearly hear the dialogue, but since 4-5 seasons I need subtitles for everything. Zombie noises from 200m away are louder than main characters speaking next to the camera.
>Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie.
Audio component manufacturers have actually responded to this tendency by adding in-line compressors to the audio channels that can be enabled/disabled. Sometimes this is labelled as the "Dynamic Range" feature in AV systems. Essentially it squashes the loudest sounds, which in turn brings up the average volume of the quietest sounds, thus evening the overall volume and allowing for a single volume setting to be used throughout the movie.
I think some of it is surround sound that modern streaming and televisions use without actual surround sound speakers. I've found if a movie/show is in surround sound, changing audio to non-surround sound helps a lot.
We do the same thing, loud noises, quiet dialogues and im constantly adjusting the sound. I've tried the audio settings where you can normalize or do night mode, it just doesn't work well. I have kids trying to sleep. We recently started hooking up a bluetooth speaker that sits between us and on loud scenes we just flip it down into the couch. We both try to work on stuff while watching so subtitles isn't something we can just turn on.
You've got this backwards. Overly compressed dynamics are far more common than "excessive" dynamics. It's definitely not a case of sound engineers needlessly flexing.
Your receiver will have a dynamic compression feature of some sort. Make sure that's maxed and it'll help. But frankly, an action movie isn't supposed to have explosions at the same sound level as dialog.
> ...Whenever I watch movies...turn on subtitles--easy but shitty solution...
Yep, I've been doing this now for several years. I guess i got used to watching (and enjoying!) many films that are not in English, but 99.9% of the time its because of actors mumbling, or some background noise (in the film) not making it easy to discern what was stated.
This is why I sometimes choose the German-dubbed version of a movie, even though I prefer the original one in English. They either mumble that it's hard to understand, or have an accent, or it's just a bad mix there the dialog is disturbed by noises. Dubbing reduces those noises ans removes the mumbling and the accents.
My wife is also very sensitive to loud or harsh sounds and we have to do a similar thing. Sometimes I set up a compressor in VLC, but it's a pain to get the settings right. Really we need something more like a limiter but I don't think VLC has that. It's not very fun to watch a movie on the TV nowadays
> Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie. Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
I am all for a ruthless dialog loudness war, like the loudness war in the 1990s-2010s.
There's a lot of podcasts with egregiously bad audio mixing. Which...c'mon guys it's a podcast. You should get that right. I've wondered if there's a way to use an algorithm to make people's voices a little easier to understand, like slightly exaggerating consonants or something.
Shout out to the ex-Cracked podcasts; a lot of those people -- presumably because of their experience with being part of actual productions -- have sound engineers for their podcasts.
I thought it was my tv having completely broken audio… Or the broadcaster. I noticed that, the volume goes up when commercials kick in, but also explosions, shootings, etc. the volume has to be adjusted every 5 minutes and we are watching 90% of content with captions on since I can remember…
I also suspect the hardware they master for is not the hardware most consumers have. My cheap soundbar isn't going to produce the sounds they want, and im not going to hear dialog. But when I visit a theater, I have no problems hearing the dialog.
> The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her...
Exact same problem at home... it was so bad on Interstellar that after that movie, she never went to a cinema with me again, or watched any movies together at all :(.
There seems to be a wave of naturalistic acting in TV series nowadays. Actors who simply play out the script verbatim as if in pre-premiere. No idea when this started. I'm thinking of the new she-hulk series.
Agreed, mixing at ‘reference level’, which is deafening, isn’t doing anyone any favours. Very few people have a home theatre set at reference level when watching a film or show.
To be fair the consumer audio stack is crap in the average home. I bet a CRT TV would be a big improvement in audio quality compared to most flat screens on the market.
What is the typical end user? Is it you with your TV? Me with mine? My neighbor with their soundbar I can hear through the walls? The guy on the train with his airpods? There is no standard, its all over the place. You might as well engineer so it sounds good when people actually care enough to string together some half decent components than to take a shot in the dark at building around some audio spec that doesn't exist.
Don't forget watching on tiny laptop speakers, cheap earbuds, or little bluetooth speakers. Even older movies are an issue when the sound quality isn't good.
I've never seen an implementation of that that actually did what it claimed, even on a modestly high end Denon receiver it just ends up making all audio sound harsh.
>Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
Hard disagree. I want realism. The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences. Believe it or not this old style speak you see in Older movies was Literally artificial and made for acting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpv_IkO_ZBU
Modern Audiences want realism. They want a certain level of believably that matches with reality. And a dialect artificially designed for "clarity" on radio just doesn't work.
Clarity takes a hit in the name of realism... but who cares? I have closed captions for that. Literally I don't see what's wrong with it.
The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences.
My mind immediately went to that scene in idiocracy - "You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded"
It's pretty clear to me that modern mumbling smarmy sarcasm is the low culture, and the Shakespearian trained actors of the past are high culture.
It's just like with fashion. We may pretend that hoodies and patagonia vests are just as respectable as a 20th century suit, but if we see two photos side by side we deep down know who is better dressed.
Except that's not what I'm talking about. And neither were you. Again did you watch the video?
Both of the actors you refer to talk in a certain British accent. It's not "Shakespearean" in any way; and that specific accent doesn't work outside of any of those contexts of playing high class British people or older "wise" professor types. Patrick and Ian, though both very good actors, have very limited range and their accents do sound comical outside of relevant contexts.
The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?"
To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption.
People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertainment to support their lifestyle, tend to not use CC. Why should they? The words literally don't matter, it's just an aesthetic.
People who actually desire an immersive experience, who deliberately pay attention to the shows they watch, tend to care about CC since it complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC. Or maybe it's that people who use CC tend to value and perform better at synthesis and comprehension? Regardless of causality, CC seems related to an individual's desire for more active entertainment.
I wish there was a CC mode for “I’m not deaf, I just don’t catch the quiet mumbly dialog sometimes so give me captions only of the dialog.”
Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, etc that are distracting for me, and not needed.
What’s worse, sometimes they ruin comedic timing by putting the punchline on the screen before the setup has finished (or logical equivalent of a punchline… comedy is often found in timing) and the captions ruin the timing.
There is on some shows. For those the choice is between "English" and "English [CC]" or similar; the former omits descriptions of noises. Most don't have this, probably because it's not provided by the producers.
Agreed on timing issues. This also seems to vary by show/producer.
> Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
I think that'd ruin me more than not having subtitles at all, because I just get stuck at reading the subtitles all the time if they are on (which, I have on 99% of the time). I go so far to avoid content that doesn't have subtitles.
What I'd love to have, would be a "speed-reading" version of subtitles, that just show each word individually as it's spoken (or maybe two/three) instead of the full sentence. That way it can still be in sync, while not ruining punchlines. Would be a real hassle to actually write/make the subtitles though, but with all the AI/ML around today, there is probably a way to automate it.
3Play Media's format could do this. Their output is usually a transcript where you can click on any word and it will take you to that second of the video. The software they've developed for the people who create the captions does go second by second as well.
I don't know if they've ever considered having that as a display option. They're just one of the only companies I can think of for whom it wouldn't involve a whole rethinking of how they create the captions.
That’s the difference between subtitles and closed captions: one is for people who don’t speak that language but can hear in general, the other is for people who can’t hear at all.
There usually is (but not always). It is something like English vs English [for hearing impaired].
As a non-native English speaker I’m used to watching most television and movies with subtitles. The extra sound descriptions don’t bother me too much actually. Sometimes it is kind of funny actually, it is a running joke in my home to count the times a show has [ominous music].
> Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, etc that are distracting for me, and not needed.
This drives me nuts too, especially when they're being subjective and I'm asking myself things like 'Was that music really "ominous"? Didn't seem that way...'
Another thing that bugs me is when captions reveal a character's name to indicate who is speaking when the name of that character hasn't actually been revealed in the story yet.
> Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
This is the exact reason why I vastly prefer playing media on my own media player. I have it set to always delay subtitles by exactly 2 seconds. I even have the font overridden to use a nice geometric sans (Josefin Sans, to be exact); subtitles with bitmap fonts (like they are on DVD and Blu-ray) are disabled outright.
Every time there's a new person watching something with me, they comment on the subtitle delay. It usually starts with a complaint that the subs are off-sync. Never had someone (yet) stick to that complaint though, after this explanation. But, nobody I've met has previously recognised a need for such a delay, either. Until they watch something with me, of course.
> [CC] complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC
As you say, you don't have any evidence for this, so I'll just add that my subjective impression is the absolute opposite. I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on.
I associate CC with the one place I ever see them - at the laundromat, where they are always on because you can't hear the TV clearly above the background noise. Hard to think of a setting where "background entertainment" is a better descriptor.
I think it depends on your reading speed and ability to skim. If you can read faster than people can talk, subtitles aren't really distracting because you can glance down and then go back to reading the visual expressions and background details of the dialogue.
As non english-native speaker I watched so much stuff with captions it's second nature for me.
But for any language that I understand well I only turn them on when the accent is so thick I can't get what the actors are saying.
Similarly I always turn on all subtitles in video games because it's easy to miss something if say ingame explosion or other sound effect covers the voice, or it is just too silent (say NPC talking that's a bit far)
But the article claim it helps multitasking seems weird - how having to look at screen would help when multitasking?
> But the article claim it helps multitasking seems weird - how having to look at screen would help when multitasking?
You have the audio on and are doing something else with your eyes. You don't quite hear something that's been said, glance at the screen, read the captions to fill in what was missed, return your eyes to your other task.
If it was audio only, you missed whatever it was, and have to live with it or replay a little bit of content. Going back a few seconds is often a UI challenge not worth the gained context, IMHO, but if it happens a lot, might as well not be watching anything.
There are a number of tasks that have varying noise levels, yet aren't so involved that you can't keep glancing at the screen. Washing dishes, for example.
>I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on.
This is a skill. I would have agreed with you 20 years ago but at some point I started putting them on because I could only afford a shitty audio setup and dramas got really mumbly. Took a while, but I learned to not be distracted by the subtitles.
I'm from Europe so used to subtitles from early age. My wife is Canadian, and first little while of our dating was bewildered with subtitles.
Now though, literally all my Canadian in-laws use subtitles, intergenerationalLy - they're used to them, and addicted to knowing what the heck is going on :)
I mean, I do "try" in the sense that about half the movies I watch are foreign, and therefore require subtitles. Despite this, I really do feel that I miss out on a lot of what is happening in terms of cinematography and creative directorial choices because I'm spending about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time reading the subtitles.
This aligns pretty well with McLuhan's concept of cool and hot media [0]. The younger generations prefer it cool - perhaps their hotness is found in newer forms like video games.
For context, I'm in my mid-30s and grew up playing video games. When doing chores I listen to podcasts or audio books.
I really like to think of media consumption in terms of attentional pressure. How long can you not pay attention without "missing something". For movies and TV shows it seems like 15 seconds, plus or minus depending on the content itself. Chatty podcasts give you 30 seconds or a minute.
I enjoy the fast video games I play (shoutout to Deep Rock Galactic, killer PVE FPS with a non-toxic player base!) because they modulate their attentional pressure and ratchet it up intensely at moments. It feels great to handle a situation where even a subsecond lapse in attention would result in failure.
From wikipedia: Cool media are those that require high participation from users, due to their low definition (the receiver/user must fill in missing information). Since many senses may be used, they foster involvement. Conversely, hot media are low in audience participation due to their high resolution or definition.
Seems like it's hard to place fast video games? You don't have to fill in much of anything (hot) but they require full participation (cool).
One of the things I love about podcasts is the ability to titrate the playback speed multiplier as a means of selecting a context appropriate window of permissible inattention. Sitting in an airline seat 3x… driving to an unfamiliar urban destination 1.25x.
This is an insightful observation but also feels incomplete and outdated. They use hot and cold to distinguish between "one sense" and "all senses", for some reason, which doesn't quite match modern media.
But I definitely agree that there is something to it, and video games occupy a different niche of entertainment than movies for me. Video games are a pastime and a hobby, movies and shows are not unlike books: I don't want to miss a single piece of the action.
When I have dinner I watch something off Youtube. Movie time is after dinner when I can give my full attention to it.
I'm a native English speaker and grew up mostly overseas in non-English speaking countries. Subtitles helped me understand American slang and conversational English that I wasn't used to hearing at home. I've also always struggled with distinctly understanding dialogue in films. It never had anything to do with active vs passive viewing. Another reason I always had them on was because I grew up in apartments and was always mindful of my noise levels for my neighbors. Using subtitles let me actively consume the film without worrying about bothering people around me. Now as an adult subtitles are my default for all media when available and I prefer it.
They mix sound differently now as well. I can’t follow speech in many shows and movies because voice volume is low and the background crap is too high.
This whole framing is bull. People who grew up without closed captions are just used to watching a show without it. For them, it’s distracting to constantly have words to look down and read when they are trying to pay attention to what is happening on the screen. Like trying to read the words on every single road sign when you drive somewhere.
You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is—they don’t show captions except maybe when translating foreign language.
Or you may not, if you only watch movies at home on your TV.
The bullshit framing is that there is any correlation between having CC on, and how closely the viewer is paying attention to the show or movie. There is not, as evidenced by a century of cinema and TV.
Movies originally had captions, because there was no dialogue track. As soon as they figured out synchronized sound, the captions went away. Even if people were paying very close attention.
> You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is—they don’t show captions except maybe when translating foreign language.
Well, it just tells you come from the English speaking country. For the rest of us, subtitles in a movie theatre are among most normal things in the world.
You’re right - except I don’t think there are many countries where national movie industry can seriously compete with international (predominantly American). Therefore, subtitles are a standard for your movie going experience.
> You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is
Movie theaters have the same influence on a mind as any other experience of collective attention. It keeps your attention aligned with attention of a crowd. It may be a case of herd behavior, or it may be something special, I dont know, but it works.
I believe that this collective attention is the main reason why movie threaters are still profitable. But not just it: surroundings associated with attention on a screen and all these rituals, like eating pop corn, also do their part as stimuli leading to a learned response. You get highly focused attention without any conscious effort. You need conscious to fight it and to divert attention from a screen.
But it doesn't matter when you try to watch a movie or a lecture at home. Despite of all your experience of collective attention it would be much harder to keep your attention focused.
No, that's not it. I grew up with literally everything in English being subtitled. Always hated it, but all I can do is make an effort to not have my eyes there.
Even some DVDs did not have the option to turn off subtitles. I never had subtitles on for anything that gave me the option. (I even bought DVDs from overseas occasionally to not get subtitles)
But now every other show is frequently incomprehensible.
Either they've put lead in the drinking water, making us all not understand the spoken word, or they've made dialog audio shit.
I think it's not as universal as you believe. I personally use closed captioning as a crutch when I'm half-ass watching something, because if my mind wanders and I miss hearing a line I can usually just read it without having to pause and rewind.
If I'm actually fully immersed in the movie or whatever, and I can understand the dialogue, then I don't need the captions and I leave them off.
In the past, that line needed to come in loud and clear, or people would just miss it, probably forever. Now, we can rewind, or of course turn on subtitles, so there's not as much pressure on the audio finishing to be super clear.
With television you turn it on and there are a few mediocre choices you can tune out. On streaming platforms you have to specifically select a program to watch. When Gen Z watches/listens to something in the background it's much more likely to be a long YouTube video or a podcast.
I use CC even in my native language especially when I background watch. It's easy to work while watching a tv show (only works with relatively boring work) if I know I can quickly glance at the subtitles if I missed anything.
What kind of work can you do while watching? You're just doing two things badly. Unless you mean physical work that doesn't engage the mind like cleaning or doing the dishes?
Your tone is a little smug here. If I’m paying attention to something I’m watching on TV, I can hear the dialogue. I want to be able to actually watch the performances of the actors, or whatever else is on the screen, instead of reading captions.
Sounds right - my parents (early 70s) don't pay attention to what they are watching even tho watching TV is the only thing they are doing at that time. They both even regularly fall asleep watching TV/movies at night and literally don't care that they missed most of the show/movie they were "watching." They aren't interested in watching the parts they slept through in the morning.
Well sure if the actors mumble all the time trying to appear enigmatic, the comprehension is surely greatly improved. I m not american and often i find it very hard to listen to what is said in tv series/movies. This is a new trend in acting btw, older TV was not like that.
Older people are more likely to be alone and the TV helps to break the silence. TV is usually tv shows where people speak properly so that helps i guess
>To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption.
The alternative is that the new generation has no ability to focus on anything and needs the same information piped to their brain through both their eyes and ears. Up next: smellovision captions.
Closed captioning only very recently become not crap. It used to be mainly served as those black bars with white text coming in about 30 seconds too late and with ridiculous typos.
31 but yeah, I've had subs on for almost a decade now? Maybe only 6-7 years?
For me I find I miss things without the subs on. Whispered/background dialog that I'm unsure how anyone is supposed to hear/understand being top of list but also sound mixing seems to be terrible by default and it's hard to hear/understand characters even in a quiet room sometimes. I read quickly so subs have never been an issue to me, I can scan and parse the subs and be looking back at the video in no time at all.
For foreign content (like Anime) I use dubs + subs (the subs are of the initial English translation before the dubs were done) because it gives 2 passes at any given line. I find it very interesting to see how they change things between the two and it sometimes paints a fuller picture.
> For me I find I miss things without the subs on. Whispered/background dialog that I'm unsure how anyone is supposed to hear/understand being top of list but also sound mixing seems to be terrible by default and it's hard to hear/understand characters even in a quiet room sometimes.
So many video sources coming with only surround mixes, or lazy stereo mixes that were made automatically from surround mixes, while very few homes have a surround system at all, and even fewer have one that's at least decently-calibrated, has been absolute hell for being able to tell WTF anyone's saying in movies. I suspect many VHS releases had better audio for most people's actual system even today, than the blu-ray of the same movie does.
That's interesting - I have subtitles on at all times (I am Swedish, we never dub adult content so I have used subtitles for a very long time), but when I do watch children's movies with my kids, they are dubbed, and then I find having subtitles on is extremely annoying.
I cannot stand having subtitles in the same language as the dialogue, but which differs in phrasing/content. It is very distracting to me.
I've moved to Germany a couple of years ago and this is a HUGE issue for me. I try to improve my German by watching German shows/movies in their native language. All German audio vs subtitles differ, constantly, and not in a minor way. It's practically never been an issue with English for the past two decades.
> For foreign content (like Anime) I use dubs + subs (the subs are of the initial English translation before the dubs were done) because it gives 2 passes at any given line. I find it very interesting to see how they change things between the two and it sometimes paints a fuller picture.
Anime is an interesting case, because — remember, a lot of these threads are about poor enunciation and mixing? — anime tends to be really well enunciated, and the characters speak like they're on stage. It's easy to follow along. I keep subs on, because I don't understand literally everything, but usually I don't read them.
Surprise surprise, this doesn't reduce my immersion at all.
Also if you speak some Japanese and listen to the Japanese audio while reading the subs it makes for some interesting food for thought, often the translations aren’t exactly what the characters are actually saying so you get a feel for how the languages and cultures differ.
Sometimes it's that, but often it's just that concepts don't really map 1-1. Especially humor, often jokes don't really directly translate well even with great translations, but also because there are connotations to certain words or phrases (e.g. allusions to folklore, or just the feeling of a word is different in each language) that could make a direct translation sound bad. Really common example is that you'll often see advertisements directly translated to English like "Let's go traveling!", "Let's eat seafood!" or whatever, but it just sounds lame in English since people don't talk the same way (and ironically sounds cooler to Japanese people because it's in a foreign language).
1) The reason TikTok etc. have closed captions on is that audio is off by default. If you want people to listen to your words but audio is off, put it into closed captions.
2) With closed captions you can watch a movie on low volume without disturbing others and still understand every word even of the girl in the corner of the room barely utters a word.
> The reason TikTok etc. have closed captions on is that audio is off by default. If you want people to listen to your words but audio is off, put it into closed captions.
I can't believe that whole dramatic article missed this very obvious reason.
It didn't. When I downloaded it the other week to see what all the hubbub was about (spoiler alert: I killed it with fire lol), audio was on by default and I had to change that setting. I'd wager that OP forgot that they set it themselves.
tiktok audio is not off by default. But it's right in the idea that some people will have the audio off, and cc means you can consume the content in either case.
I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
I think that the phenomenon described in the article may actually be a symptom of a much deeper social change. Listening and auditory comprehension were critical skills for communication and preservation of knowledge in prehistory. Spoken word is inherently ephemeral. As civilizations developed or adopted writing systems, and the population became increasingly literate, text supplanted spoken communication and oral history in many areas. There are many obvious benefits to that change, but I believe that we also inadvertently sacrificed our listening and auditory comprehension skills in the process over many generations.
Text messaging/SMS is increasingly preferred to phone calls, with many of the younger generations experiencing high levels of anxiety if they're required to call someone.
This is completely anecdotal, but I've also observed several others who are unable to follow verbal navigation instructions - either spoken from another person or even live step by step instructions from a navigation app. They only feel confident if there's a visual representation.
I think we've mistakenly classified that behavior as having a "visual learning style", when it is more accurately the result of our species losing its ability to process auditory language.
I think you're right in absolute terms, that captions require more attention than audio generally, that's only true if you're choosing one or the other, when most people are doing both.
With audio, if you missed a word, because you were focussing on something else for a moment, you have to rewind. If you have captions on, you can glance quickly at the screen, read the word or two that you missed, allowing you to 'recover'.
That allows you to pay even less active attention to the audio, because you know you can always 'error-correct' later.
> I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
I do this. I can parse what is happening on screen and read the captions in a fraction of the time the thing actually plays out, then I got a few seconds to do something else. Usually I would be reading HN or something while I tune out the video for a few seconds, before glancing at it again to catch the next bit.
Listening to a video and reading something else at the same time doesn't work for me. When I do that, I usually forget what I was reading or miss something in the video. Interleaving works much better for me.
Also I don't normally do that, just when there's some particularly boring part that I don't want to skip but which doesn't demand my undivided attention.
> I do this. I can parse what is happening on screen and read the captions in a fraction of the time the thing actually plays out, then I got a few seconds to do something else. Usually I would be reading HN or something while I tune out the video for a few seconds, before glancing at it again to catch the next bit.
That kind of context switching really does sound terrible to me. In my case, I speed up the content itself by 3 to 5x speed so that I can process more information at once and any boring bits are basically sped through. It's helped me retain a lot more information than simply watching at 1x speed.
This is an interesting take actually.. If we can assume that younger generations spend more time communicating electronically via some form of text messaging, at least the majority so, are you saying that that just becomes the "default" form of communication naturally?
Where are older generations would have spend far more time communicating verbally..
That makes some sense to me anyway. Would be super interesting to see some further studies done. And to philosophise the results that could mean.
I was thinking along those lines, yeah. Extrapolating that out, I can imagine a future where writing is the only form of language. It'd make for some interesting dystopian fiction, if nothing else.
I'd be interested in some formal studies as well. My thoughts aren't well researched or anything. Just ideas.
I can read considerably faster than people speak. I can keep up with a scene by glancing at the image and reading the text while focused on something else primarily. I can’t do that with audio.
> Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions (or even the music at times) and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
I won't pretend I'm fully multitasking, but sometimes I want a comfort show on in the background that I've seen before while I play a game on my phone/iPad. In those cases it's nice to be able to look up and see what was said if you just missed part of it. But I also leave subs on 100% the time I'm normally watching for the obvious reason of not missing anything, it's not just for background TV.
> Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
It's simpler than this. If you're watching a movie/show on a phone or laptop in a shared area, it'll probably be at low volume, so you can't hear the dialog. I've watched entire series with CC for exactly this reason.
With social media videos, CC is even more important cause nobody wants their phone making noise in public, and any wise app will mute by default anyway.
I disagree, I have a harder time paying attention to people speaking than reading. Reading is faster, much faster than waiting for people finish a sentence.
Then again, maybe you're right, I don't process auditory language and when I was in university, I skipped classes to instead read the textbook back to back without a teacher distracting me by yammering around.
I can browse my phone/watch instagram videos with a NFLX show playing. If something interesting happens I can look up and quickly catch up on the dialogue by reading the caption.
It's not so much the verbal aspect rather than the memory aspect. Written instructions are more soothing because you can refer to them verbatim and they stand no risk of being forgotten.
Not mentioned: The increase in poor audio mixing that sounds like it was done by a monkey in addition to the prevalence of devices with speakers crammed in odd directions inside of enclosures that are in no way, shape, or form big enough to contain them. If there was one advantage of the days of big tube TVs it was you had plenty of space to also fit big speakers in too
Even on my nice 2.1 setup on my PC, I always put captions on.
It's because re-reading a word I didn't understand is much faster and easier than re-hearing (in my head) a word I didn't understand.
It's even happened with my spouse, in the same room, speaking the same dialect of American English as me, with the same accent. I mis-hear one word, and it bleeds into the next word, and I need to think for a few seconds or ask them to repeat before the sentence makes any sense to me.
Perhaps us, and the TV actors, just don't enunciate like we used to?
I think mishearing a word causes an effect that feels something like a mental mispredict leading to a pipeline flush. There's definitely a delay to refill that pipeline.
I suppose that's true. But at least most people took their headphones off when they weren't at home, which somewhat limited their exposure time. Today, when I'm outdoors, it seems like a large fraction of people are wearing earbuds. For instance when I'm riding on the bike path, I have to be alert to the fact that nearly everybody out there who's walking or jogging won't hear my signal from behind as I pass them, because they're all wearing earbuds.
I recently graduated to the next step beyond closed captions: I've started enabling audio descriptions for TV shows too.
It's SO interesting.
They are generally really well put together. And they often highlight things that I would have missed - mentioning the name of a character who joins a scene who I don't instantly recognize, for example.
Even more fun: audio descriptions of the title sequences for a TV show. Three that I particularly enjoyed were Severance, Moon Night and Star Trek: Picard - in all three cases the titles are rich with visual metaphors relating to the show, which the audio description then carefully spells out for you!
I find Amazon X-Ray similarily userful. It displays the current actors on screen, their screen names, and the current song playing in the background of any scene. As far as I know, no other streaming service has this feature.
I'll add one more reason -- TV shows often require you to pay attention to every word now.
Thirty years ago, if you missed a line of dialog, it wasn't usually a big deal.
Now if you're watching Westworld? If you misunderstand a single line that might be the entire difference between "solving" the episode or not.
TV has gone from a "casual" experience you can tune in and out of, to a kind of literary-precision experience that demands your undivided attention, for many shows. CC makes sure you understand every word, which just wasn't usually that important previously.
I’ve had the same experience. Watching shows like that with the captions on makes me realize how much I miss with them off.
I’ve had a few instances where I didn’t “get” what had happened; I thought maybe it was just over my head. Turns out, I just missed some key dialogue is all.
Agreed. There's still older shows, or even new simple "popcorn-flick" movies that I can watch without subtitles just fine, because of a simpler plot line and cast of characters.
For example, compare a show like Lost against Westworld. With Lost each scene was so drawn out, that even if you missed a line, you'd be able to figure out what's going on from the general context.
We started putting captions on when our first kid was born, so we could still watch TV but have the volume down nice and low and not disturb her sleep.
It made a radical difference. We now tend to just have them on all the time. It's really mostly more modern movies and TV that we get value from it on, the audio mix is becoming such a mess with dialogue sinking in to the mix, that it's taking so much more effort to watch & listen. Put something on from 20ish years ago and the mix is totally different. That's despite having a sound system with a multiple speakers.
Most production are not made with the passable quality of reproduction that a sound bar provides in mind.
Mix are made for a THX compliant setup where the center speaker is responsible for over 50% of the dialog delivery. If you skimp on the center speaker quality and placement, the dialog mix gets muddy quite quickly.
I go to the local movie house a fair bit, and while it may not be THX certified or compliant, it's certainly not too bad. Some movies include speech that's easy to understand and others are kind of hard to hear.
Certainly, modern very thin TVs have a very uphill battle to fight, but a good center doesn't fix everything.
Not to mention that they are mixed for reference volume. If people weren’t concerned about neighbors, sleeping babies or protecting their hearing, I’m sure they would just crank it up and not miss any dialog. Of course, that’s just not possible (or enjoyable on most equipment).
The article mentions but doesn't get into the "audio description" option too. If you haven't ever tried this, it takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it makes multitasking much easier. I strongly recommend giving it a try.
During the gaps in speech, a narrator comes on and describes the most important things happening on the screen.
I had a gig for awhile actually writing the descriptions for this content, and it's really interesting work!
I love that we're discovering that features invented for "accessibility" are appreciated by many people who would not otherwise have identified an accessibility need. I can't help but wonder if it means people who were only dealing with mild impairments are now receiving assistance they didn't know they would benefit from. How many people do you think can pass a hearing test in a silent room lab setting, but have a hard time in our noisy world?
I watched Super 8, on I think Amazon, when it came out. I thought it was about the weirdest movie I'd ever seen, a narrated in real time action movie.
Come to find out, for whatever reason, it had audio description turned on by default.
As someone who can see and hear fine, I found it rather odd(before learning what it was). But for a vision impaired person, such a thing must be a game changer.
I had the opposite experience watching a vampire film called 30 Days of Night! For whatever reason my DVD player didn’t show any subtitles, even the translation from the Aramaic spoken by the vampires. So, I got to watch a bunch of undead growl unintelligibly at each other throughout the movie. It actually improved the experience because not knowing what they were saying made it so much creeper!
I was without my glasses and contacts for a day and I tried this out. It helped a lot, and was actually a nice experience. It wasn't miserable like I assumed it would be.
Wound up turning it off when I could see clearly, though. It felt strange to hear about what was happening in a scene just as I watched it happen.
Definitely could see it being useful while multitasking, though. I want to try that out at some point.
I started using captions as a teen because of watching anime, and then I started doing it with normal tv. I am not in my 20s but I think a big part of it is that most tv shows and movies have become absolutely impossible to hear what they are saying. I think speakers on TVs have gotten really bad with the transition to flat screen, and even with a sound system the mixing of audio has gotten really bad. Music and sound effects go over the dialogue too much. Movie theaters its fine, so I am not sure what they are doing differently.
And the volume levels vary so much. If you don’t want hearing loss or angry housemates you turn it down and then can’t hear the normal dialog. If I am watching very closely I will incessantly fiddle with the volume, but otherwise then captions are nice. I agree tho I miss visual side of the film while reading the captions. But I also tend to watch stuff I really like more than once so I get the body language second run thru.
Why would I buy something from people in the same industry to fix a problem that they caused? I'll just take subtitles. Especially when all the suggestions for 3.1 systems cost 500+. That's just ridiculous when all I want is a system to make the audio not terrible (loud sounds don't blow out my ears yet voices are clear and understandable).
It's definitely better but I still find mixing inconsistent enough that I have to cycle through profiles on my AVR(denon)/system(performa3) to find a mixing that works. Mostly seems to be an issue with stuff in the last couple of decades.
With the heavy accents I can barely understand every other word in shows like Brassic or sometimes an English word that means one thing for Americans but with a period/place specific meaning so I am not sure what I just heard like in Derry Girls (1980's Northern Ireland) without captioning.
I remember when "The Wire" came out, I started turning on captions because the Baltimore vernacular was so thick. And the Caucasian and African-American characters spoke separate dialects of it. Especially the constant use of "a'ight" as a contraction for "all right".
Derry Girls is interesting in that the actresses sound mostly like trained Brits doing an Irish accent. I've never been to Ulster, I don't know how people actually talk there, maybe the Irish have a softer brogue from having to interact with the British/Protestant people they share the region with.
Maybe spatially separating where sound is coming from helps? Or perhaps not having to overlay multiple audio tracks on a single speaker output allows for higher fidelity due to better dynamic range.
In any case I think my anime watching has resulted in a slight dislike for CC if only because I find it all too easy to accidentally only read, and actually the action going on. I only realized this when I go back and rewatched some old youtube clips and found myself not remembering the actual animation and physical comedy.
Not in that age group but I can't imagine not having cc on. I was hooked when watching anime and foreign movies but even with english movies they only have an upside. You don't have to guess what word they said or how someone's name is spelled. Loud scenes where you can barely hear them is one but also when you have characters that have accents or switch to a different language it helps (you don't get distracted by the sudden need to read cc).
You have to get used to it but it only takes a few tries.
One downside of having captions on all the time is that forced subtitles when characters are speaking a foreign language in an otherwise native language show are usually burned into the actual video stream instead of being in the same text file that the normal subtitles pull from, so a lot of lazy captions providers will put something like "<Walter speaking Spanish>" in the captions, which will then be displayed over the same space the burned in subtitles are for the entirety of the time they are speaking, meaning I have to rewind, turn off subtitles, rewatch the scene, then re enable the subtitles if I want to actual know what is going on.
I've thought about this many times as well as it does suck to have it spoiled, especially if there is a long pause in the scene but the subs have been up revealing the joke/jump-scare/etc for a few seconds already. In the end I enjoy subs too much to turn them off for that reason but every time it happens I do wish the "reveal" in the subs was held until the reveal in the scene.
I’m also not in that age group (I’m late 30s) but I’ve been watching TV and movies with closed captioning enabled since I was a kid and have found that it helps my comprehension of what’s going on with plot lines, etc, immensely. Maybe I’m just a stronger reader than listener, but I’m at the point where I vastly prefer to watch movies at home rather than at a theater because I can have CC on by default.
I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.
I always have subtitles on in games. Especially since I find it hard to focus on the words being spoken and video game cutscenes are almost always unable to be rewound. During gameplay it's harder to read and play at the same time though, although over the years it's gotten easier.
Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time.
I think for watching movies they can be useful too, because it feels like almost every movie coming out now has terrible audio mixing for the average person. Even the audio mixing in a Dolby Atmos theatre doesn't seem right. If you watch any modern film mastered in Dobly Atmos on a TV with a sound bar you will have a bad time. You'll have a worse time if you're watching with just the TV speakers.
I had to buy a 3.1 bar just to get a center channel. Basically one of us couldn't make out voices without it, and there were a couple movies/shows where it was just unwatchable. I'm not sure why things like Apple TV can't do a more credible job remixing the audio for 2 speakers.
I bought my TV in part based on reviews for audio quality. And while that’s certainly part of the equation, this has just been getting worse the last few years.
I have them on for games so I can read the conversation and skip to the next sentence. For open world RPG games that are 50+ hours long it really helps staying engaged, as some quest lines are not that interesting and I like to complete all side quests.
I've found that a lot of games initially start with subtitles on. I usually switch them off pretty quickly. I'm not used to them and they break the immersion for me.
Audio mixing has been absolutely terrible in so many productions that I started using subtitles a few years back and then I got used to them.
If I want to really focus on the movie I usually turn the subtitles off because sometimes the subtitles are ahead of the scene a bit and then it spoils some key moments slightly. HOWEVER, when I fail to understand a word and the subtitles are off I rewind, turn them back on, and just leave them that way. If audio mixing was consistent and good I would leave them off.
I have auditory processing difficulties. Among many other sensory challenges. Sitting at a table in a restaurant, I struggle to understand what my friends are saying to me over the din of background chatter, a bartender shaking a drink, back of the house clinking a pan.
I similarly struggle to understand what actors are saying when they’re backed by theme music or other physical things going on as part of (or behind) the story. Captions help me actually consume video rather than feel lost in it. Without text I pretty much would stop consuming video entirely.
Granted, I’m 40 so I can’t speak for the youngs. And I hear just fine in that the sounds are all present in my ears and my brain. They just get jumbled and being able to catch up with text helps immensely.
As one of the younger but not young crowd, I have a form of auditory dyslexia which is why I've used CC and subtitles most of my life. Good sound mixing and actor enunciation helps to a small degree, but my brain garbles the first part of conversation starts and when dialog happens without visual cues.
My hearing is good, but the delays in processing dialog to content make watching movies or tv very frustrating when I can't see the actor's face to lip read or don't have CC to catch what I miss.
On the other side of things, I have a very high level of internal voice so when I am reading text I can 'hear' the dialog in my head. I can listen to the first 20 minutes of a movie or episode or two of a tv show, then watch it muted with subtitles and will hear the actor's voices. It's nice because I can watch shows with my own background music or without disturbing anyone with the audio.
I'm the kind of person who concentrates when I watch TV -- if I can't give it my full attention I don't watch. I'm 45 BTW.
I used to hate subtitles -- found them super distracting. Then I met my wife, whose family always watched with them on. In part because English is their second language, and as I learned later, in part because some of the relatives are very loud and talk over everything.
Now I can't watch without them. Maybe between getting used to them and having kids and the crappy mixes with the dialogue too quiet, I need them now. I feel like I'm missing something without them.
Not being 20-something, I can't speak for them, but for me:
A lot of dialog is mixed way down in relation to the music and background noise, actors tend to speed up and drop the volume at the ends of their sentences, and of course there are those pesky accents.
I'm seeing a lot of other good reasons in this thread, too.
One cause of this is sending 5.1 audio through two speakers, where the center channel just gets dropped along with a lot of dialog. Another cause is of course crappy mixing.
I have never seen software or receivers that drops the center channel instead of doing a proper downmix. The exception is when the user has incorrectly set up the speakers to identify as 5.1 when they have only a 2.0 or 2.1 setup.
I think it’s this, if you want to have the volume at a level where conversations are understandable, the action scenes or other “high tension” moments are way too loud, and you spend your evening ride the volume control…
Yea, this is our family too. Volume button up and down, up and down, for 3 hours. I don't recall this being a problem with older movies, either. I feel like maybe modern moviemakers have access to sound pipelines with crazy vast dynamic range, and audio engineers feel they have to use every setting from "mouse quiet" to "nuclear bomb" in order to do their jobs right.
Another reason that I can think of is that many people are watching content at a increased playback rate. I personally limit that to education content because for things like comedy it can mess with pacing. But I have friends that have used it while watching really long shows. It doesn't have to be much faster but if you think about a 10 hour series, that is approximately an hour saved. I recognize that this seems odd, but I have tried it on some shows and it honestly makes them more enjoyable. It's not universal to every show or to every person.
I do that too - 1.5x seems to be the minimum I'll start with, and sometimes I'll go as high as 2.5x. Having subs definitely helps at the upper end of the range.
On the other hand, the downside is that when you interact with people in realtime, you constantly feel like they're speaking too slowly, and others have trouble understanding what feels like a normal speed of talking for you.
I watch everything on 1.4x, but I would watch it faster if it wouldn't run into buffering issues and get glitchy. Podcasts are normally 2.2x.
I just find I enjoy taking the information in more when I can do it quickly. If my brain has no trouble operating at that speed, I might as well take advantage of the chance to get more new ideas in my head!
Same here. Many movies are nice but slow; watching at 1.5× speed makes it a better experience. But then it becomes difficult to understand some dialogs, so I turn CC on.
I like having CCs on for movies because the dialog is always so quiet compared to the music and sound effects. I can keep it at a reasonable volume and still catch what the characters are saying.
Also, if I'm watching British shows, I like CCs because I'm really bad at accents.
Edit: I'm coming up on 40 now, so I guess I'm not the people this article is complaining about.
I don't understand how the people making movies/TV still haven't figured this out. Do they all just have home theaters and never try to watch something on a phone with crappy audio or when somebody is sleeping in the house?
Do you think those people actually watch the stuff they make? If they did, half of it would never get released, and the next 49% would be way better than it is right now.
An example of this being the case (that movie creators don't watch their stuff) is that most of the Star Trek TNG actors freely admit they've never watched most of their episodes.
Also a lot of times you get plot info from the captions. Like I won’t hear anything but the caption is [ominous foot steps] or [Krish slamming the door]
Two reasons from my perspective, other than my ears are getting older:
1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
2. Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content, and CC helps to cut down the cognitive load of “translation” while being entertained. Frankly, I enjoy the diversity of content, but I don’t want to have to work hard to watch TV.
> 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
I've found this really frustrating. I constantly have to control the volume when watching a movie. Commercials are also obnoxiously loud. It made me wonder whether the TV could automatically "balance" upcoming sounds so that quiet scenes are never quiet and loud ones are not too loud.
Some TVs and receivers have a night mode that does what you want. It's basically a compressor that cuts off the high peaks.
I've always been told that the ads are not really louder, that's another compression technique at work. There's no dynamic range and everything is at the top of the volume range. ( I think it amounts to the same thing )
> 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
I've also noticed a prevalence of mixing background noise/music into dialogue scenes which often overpowers the main dialogue, or overlaps in audio range enough to make it hard to hear. Add in sub-par audio equipment, or equipment which is compelled to emphasize one end of the audio over the other - and you have a recipe for difficult to understand dialogue.
Turning on the closed captions is an easier solution than fussing with the audio in many cases.
> 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
I was once told, by a salesperson in a TV store that this was essentially "by design" and that the solution they're taught to present is to "buy a soundbar". From his understanding, in the quest to get thinner TV manufacturers sacrificed built-in speaker size and quality, which results in the effect you describe. I am not sure how much is sales patter and how much is truth...but I bought a sound bar!
The smaller speakers in a TV naturally compress the dynamic range because they can't get loud, and especially can't get loud in the lower frequencies that travel more easily through walls. Getting good speakers actually makes the dynamic range problem worse since the loud parts get even louder and travel through walls even easier.
Soundbars have really good margins though, so it's unsurprising that that's the solution they sell!
> Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content
This is why they are always on in our house. I think people who understand fine take for granted how hard accents can be.
My wife is ESL. She understands me fine, and the 'neutral tv accent.' She can't understand a word my father says(Appalachian accent). Can't understand British people, Boston accents, etc. She's learning, slowly, but I've never even thought about how amazing it is we're able to process all the different ways people speak, rather seamlessly.
A new hearing loss modality seems to be gaining traction -- "hidden" hearing loss. A core symptom is difficulty parsing speech in noisy environments. Caused by repeated exposure to loud noises. Don't know if folks around here are going clubbing much but I'm under the impression that it's gotten way louder recently. Live music as a whole is pretty popular these days.
Apparently most who have it don't have the classic symptoms: tinnitus or hearing loss picked up at the audiologist's office.
I definitely have this. My friends can usually understand one another shouting in a moderately loud bar; I can’t understand them at all.
I don’t know if it’s technically hearing loss though; I feel like I can hear the noises my friends are making, I just can’t segregate them from the background noise enough to parse the former as speech.
I wear hearing aids for moderate hearing loss. They are optimised for picking out speech from the background sounds and in the open air or rooms that have good acoustics my comprehension can be better than people with notionally better hearing. But some sounds are very effective jammers for hearing aids, notably running water, boiling kettles and, unfortunately, the ambient noises in typical restaurants.
I'm 40. When I was 9 I made friends with a girl who was a CODA, a child of deaf adults. Her parents' TV was the first time I learned captions existed and I was immediately hooked.
Back then you couldn't rewind if you didn't understand and important piece of dialogue, and being able to read while you watch absolutely helped with not missing those moments. My parents didn't like my shows too loud, so captions just made them better.
I got in the habit of turning on CC all the time, except live shows which were usually not worth the effort.
30 years later I still love captions. When my children are sleeping in the next room, I can keep the volume low.
The only downside is that sometimes captions ruin the jokes.
I can relate so much… I don’t have any hearing loss and I’m in my mid 40s, but I no longer watch anything I truly need to pay attention to without captions or subtitles. In fact, I like foreign films because picture and caption is enough for my brain - it’s like I have 2 brain channels and voice is simply a distraction / noise.
I think partly it’s because English is not my native language so caption in the early days helped. I also grew up with radio (no electricity / TV) - so I mostly listened and made up my own pictures. That said, I don’t completely tune out the voice now - it’s useful for tone and inflections but I depend on captions to get the the compete picture.
Even though English is my native language I’ll always opt for subtitles for any movie or show I’m watching. It just helps to not miss anything in the story or scene, and I never even notice them. Reading them becomes completely subconscious.
I started using them for two reasons: at one place we were living, there was a lot of ambient noise which would sometimes periodically drown out the sound which can make you miss key pieces of dialogue. It's also the case that the large amount of dynamic range in many modern shows/films means that for the loud sounds to be at a reasonable volume, some speech gets almost inaudibly quiet so subtitles help with that.
Seconding that. Also some movies/shows have potent actors yet somehow they have terrible delivery^, but the subs are good. In that case I either lower volume (and mentally shut away voices) or outright turn sound off and use the power of imagination^^.
^ also applies to bad dubbing + original audio not available
^^ seems to be an increasingly rare skill these days
This, it’s a minor frustration but everything seems to be going cc by default, which would bump the usage numbers. I wonder if it’s because there’s a measurable engagement increase rather than just user preference? As someone who doesn’t want them I have to keep actively turning them off everywhere
Is it possible that you’re hitting a keyboard shortcut by accident? IIRC YouTube turns on captions if you ever press the “c” key, which I definitely do by accident once in a while.
When doing some other task side by side with consuming a movie with captions, the combination of reading and hearing allow a better comprehension than just one or the other. E.g. side tasks like reading twitter, playing a game, sending a text message. When captions replace the aural mode, this allows enough time to interleave attention (e.g. watching a movie while browsing TikTok on mute).
I sort of doubt there's really a so-called generational gap. I suspect it's just the usual click bait.
I'm sorry I don't have the link but there actually was an online lament by professional sound crews for film/TV that I read a few months back. Sound is apparently compromised by the usual suspects: creative egos, competing priorities, actors' failure to enunciate clearly, and failure to appreciate the technical nature of audio recording. In some cases, the director instructs the sound crew to "capture" the performance after the scene is shot. I've never worked on a set before so I'll leave it at that and say that as an older person, I love CC and use it all the time whether I'm other-tasking or not!
> In a May survey of about 1,200 Americans, 70% of adult Gen Z respondents (ages 18 to 25) and 53% of millennial respondents (up to age 41) said they watch content with text most of the time. That’s compared with slightly more than a third of older respondents, according to the report commissioned by language-teaching app Preply.
Not sure if you want to trust Preply over your clickbait spidey sense. I’ve never heard of them. But FYI.
I grew up with Dutch subs and later English subs on the beeb (you could use teletext for that back in the day – maybe you still can?) in my teens. Then I watched stuff without subs for years just fine; I managed to watch Shameless without subs years ago (which was a bit hard at times; stuff didn't commonly come with subs back then). I turned on subs for The Expanse as the belter dialect was difficult to follow at times, and I've used it regularly ever since. It just makes things a tad easier; no more "wait, what did he say? ah well, whatever" At times it also makes things a bit easier to skip ahead when things aren't all that interesting.
The other trend I notice is not caring much at all about video quality. If there’s social interaction, young people I know are happy with a low bitrate 720p streamed over discord in a small window. Maybe this is an artifact of videos on phones?
Yep, the 12-14" CRT was a fixture in basically every kids bedroom in my childhood and a decade later it was flip top portable dvd players with built in screen. Absolutely garbage picture quality even by the standards of the day, pretty popular because it gave them control and could be shared with friends
I have never seen someone of big-screen means choose to watch a flip top dvd player outside of a portable environment or the kitchen or something.
There are people with 4k TVs viewable from their desk who primarily watch movies in a small Discord window because of the social element.
I’m saying that the demographic corresponding with tech enthusiasts who were excited about DTS, THX, 4k, Blu-Ray, or complained about 240p video on YouTube seem to care much less now.
The market is a bit more streamlined now, so once you check the 4K OLED smart TV surround speaker box there's less to discuss about hardware. With the rise of streaming, the decision is binary: use it or don't. And if you do use it your choice is more limited when it comes to discussing video quality itself.
Tech enthusiasts focused on quality will be found discussing encoding methods on private torrenting groups or emerging tech like e-ink. And the "audiophile" crowd is as vibrant as ever.
I was one of them which is maybe why I want to be as far from the low vertical resolution smeary VHS world as possible when it comes to film/Tv.
Of course, the frustrating limitations of the past become the faux-nostalgic aesthetic of the future (there’s like a Gibson quote for this I think?) I’m all for fake tracking artifacts in a music video.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
I always have them on because I have audio processing issues. Due to ADHD and other problems, my brain can’t process in real time. If I have difficulty understanding something, my brain stops hearing while I attempt to figure out what was said. My auditory memory has no buffering ability.
If I’m reading, I’m both able to understand faster and reread if I need to.
I think part of this is the relatively new diversity of media. People are getting used to subtitles because of foreign languages, and like being able to make out every word. Likewise for shows that have very thick accents; there are a few accents that become utterly undecipherable to me if they're thick enough, especially with the crap speakers built into TV's.
Once I got used to having them on for stuff I needed them for, I tend to leave them on unless I'm watching carefully and it bugs me that they block part of the screen.
Here's another speculation: A lot of movies, etc are mastered for surround sound and the single downmix is pretty terrible. It's actually quite a rabbit hole in the ffmpeg forums. But basically the non-front channels end up contributing too much volume and end up drowning out spoken voice a lot of the time.
I know this happens on BD, but I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix + co are using the same source, and 20-somethings probably don't have large places with surround sound systems.
There are 2 schools of thought. 1 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the people (their age usually, sometimes their wokeness, or there race, or there politics) and 2 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the environment (having internet now, different economics now, ratio of cost of living to income now, etc).
I tend to fall into more #2. It's not that "kids these days" do this. It's that movies and TV these days does this. If a younger person is watching an Seinfeld episode from 30 years ago there is no need for subtitles, if an older person like me is watching a TV show or movie that came out this week It's likely that subtitles would help anyone, of any age, follow the story.
As other comments here have noted. It has to do with the huge dynamic range on audio in most new film/TV. In my view it's not a "kids these days" thing, it's a "content these days" thing. I think that most things are this way. We read about how younger generations aren't as into home buying, nope. Economics have changed, they're not as able.
I vote for subtitles as an over-40. I started literally requiring subtitles due to the presence of children (whom I dearly love) in the house and all the other various household sounds like kettles boiling or dishwashers or washing machines or toilet flushes or whatever the fuck else.
But I can't go back. I've re-watched movies with subtitles and found explanations of things (non-plot critical, but contributory or interesting) that were previously drowned out by mumbling or poor mixing or just not having the volume high enough to vibrate the foundations.
Subtitles explain all!
(I actually find it's harder to multitask if I'm watching a show, because I need to read the screen - this isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's a show I've actually chosen to try to watch).
P.S. 2nd episode of the latest season of Rick and Morty has an ... interesting ... differentiation between the subtitles and spoken words for one specific word starting with c, in which the subtitle was the original, category* 0, word, whilst the obviously replaced word also started with c but is a somewhat more acceptable category* 2 word.
I'm in my 30s and I use subtitles for everything because I don't have the absolute best hearing and I was an anime fan growing up so it never felt weird. Doesn't the Wall Street Journal have better things to be doing other than trying to make a false generational divide over subtitles?
Like seriously, this kind of needless naval gazing from a supposedly serious outlet just frustrates me so much.
Fully agreed - it's not a generational thing at all. They're just continuing the "nolan bad" meme that's been going around in double force since tenet came out. Watch them make another article about subtitles focusing on nolan soon enough, it's coming for sure.
Ironically we could be creating a generational divide over the fact that older people seem to like to categorize and explain away the youth without proper insight into the matter.
I started using subtitles to watch movies with my wife, who used to have trouble understanding American English. I’ve become so used to them that I use them on my own now.
Could be a combination of:
- Degraded hearing
- Degraded audio comprehension, relying on the text
- Realising how much I was missing, just due to bad audio mixing or low quality TV speakers
- Getting over the ‘annoyance’ of having text pop up on screen & being able to view both the subject & text at once.
I watched Top Gun (new) with my dad, he has a sound-bar setup and a HUGE TV. I honestly couldn’t understand 50% of the dialogue, and when I asked him to enable the subtitles he refused and said I should get my hearing checked. So I started asking him “what did they say?”, and to his surprise, half the time he couldn’t actually tell me what the actors were saying. It’s a mix of issues. I think that movie had horrible audio mastering and maybe a lot of media does these days too.
In the 80s and 90s this was an occasionally used process to fix problematic scenes, now it’s used for 70-100% of a full, particularly high budget.
The actors sit in an anechoic sound recording room and whisper their lines a few cm from a microphone
They’ll do this even if the camera POV is meters away from the character in a busy environment, where the any human would be talking loudly straining to be heard over the background noise.
ADR makes all dialog recording sound like soft pillow talk.
Add incessant overproduced over compressed music score to the mix, a 5.1 to stereo downmix, and you have an incomprehensible movie.
At first I assumed this was just going to be the writer being out of touch. Of course young people use subtitles. They're distracting and frequently ugly, but modern movies/shows have awful audio mixing, forcing you to turn it down, and mumbling/whispering dialogue. And we frequently watch things in environments where we don't want sound or headphones, e.g. TikTok or whatever in public or at night (and also, since these platforms start playback automatically, you'd otherwise miss something). And of course, we watch things that aren't in English.
But then I read all the accounts of people who can't explain why they turn on subtitles, aside from "I just like it" or "I'm just used to it", and I just... I feel confused, angry. I AM the out of touch old person.
It's vitally important to have a 2 second delay with closed captions. Without the delay you may start reading the dialog in advance, this degrades your enjoyment of the movie. Better to listen, and have the subtitles there as a backup 2 seconds later for anything you miss.
Tangential: I’ve found subtitles to be a very useful tool for learning a language. In order of challenge, I’ll at least watch everything in English with Spanish subtitles, then Spanish SAP with English subtitles, then Spanish SAP with Spanish subtitles, then just in Spanish.
I discovered something amusing about this. When I was living in Spain 20 years ago, my Spanish (ex-) wife and I bought a DVD collection of Friends. At first we'd watch it in English with Spanish captions so my ex could get the subtleties, then as her English improved, we'd watch it with English captions which helped with words she was unfamiliar with. Then we started doing the reverse, Spanish overdub with English captions so I could practice.
But when it came time for me to try Spanish overdub with Spanish captions, it turned out that the scripts had obviously been translated by two different companies, and what was said could be wildly different from what was written. Hysterically bad differences - to the point of completely changing the sentiment of something that was said. Mostly it was with insults or expressions, which could have various ways of translating, but sometimes they changed entire plot points, especially when a character's relationship with another was ambiguous. An aunt could be just a friend, or a sister-in-law could be a co-worker. It was so confusing, after a little while I just turned off the captions completely. Since I had seen all the shows at least once, it wasn't a problem.
A fun thing to do on Disney Plus is change between the various Spanish regions to see how they overdub characters. I did this for Guardians of the Galaxy and it's fantastic how Rocket would go from being a Mexicano gangster to a Spanish thug.
I see that a lot on Netflix, I like to watch with the captions on but not for the foreign stuff with English dubbing. Squid Games is one that comes to mind where I'd have to turn the captions off because the mismatch between the english audio and captions was too distracting for me.
I've been using it with Netflix and YouTube to study a couple of languages, with really good results.
The gist is that it adds dual-language subtitles, translation/dictionary tools, precise subtitle-based playback controls etc to the player UI.
It can also colour-code every word based on its frequency in the language and on whether I already know it or am actively trying to learn it. This makes it very easy to identify common words I don't yet know and make them the focus of my vocab learning.
The main shortcomings (for me) are:
1. Word translations are sometimes weird (but then I can get to a real dictionary with two clicks).
2. It does not understand grammar (e.g. separable prefixes in German).
3. Different forms of the same word are sometimes treated as unrelated words for the purposes of colour-coding (e.g. the infinitive and Präteritum for some verbs).
4. Word frequency highlighting (e.g. highlight the 1500 most common words) is configured globally rather than per-language.
5. TurtleTube sounds cool but I find the contents a bit meh and the levelling inconsistent. I have found a couple of great YouTube channels through it though.
6. Local file playback requires an SRT file and can only play the default audio track. The former is no biggie but the latter completely breaks the feature for me (since the default audio track is usually English and not the language I'm learning).
7. Plex integration would make it even more useful.
Or Baltimore slang, like when I tried to watch The Wire back in the day.
It was actually the show that I first turned on subs for and I usually keep them on now out of habit. I found the thick local accents hard to understand which is rare for me, and I didn't know if words were just slang or I'd misheard. Throw in a bunch of unique names to the mix too (I can rarely remember someone's name anyway after an introduction until I read it) as well as a few mumbley characters. Great show but I needed help.
In our house captions went on the same day our first baby came home from the hospital and haven't been turned off since. Captions let parents of small children enjoy entertainment without bothering kids who may be sensitive to noise.
Speaking of captioning, why the expletive deleted do I have to turn on captions every single time I enter a meeting in Google Meet, Teams, Zoom (which makes it really hard to get captions), Slack Huddle (which I’m not sure if it has captions or not now because the last time I was in one I couldn’t find a setting to turn it on), BlueJeans, etc.? I’m signed into every single one of these and using a dedicated app in many cases and yet every single one forgets that I always need captions. In contrast, all the video streaming services that I use don’t require me to turn on captioning after the first time.
I believe this is because these settings are linked to the host in some of these apps. For instance, captions can be blocked by the host on Zoom. There is no such aspect to consider when streaming video for a single user.
How do I know this? I once organized a session on accessibility and it turned out a deaf guest had the captions blocked by our IT guy who didn't understand what was going on...
I’m also a big fan of watching with CC (sometimes it can be genuinely hard to pick up what someone says and it can be key dialogue). However anything in the comedy genre is the exception since CC ruin the timing of the jokes.
I absolutely get the worry (and reality) of jokes being ruined. In the end I bite the bullet because of the same reason I want CC's on all the time: I just miss or mishear things when I don't, sometimes to the point I don't understand the joke.
That said, sometimes subs (from places like OpenSubtitles) are laughable bad in that they don't know the "in-universe" words for a show (comedy or otherwise) and do best-guesses/phonetic spellings of things they aren't sure of which is it's own issue.
I have never understood surround sound: just mix the audio in mono and make sure that every word can be cleanly heard by my father who is 85 and uses a hearing aid. As an unintended side effect your movie will be more widely appreciated by every other demographic.
The premise of surround sound is that it is extremely important to know the direction that the sound is coming from -- but when you sacrifice the audience's understanding of what is happening in the movie to achieve this sound directionality, then you've completely lost the plot.
> just mix the audio in mono and make sure that every word can be cleanly heard by my father who is 85 and uses a hearing aid
Unfortunately, this would trash the theatrical mix. Dialogue would roar from the center channel with every other channel operating at a whisper.
The right solution is to produce two mixes: a stereo home mix and a surround theatrical one. Make the stereo home mix the default. Any *-phile is going to make sure the movie is using the right mix beforehand anyway.
There is zero need for surround sound -- the plot is infinitely more important than knowing which direction a sound came from. Surround sound is completely and utterly a waste in every respect.
There is zero need for color -- the plot is infinitely more important than knowing the hair color of its actors. Color is completely and utterly a waste in every respect.
There is zero need for widescreen --
There is zero need for high definition --
There is zero need for stereo audio --
There is zero need for digital home video --
The plot is infinitely more important than any of the aforementioned gimmicks.
All we need is B&W+mono on RCA SelectaVision CEDs playing on 9" round CRT TVs. If the mains for the TV has a ground wire, then it's too new!
I do prefer Koyaanisqatsi to any movie that thinks it has a plot but really just has a bunch of surround sound and vibrant colors signifying nothing. Koyaanisqatsi is great for putting on a large flatscreen in the backround while you're playing a board game with friends.
My favorite movie of all time is City of God -- tons of plot, compelling characters, realistic situation, great music, a totally immersive experience. I consider it the greatest movie ever made in spite of the fact that you have to watch it with subtitles unless you speak Portuguese.
I seem to be missing the gene that most people my age have that requires them to have 5.1 or 7.1 sound, and I consider myself to be somewhat of a movie connoisseur. Actually, maybe that's why.
I can feel immersed in a movie without needing the sound to 'prove' it. The picture is still that little window in front of me, why does the sound need to be all over?
Happy to be educated as to all the reasons I'm missing out on 'the real experience' though.
I use captions too, even though I can (usually) hear the TV. There are many reasons for this:
- I think it makes it somewhat easier to understand than audio only, for one thing.
- If you do not know what they said, because you have missed it, possibly due to other noise in the room (telephone, other people speaking, etc).
- Sometimes the speech of the movie is difficult due to e.g. you do not understand the accent of their speech, etc.
- If you want to reduce the volume or mute to not bother other people.
- If you do not know how to spell someone's name, or an obscure word. (Unfortunately, sometimes the caption writers do not know, and do it wrong.)
- In some shows, they will mention the name of a piece of music; this can help in case you do not know. (They do not always do this, though.)
However, there are often problems with them. For example, sometimes the caption writers do not know what they are saying, either. The caption writers should try to make an effort to find out what they are saying (and the proper spelling), by whatever means are appropriate, e.g. referring to the script, asking the people there, watching the show twice to make corrections if necessary, etc. (This might not always be possible, e.g. live shows that are broadcast as they are being filmed rather than being edited later, but they should do it when possible.)
I also sometimes see worthless captions, e.g. "male announcer reads words on screen". I think that is worthless, and should be omitted.
(If you can specify "hidden captions", then it may be useful to encode the text which is already part of the picture, as a hidden caption and then allow it to be displayed in a caption scrollback menu if the TV system you are using has such a menu (I do not know of any that do have it, but it is something that I would think would be good to have).)
A good feature of captions is that you can turn on/off, and can customize fonts/opacity on some receivers (I personally prefer translucent captions). (DVD video only allows on/off (and selection by language, sometimes), although it should also be possible to allow adjusting colours/opacity (since DVD subtitles are encoded as pictures using indexed colours), although font changing will not be possible.)
I think they are not very useful even for someone who cannot hear them, though. The picture should be obvious what it is meaning and the captions might cover up the words in the picture (I have seen that happen before).
In my mid forties and gave up on trying to understand the audio a couple years ago.
Recently bought a sound bar which has helped quite a bit with the audio quality - apparently it's one with emphasis on centre channel so should have better voice output? - but we're still rocking the subtitles.
The big downside is I tend to read them much faster. So I'm often laughing at jokes several seconds before my partner as apparently I read faster than they do!
I used CC for the same reason as many. Speech audio is of poor quality, back in the old days in my CRT television it wasn't a problem. Speech was clear. Now for whatever reason it's too loud for comfort if I want to hear the words. My tv has speech clarity options but it is marginal at best.
I'm using a Roku streambar with a couple of wireless speakers. Still poo audio. And I'm not convinced a system of higher cost and quality would solve it.
It's just hard to hear the dialog in some movies, and I'm not hard of hearing. I think it was always like this, but you'd crank up the volume to overcome it. Now that I often watch on a laptop, that's not an option.
Also there was the diner robbery scene in "Pulp Fiction." My brother said, "Let's turn on subtitles despite the fact that this guy is speaking English. I can't deal with the accent."
This article focuses on accessibility in the USA, but living in Asia, for many years pretty much every major show and YouTuber across most Asian countries I’ve been to always has bright colorful subtitles (and onomatopoeia reactions too). On one hand I wonder why that became the dominant motif here far earlier than in Western markets; on the other I wonder if the this prompted the Western phenomenon from the article.
Millennials are Gen Y. Gen Z are the ones just now becoming adults. I think you meant Gen X. And yes, Boomers just love to complain about every subsequent generation. I, for one, will not miss them when they're gone.
It's not just boomers complaining, if you look at the ages of the journalists behind the articles, you'll generally find it's younger journalists, approaching 30s, maybe 40s, effectively taking the crap they got and passing it down the line.
In this article's case, a quick google search shows the journalist is in their mid 20s.
> They’re now a must-have for plenty of people without hearing loss, too, helping them better understand the audio or allowing them to multitask.
Aha! I have some answers here. Kind of, anyway.
This is something that people older than 20-something do, too, and have done their whole lives.
They're likely to do it if they grew up with the following often being true:
1) The TV is on.
2) At least some people are actually trying to watch it (it's not just "background noise")
3) The living space is fairly compact, such that if people are making noise in common areas there are no other common areas to escape to (not with a TV, anyway).
4) Bedrooms maybe don't have a TV or they aren't equipped with the same stuff as the "good" (living room, probably) TV.
5) House chaotic, lots of people around doing various things, many of these people (adults and kids alike) talking much louder than what some of us may be used to.
6) TV often in use in this same way during large gatherings (family and friends over, holidays, whatever)
In other words—drum roll—a Fussellian "Prole" (lower class) house.
But, why is this showing up in stats now? I suspect two causes:
1) "Prole" kids growing up and getting more streaming services than their parents had, plus using them more.
2) Anime has gone very, very mainstream among "the youths", so (as some others have noted) this may be expanding the set of people for whom captions seem normal beyond the ones I'm otherwise describing here.
Source: I know people for whom having the captioning on was normal when they were growing up, and they still do it because it's what they're used to, and I was in their houses when we were kids and saw why they gained that habit/preference. They're older than their 20s.
[EDIT] Others mentioned modern video sources coming with audio mixes that suck ass on most home entertainment systems—just flat-out incompatible with the reality of how most people watch TV/movies, where they want the highs (KABOOM! BLAM, BLAM!) to be much lower than the highs in a modern movie theater, plus are very likely watching on a crappy "sound bar", if not built-in stereo speakers. That could be a 3) on my list of causes, with 2 and 3 both being things other than the main phenomenon I'm describing int he rest of the post. This one would basically be the fault of movie and TV productions themselves, who aren't serving most home viewers well with the audio mixes they're providing.
Speaking of shameful, anti-human behaviour related to closed captions, I have some pet peeves that would be trivial to fix, but major production companies simply refuse to implement.
(There are ZERO excuses for all of the below. None. It's just text on a screen, displayed by dedicated apps on Smart TVs, fully equipped with CPUs and GPUs! Netflix staff especially that come across this thread: You should be ashamed. Shame. Shame. Shame.)
1. English subtitles != English subtitles for the hearing impaired. I don't want "Breathes loudly" and "Bang!" over action scenes. I live in a household where everyone's second language is English, and if I turn the subtitles on for them, the extra sound-effects subtitles drive me crazy.
2. Can't have multiple subtitles for mixed-language households. My partner prefers subtitles in her language, but then if there's a scene in an English-language movie with a short foreign-language segment in it, I have to pause, switch to English for the hearing impaired (see point #1), and then pause and switch back when the scene is over. I should be able to select any two or even three subtitle languages, such as "auto english + japanese", or whatever.
3. Can't have subtitles in some languages. Netflix in particular loves to waste $500K annual total comp on data scientists who analyse their market segments to select the "top 5" languages in each market region. Don't speak one of those languages? Tough titties, no subtitles for you! It's not even a matter of copyright or distribution rights. They do this for their own productions too! They do it because some idiot at Netflix thought too many options was "hard to navigate". You know what's even harder? Trying to understand a movie when it doesn't have subtitles matching your language!!
4. Eye-searing HDR subtitles. Netflix again. On my Sony OLED TV the subtitles use the HDR max-brightness white. They illuminate my entire room and look like someone is trying to burn the text into my retinas with high-powered flashlights. This cannot be adjusted... for some languages. For like, no reason. English: can be fixed! French: yes. Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Romanian, Traditional Chinese, and Thai: BURN YOUR HEATHEN EYEBALLS! See: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100267
As a closed caption user, I partially use it to try and improve my vocabulary. On the fly, it’s very easy to hear a word like “hoi polloi” and not know how to spell it. In that case, that’s a missed learning opportunity.
Also, closed captions make watching TV on mute seamless and that’s fantastic if you like to intersperse your viewing with conversation.
So, television captions were terrible until the dawn of streaming. One could argue that DVDs (circa late '90s) were OK, but the captions were cartoonish, pixelated nightmare captions that nobody wanted on their TV, just as bad as the typical "closed captioning" of live network television.
Decent captioning really didn't occur until the age of Blu-ray and streaming, around 15 years ago; 1080p captions that were inobtrusive and in lockstep with the dialogue at hand. The 20-somethings would have grown up with perfectly acceptable, inobtrusive captions, and thus have no issue keeping them on-screen to avoid confusion when keeping the television volume at a reasonable volume.
I'm no 20-something, and we keep Blu-ray and streaming captions on in our household. This is a new thing in the past 10-15 years, and it has to do entirely with the quality of captioning and nothing having to do with anything else.
Closed Captions are more available now through settings, great audio <> text models, exposure of people to foreign language films and shows, etc. The 20-somethings are exposed to it more and adopt to using them. Youtube's closed captions are both a noticeable button and a "c" keyboard shortcut.
There is also the reverse - I don't want hearing loss so I refuse to jack up the volume. Which in turn makes things harder to hear so captions help
Plus yeah they're a little lagged so helpful for multitasking if you miss a fraction of a sentence. Lets you recover from the gap without rewinding the vid
In my experience it's not just 20-somethings. I've sometimes started watching something with CC accidentally turned on, and then realized it made the clip/movie/whatever easier to understand. My parents use it as well, and it has nothing to do with hearing loss.
Because why not? It's far more often than not that for whatever reasons the dialog sounds are just terrible. They don't care about the audience hearing the dialog(see Tenet). A show which guarantees that you can hear every line clearly is the outlier now.
My Mom and Dad are avid TV watchers, and now my octogenarian father does have significant hearing loss. We've been using subtitles for decades, probably since the 90s when I started to play with the settings on our newly-purchased TV sets. We enjoy it, especially because we watch a lot of British TV, and although we are quite accustomed to many varied accents from around the Empire, subtitling definitely helps with the interesting turns of phrase, the barely-intelligible asides, and comprehension in general.
I also love watching Spanish subtitles to learn the language better. However, I do tend to disable them on YouTube, because they distract and detract from the viewing experience when they are completely unnecessary.
Something like this occurred to me. I can watch movies and videos for entertainment and casual attention, but I follow and learn video terribly. I need words. I do OK with presentations and lectures where there's a slide deck. If it's solely talking, I don't keep up well. Captions make it possible for me to engage my better cognitive abilities.
What I see happening is that the much-ballyhooed "pivot to video", though more hype than reality, is a thing – I see more stuff as just video, nothing written.
Pretty sure practice also improves that. Even lip reading is possible with enough practice. And for sure accents understanding improve pretty fast if you bend your mind to it. The danger there for me is if I am trying to get a new accent, I might start copying the accent or word choices a bit and embarrass myself. Humans are amazingly flexible in what we can do without thought, after a bit of practice.
35 now, but I’ve been using CC for as long as I can remember. Maybe since I was 7 or 8 years old.
For me it was always that I could never really make out the dialogue much of the time, and with live tv there was no rewinding so CC gave me a second chance if I missed something.
Idk what you can do with streaming services, but old-school VLC users can dodge „whisper and explosions“ by turning dynamic compression to the max.
In theory one can use systemwide in-line effects with something like AU Lab to the same end, but that's kind of a pain at least on Mac, mostly because virtual audio devices like ‘Blackhole’ tend to not work. Perhaps the paid ‘Loopback’ does work, dunno.
Also funny how USians complain en masse about volume too loud (with the trademark ‘shaking the house’), when with a simple pair of desktop speakers it would be physically impossible to have that problem. Man buys big speakers, surprised to discover that they provide loud sound.
I land in a bit of a weird spot on this topic. Personally, I loathe using subtitles or CC because switching between trying to watch what's happening in the scene and quickly reading the text at the bottom of the screen over and over throughout a show or film leaves me feeling like I can't relax and enjoy it, even when I can hear what's happening just fine.
On the other hand, unfortunately, as many others have said - modern audio mixes almost force subtitles to be turned on, making it a 'necessary evil'.
40yo here. I turned the subtitles on the help my little kids learn words as they watch. Now I love them. I’ll watch old movies - ones I’ve seen dozens of times - with the subs on and pick up things I never heard before.
Open captions refer to captions that are part of the video image (sometimes called burned in). In movies they might be used to pass setting information for a scene like time or location.
Closed captions are encoded separately and their display is elective.
Slightly off topic, but one thing that annoys me is most movies made in the last 15 years that end up showing smartphones and text messages or the actors typing on their phone and most of the time the text is too small, or the camera cuts too fast and I end up pausing/rewinding to check it again.
Very few movies actually put an overlay and show such conversations using legible text. If the messages are important for the plot, it would be great if the filmmakers took care of this aspect.
1) Dialogue is mixed too quietly these days
2) Thin LCD TVs have bad speakers, and I haven’t gotten around to researching soundboard yet
3) My kids talk through everything and I can’t hear over them
Modern sound engineers seem to expect that I own several thousand dollars of high-end sound equipment capable of reproducing the full dynamic range they've sculpted. It's super annoying.
Quiet talking so I have to turn it up and then a whole orchestra moves the fuck in and I have to scramble to lower the volume. No music please. The way they are handling it ruing the immersion.
Unless I’m missing something major, the article does not answer its headline question in any way. It just presents a bunch of examples but does not come to any conclusion.
Par for the course with question titles. Betteridge's law of headlines says: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."[1]. That rule, however, doesn't apply to "why?" questions because they are not yes/no constructions.
Nevertheless, there's an aspect of Betteridge's law at work here. Running a story that doesn't really have anything to it yet needing to meet production targets – in the old days, column-inches to fill, today, space to place ads. Reporters are required to produce a certain number of articles of a certain length per week. An honest headline would just say, in effect, that after looking into it, the reporter didn't find an answer. An honest headline might be OK in newsprint. Online, the drive for "engagement" requires a headline that will lure readers in, and thus sell ads.
Reiterating the many "sound mixes are terrible, subtitles are vital" comments but also adding that my ears basically can't process more than one sound at a time - if there's external noise (someone commenting on the TV, the feral children outside, a party in the park across the square, washing machine / dishwasher, etc.), it'll interfere with my understanding of the dialogue. Hence subtitles.
I have it on all the time due to the volume range going from soft to insanely loud to soft and it’s annoying… when the kids are sleeping this is also a show stopper
I religiously have CCs turned on for everything I watch. Open Subtitles[0] is my daily staple. I sometimes miss little phrases/words in a movie, and if I miss them, the whole plot could be ruined for me and I wouldn't know what was going on. I pay attention to every word.
I turned them on 15 years ago when I was trying to get better at understanding English accents and never turned them off. I don't use subs on Youtube for example, but I hate watching a movie or TV show without, and my movie download pipeline automatically fetches them for me. I tried to wean myself off, but I'd rather keep them on and never miss a line because of terrible mixing or noisy living room.
Interestingly nobody in France needs subtitles. But when I watch english movies and shows I do need them. I was surprised when I realized that Americans used subtitles to watch American shows as well. It reminded me of China.
I still remember watching Tenet and feeling like it was just another movie I couldn’t understand because I didn’t have subtitles. And then I realized that even native speakers couldn’t understand it.
For the language learners: There is an extension for Chrome that lets you display captions in two languages simultaneously. You can also lookup every word in the dictionary with a single click.
It used to be called "Language Learning with Netflix" but they rebranded it and I can't remember the new name right now. I'm not affiliated in any way, just a happy user.
1. I watch foreign films so that’s how I got started
2. Then I put on CC so I could watch things at 2-3x and still keep up
3. I’ve got young kids and I can’t watch shows at times with the volume up if everyone else is sleeping
4. I got it as a tip for kids shows too so children can see the words they are hearing. Helps them reinforce their vocabulary. So it’s always on if the kids are watching tv.
Also probably because reading something is much faster than listening it. It takes just a second to visually read a sentence that is on the screen, instead of waiting for 2-3 seconds for the actor to actually say it out loud. Probably because we humans recognize words and word groups instead of letters (as how that Oxford study a few years back found out), and that's much faster.
I'd be curious to know how many speed up the videos versus cc it. I know I prefer most videos at faster speeds unless there is a lot of music in it. But cc'ing it with faster speeds is difficult.
As a side note, I think the Rings of Power would be way more enjoyable if I could just 2x it. Kind of hoping someone here will say "You can do that, just ..."
I think there will be a trend of content being made specifically with a faster playback speed in mind. I watch my 10 year old son who habitually watches videos at 2x and I can't believe that its not the same for many other kids.
Anyone else here super annoyed by the closed captions rendering on netflix. They basically don't have a usable font / color choice, and the captions are randomly ahead or behind the audio all the time. I have a netflix account, but I just don't bother watching foreign subtitled content on it anymore.
Of course my solution is pirating content I already pay for.
My personal view on this is that it’s because the soundtracks are so poorly modulated for volume that either the tv is way too loud when the action scenes/musical score happens and if you turn it down, you can’t hear when people are talking so people put their tv on a normal volume and turn cc on so they can read the 15% of the dialogue that is hard to track
One reason neither the article nor the comments here are mentioning: lots of videos are now designed to be Content in an Endless Feed, and are made with the intent of capturing your interest even if you're sitting there with your phone muted. Text floating on the screen increases the chance of making you stop scrolling and rack up that precious view count.
I started doing this when watching Game of Thrones. Had a hard time with some of the accents so periodically would rewind and turn on captions. After a while, I just left them on and literally never turned them off, all these years later. Especially now that I have a toddler I like that I can have the volume low and not miss anything.
I did this when I was 20-something too. A while ago now, as I am 45.
UK TV back then had subtitles on teletext page 888. (And maybe it still does? I don't watch TV any more.) My flatmates and I would always switch this on when watching TV, as it meant we could talk, while still being able to keep track of what was going on in the programme.
I just get tired of shows with poor audio normalization and having the "what the heck did they just say" moments. Or one of my kids decides to randomly scream at the top of their lungs. And there is the whole blowing my ears out with rap music in my car because I thought it was cool growing up. I'm getting old.
Isn't this just because dumbass video sites are making it bloody impossible to scrub the video to a specific time point in order to increase "engagement"?
If the audio is recorded on a potato (aka: standard Hollywood audio editing nowadays) and you can't move backward to try again, you need subtitles to not lose context.
I watch nearly everything I can at somewhere between 1.8-2.5x speed, this means subs are largely required to maintain comprehension. I prefer watching this way as I can cover far greater amounts of content (or devote less time on the otherhand) just as enjoyably as I could watching at regular speed.
I'm from a country that has always subtitled movies so this doesn't even sound weird to me. (I watch foreign movies in a language that i know with subtitles in the original language though.)
But in the case of tiktok and netflix, it's probably because the content isn't worth your full attention...
This!! Most speakers/soundbars suck, and if you don't have a center channel in your sound system, voices will wash out with the background noise/music since the speaker (as in person speaking) is usually the focus of the shot and mostly audible in the center channel.
There's supposed to be sound engineers on every show/movie to make sure it sounds good but the gap lies between your audio system and the reference systems they use. A good analogy is the infamous Game of Thrones battle that was too dark. They edited that episode on reference grade monitors where you could see what was happening, but the average lower end tv and viewing environment couldn't translate the same black levels and details that the editor's had seen when they worked those scenes (they were also intemtionally edited to look dark and chaotic on the reference grade monitors*, which added to the problem)
That being said I still use cc with a lot of content. I think it would be less prevalent though if it were not for the gaping holes in most audio setups.
This is one (of many to be fair) reasons I quite dislike the theater. Others being "free" food/drinks, my dog, my comfortable couch, pausing, and my bathroom. I've wondered before if they could give people special glasses (a la 3D glasses) that would show the "hidden" subtitles at the bottom. But even that wouldn't get me back in a theater.
AI caption sucks, not closed to the real captions.
Is a 38 years old who watched anime since at least 20 years ago. There were people who delicates into translating new anime episodes with captions every week. The best teams have it done within 3 hours after the episode is aired in Japan.
Not mentioned in the article is the type of content watched. Concluding the audio mixing disaster discussed above, one theory would be: Young people watch fast Marvel actions with explosions and terrible audio mixing. Old people watch slow crime mysteries with no background music.
ESL here. Not so much for TikTok videos but I turn on subtitles when movie dialog is in some English dialect that is different from the standard North American one. I could not figure out 40% of what is happening in “No country for old men”. British period dramas are sometimes hard too.
If you find dialog is difficult to understand you might try adding a sonic maximizer (for example Behringer Sonic Ultramizer or BBE Maximizer), a sonic exciter (Behringer Sonic Exciter or Aphex Aural Exciter), and maybe a little compression and plate reverb.
My kids watch everything with closed captioning on (ages 10 and 7)! I think now I know why, and it's my fault: I used to always tell them to turn the dang volume down. I guess then they couldn't hear the dialogue, so they figured out how to turn on closed captioning.
If you have audio on, you can't so easily ignore ads. It's intrusive.
Also, for those who think viewers are morally obligated to watch ads, my experience has been that if I don't click the "Skip Ad" button, I will keep getting more ads and never get to the feature!
My wife loves having subtitles on for all the reasons listed in the article. I, on the other hand, prefer to just listen. I've found since watching with subtitles my ability to lip read and understand tricky accents has no dived.
You know, maybe this is why I like YouTube better than movies and episodic "TV" content. YouTube videos have to have good audio, or they never survive the algorithm (I'm sure you can find counterexamples).
Wsj knows their audience. They're the folks who want to frame everything in terms of all the weird and entitled things that 20-somethings do. They're sure to get their clicks with that title.
does anyone else get intensely annoyed when a) the closed captions misspell a word (or use the wrong word entirely) or b) when the captions don't match the spoken words (often on translated materials)?
Does YouTube have auto captioning that works? Can I just use lynx or something to browse technical documentation on it instead of watching a slooowww PowerPoint presentation?
YouTube autogenerated subtitles are very hit or miss. They work pretty well for the 90% case, but the 10% they fail on are usually the interesting parts
being on the wrong side of 40 the CC was to me always available. I always hated them.
So now I hate it double. Either can't understand dialog, or need obnoxious un-immersive subtitles turned on.
So most of the time watching I have to have make an effort to my eyes stay away from the bottom part of the screen, only to "check the cheat sheet" when they start mumbling or ruin the movie with terrible mixing.
It's not the viewer. It's the content.
It seems like most content now. Tenet is just the parody of it, ironically parodying before most of the phenomenon had bloomed.
I watch Netflix with captions on and the sound low or muted, so I can multitask reading other things. It's easier to follow parallel streams of text than voice and text at the same time.
I was a bartender for a long time and I just got so used to having the closed captioning on so I could watch tv that I cannot engage myself in any video media any more without closed captioning on
I've done this for a long time, I first turned the captions on out of novelty when we got a TV that had a CC decoder built in. After a while I found it useful and left it on most of the time
Pushing 50, and don't really watch tv any more, but in my 20s and 30s I would regularly watch tv with captions on and sound off. Made it a lot easier to tune out ads.
The caption used has a bit of FOMO(fear of missing out) psychology involved because sometimes the actors mumble a bit or talk a little too fast during action scenes
Not only subs, but I wonder what the uptake on describe audio is. Disney does a particulalry good job, and I treat many shows as radio drama for background now.
Because they're producing for surround sound systems you can't be bothered to deploy or operate optimally. 5.1, 7.1, etc. The "center" channel, in particular, is where the bulk of dialog is rendered and if your system can't synthesize that channel extremely well on the loud speakers you have then dialog suffers. Also, if you lack a surround sound system -- say you're using a pair of stereo speakers -- all the audio is mixed to these few loud speakers and the spatial segregation that we two-eared beings use to isolate sound is lost. There is no fix for that; the work was produced with the assumption of surround sound and driving all of that audio through a pair of closely spaced flat screen speakers/sound bar/whatever screws everything up spatially and dynamic range wise.
The audio is tailored for the minority of people that invest in "home theater" while most people, even those that can afford to, don't care enough about teevee to build such a system. In theory one should expect media to support non-optimal cases, and provision for exactly that exists, but this costs more production money to do correctly and so it gets neglected in various ways. Obviously they don't neglect the demanding consumer with his costly home theater setup because they'll get pilloried, so they half ass the other side.
TL;DR people are turning on closed captions (i.e. subtitles of the same language as the video) to increase their focus.
I've been doing something slightly similar in reading Fawlty Towers scripts [1] on my phone while watching the episodes, and it yielded about 20% more jokes (ones I'd missed in the past, even from 10+ viewings of each episode!).
For example, Basil mumbling this brilliancy in his initial exchange with Mr Hutchinson:
For how popular this is, streaming providers and major video websites like youtube sure phone it in with subtitle placement. They could do basic shit, like force the subtitles to be within the black bars as much as possible with some basic algorithmic programming, or just spend one person day laying out the subtitles better or just approach an iota of the effort that most fansub groups do.
Note: if you want to read the article, copy the title, paste it into Google search, and click on the first result. When you do that, the whole article will be displayed.
If you just click on the link above, WSJ will display a paywall.
This is due to one of Google's requirements that if they index your page, it needs to be fully accessible when clicked.
I just want to leave a comment to the people who said they turn it on for movies because they can't hear the audio over other movie sounds.
If you can't hear the audio clearly the director didn't want to you to hear the audio correctly. Some scenes especially with thick accents the point is to be ambiguous, you having captions on is basically a cheat code to get more context than the director wanted you to have.
Same goes for when someone speaks a foreign language, if the CC is not baked into the video layer I assume the director wanted me to be in the shoes of someone who cant understand a conversion and guess the characters intent.
It's like reading a novel with pictures on every page, you don't need that much context, it robs your brains ability to infer with missing context.
