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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

This is the best way I've ever heard it described

In addition, I've read that young people are going deaf due to ear buds.

Tbf, that's been the case for a hundred years since headphones were invented. I doubt it's changed much.

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.

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