Can’t Hear What Actors Are Saying on TV? It’s Not You | Hacker News Reader

Can’t Hear What Actors Are Saying on TV? It’s Not You

wsj.com

149 pointslxm181 comments

I personally prefer to watch most things with subtitles. I'm usually extremely conscious of how much noise I'm making in the house, and I rarely ever want to watch something at cinema volumes. Good quality subtitles rarely ever feel intrusive, but I really wish there was a better distinction between subtitling and closed-captioning.

Most modern streaming platforms seem to only offer one accessibility-focused option that combines both, and I find it hugely irritating to see text on-screen like "[SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS]" or "[CROWD MURMURING]".

FWIW I've gotten hooked on using headphones, even when I'm watching something on my TV. Even cheap BT headphones will give clearer dialog than a TV's crappy built-in speaker, without having to worry about making the walls vibrate.

I spent serious money on a sound bar a while back. I used it twice, sent it back, and I've been using the BT headphones ever since. One of these days, I'm going to have company over and I won't know what to do. Make the walls vibrate, I guess.

The LG C1 TV (and possibly any LG TV?) has a "Clear Voice" sound mode which make watching things using the TV speakers much better.

I'd rather have close captioning than nothing at all.

There's many Amazon Prime movies I've quit because of a sentence I could not hear very well and they didn't come with close captioning. I hate that so much these days.

My pirate setup at least comes with auto-synced subs for everything I watch.

How do you auto sync the subtitles?

I use https://github.com/morpheus65535/bazarr which comes with https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync.

Is there a way to merge two sub files?

Yeah there's tools that can do it, it's really not too difficult technically because the subtitle format that's most popular is crazy simple.

I've used https://subtitletools.com/merge-subtitles-online before. There's command-line ones, but I can't remember which I've used.

Thanks!

I also watch most things with subs but I find it frequently leads to a worse experience. I end up reading things too early (e.g. a punchline) for one.

I've noticed this too, it's not as annoying as the audio description thing, but definitely takes the wind out of a joke at times to have it spelled out on screen before it's delivered. It would be cool if the people making the subtitles could be a little more artful about it, and maybe introduce a slight delay for the punchline of jokes and big reveals.

Interestingly this isn't a problem for me. I usually watch with subtitles because I 'hear" better with them on, but I'm not consciously reading them. I assume some part of my brain is cross referencing what I hear with the words on the screen as I hear it.

My girlfriend however has a tendency to laugh or react to a line before it's delivered which is REALLY annoying.

> I also watch most things with subs but I find it frequently leads to a worse experience. I end up reading things too early (e.g. a punchline) for one.

I find it frees up the mind. A quick glance at subtitles then your mind is free to analyze other details of the scene. Soundtrack, lighting, mannerisms, costumes, background objects, etc..

I agree it's pretty bad for comedy though.

Whatever subset of ADD I have makes that impossible. I am physically compelled to pay attention to pretty much only the subtitles.

I have no ADD whatsoever, but similarly find it difficult not to focus entirely on subtitles to the exclusion of all else.

I wish I could use subtitles (especially on shows with a heavy accent...Peripheral was a pain sometimes) but I catch myself focussing on them too much and missing visual content. I tend to watch them even when I don't need them. It's quite annoying.

Oh man, I could not agree more about the audio description subtitles. It was particularly annoying when I was watching Cabinet of Curiosities. Something about having the musical cues and weird sound effects described in text on the screen completely takes their effectiveness away. Instead of subtly increasing the tension of a spooky scene with a gentle crescendo or something it's all [DISCORDANT MUSICAL NOTE PLAYS] or [SUBTLE SQUELCHING SOUND] or [HAUNTING VOICES SING]. It's like the horror equivalent of holding up a "CROWD LAUGHS" sign or something.

I get why the accessibility version is nice, but I just want dialogue - I do not need the show's sound described and it actively works against the show.

And it is fun when the movie has some foreign language dialogue with subtitles but the subtitles are covered by “[SPEAKS MANDARIN]”.

Even better when it says "[SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE]"

I've always taken that as the characters not knowing which language is being spoken. If it's been established I expect to see [SPEAKING MANDARIN] or some such.

They don't subtitle it because the audience isn't expected to know what's being said.

But when it's subtitled in the movie itself (which is then covered by the TV's closed-captioning system), the audience is clearly expected to get to know what's being said.

I love those additional details and always watch with subtitles. Often enough the subtitles provide additional information about something left otherwise ambiguous or undefined. Names of characters are a common one, but in horror/mystery you can narrow down the plot or supernatural mechanics.

I don't remember specific moments from Cabinet of Curiosities but 1899 definitely had some subtitle details that narrowed the plot possibilities.

On that note, I've noticed that the subtitles at Netflix and Amazon Prime for German dubs are almost always wrong. Like, they're often so bad that the words are completely different and they say something completely different with a different meaning from what's in the dub. What's up with that?

Stranger Things exploited this to good effect, though, with descriptive captions like "tentacles wetly squelching" and the like. See https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/stranger-things-seaso....

You'd think removing any lines that are [*] would be easy, it's weird there's no option to do so in the players.

Being Dutch, it's most things be default show Dutch subtitles and I'm used to them. Watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix, however, I had to turn them off. They were too distracting, and the content of the subtitles was just too different from what I heard. I forgot if I switched to English closed captions or just turned them off entirely. I'd never before had subtitles be that distracting.

Frequently, though, subtitles reveal sounds that are impossible to hear from the sound. There might be some inaudible background muttering that I don't even know it's there, but the subtitles tell me what it is, and I'm left wondering where it comes from. Do people watching without subtitles just miss that stuff? Are we supposed to watch everything with high quality headphones to pick up these details?

I'm not fluent in Japanese but I know enough to be super distracted and annoyed by the English subtitles. I haven't played the game so maybe I'm missing out on the invented slang but it's jarring when they say the English word "install" in Japanese (insutooru) but then the subtitles read "chromed".

"chrome" is cyberpunk slang for body mods. I assume they meant they'd some body mod installed.

These slang terms aren't specific for that franchise either, they are common in all things cyberpunk.

The slang is English / Western language specific really. Words like choom, nova, and preem only make sense in a multicultural setting like American English. Don’t really remember Japanese equivalents to these terms from either the anime or the game, and the Korean absolutely does not have the extra slang either which takes a lot away from the experience IMO. It’s not like Japanese and Korean speakers are incapable of figuring out made up words so it’s a very conscious, deliberate difference to me. I did notice that German dialogue in the game did include some of the English slang which makes this more puzzling for myself. I’d bet that the Polish dialogue includes the in-world slang or even makes its own slang but I’m not familiar enough with Polish to understand when / if that happens in the dialogue.

"[Chittering]" is my irritation.

> I find it hugely irritating to see text on-screen like "[SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS]" or "[CROWD MURMURING]"

It's even more frustrating to know you could get rid of that easily with a simple regexp. There are way too many things that could be great with an extra line of code if only they were programmable.

Yet another way that pirated content is superior. You can edit subtitles quite easily in most formats, and the common format of subtitles is pretty trivial to parse.

There was another article, also from WSJ, discussing some of this phenomenon: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-all-these-20-somethings-...

I was relieved when I read that original article because I really did think it was just me. It really annoys me because when CC is on, my eyes tend to focus on them even if I don't need it for a particular sentence or scene. I feel that takes away from enjoying the film since I'm so laser focused on the CC. I've tried to ease my focus up a bit, but I just can't seem to do it; if CC is on, that's where my eyes go.

I do wonder if a new UI/UX for CC could resolve some of that issue. Maybe something like using AI/ML to dynamically place the CC closest to the person speaking so I don't need to direct my eyes at the bottom of the screen and can have both the text and the actor's face in my field of vision?

Anyways, just some random thoughts from someone who is increasingly annoyed by not being able to make out what the hell people are saying on screen anymore!

I also find CC distracting, but...

> Maybe something like using AI/ML to dynamically place the CC closest to the person speaking so I don't need to direct my eyes at the bottom of the screen and can have both the text and the actor's face in my field of vision?

I think this would be even worse, at least for me. Now not only are there distracting words on the screen, but they're also jumping around erratically!

I wish there was an option to delay closed captions so that they appear after the line is spoken, rather than before. That way, I'd be hearing the line before reading it, rather than the other way around, so it doesn't ruin the delivery. It would also make it easier to ignore captions when I don't need them, because I could just glance to the bottom of the screen after I miss a word rather than having to preemptively read everything just in case.

If I’ve got to use CC for video the point of the video is nil. Whole experience ruined. I probably don’t represent everybody but still enough.

So how do you watch international/foreign movies?

I guess they watch them dubbed?

I find that even worse than cc.

sure but the question was about how they handled things, not what was the true and correct way to handle things.

If the acting is any good, you can pick up a surprising amount of the plot without understanding any of the dialogue.

I'm the exact opposite - if a TV show/film doesn't have subtitles available then I won't even watch it. I don't enjoy going to the cinema for the same reason.

My understanding is that Cinemas often have what essentially are individual teleprompter reflection screens that you can use, and have CC projected onto them. It's an old feature, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I don't know how well the feature or a replacement survived the digital transition, but legally speaking there is probably an equivalent.

I think you might be right that it would be worse.

Delayed CC is definitely an interesting idea!

>Delayed CC is definitely an interesting idea!

You can set a video player to delay subs - it's absolutely awful. My spouse prefers having the subs in almost all cases - helps mumbling (talking through their asses as it being called) profoundly.

Not sure what you use to watch, but VLC has the option to delay the timing of subs.

And from someone who is used to watch with subs for his entire life, you get used to it and won't notice them anymore at some point in time.

The new Cyberpunk 2077 show on Netflix does something like this. For some characters who are speaking in a different language, the regular subtitles are replaced with text placed “in” the scene just like how it appears in the game. (When outside of a conversation, if an NPC speaks in a different language, the text is displayed near their heads like a speech bubble without the bubble)

I had no trouble with this in the game, but in the show it was very distracting. Probably because in the game I could change where I looked to focus on the text of I wanted to.

> I wish there was an option to delay closed captions so that they appear after the line is spoken, rather than before.

That’s what I do with VLC. Just press J (or K I never remember) a few times. Around 1s it’s exactly what you describe. You can then occasionally glance after the delivery if you missed a word.

"Now not only are there distracting words on the screen, but they're also jumping around erratically!"

The actors are jumping around erratically and we track them fine. Even if the text always appears in the same place, it still comes at unpredictable times (temporally erratic). And even normal cc moves around within an area anyway. We track all of those randomizations just fine, without thought or effort.

I don't know until someone tries it, but I can imagine it becoming perfectly natural and someone used to that would find the idea of having to look away to the text maddening. It wouldn't (well, might not) be perceived as jumping around but the opposite, placed already where you are looking.

Even when the text does have to jump from where you are looking, because a new speaker spoke, even that might be better than today, because it draws your attention to the new speaker or i terruption. I often actually get confused by normal cc because all speakers are rendered identically and it's not always clear who said what, and sometimes not even clear that a given string of words is from 3 different speakers. By the time you puzzle it out the whole scene is gone and you're now about to miss some new dialog that's about to disappear before you've started interpreting it.

It would hinge a lot on what they said about getting it right. Surely you could make this idea terrible. But surely it's at least possible to imagine a version that isn't terrible. Different fonts, sizes, colors, placement, borders, etc could all combine to make something far more natural to ingest that what we have now.

Like a better version of comic book speech bubbles. No not literally exactly like them. But some aspects of them, such as how they don't all look identical. Thoughts look different than speech. Yelling looks different than speaking. Emotion and intent are conveyed as well, etc.

I would be happy if the CC could be placed in the black bars when watching a 2.39:1 movie on a 16:9 TV. Always seems to be on top of the picture.

mpv does this (must enable manually for SSA subs). In VLC you can also add the black bars to the video with a filter so the subtitles draw on top of them, but some renderers won't like the aspect ratio change.

An annoyance is that deliberately absolutely-positioned subtitles (e.g., translating onscreen text) are shifted too -- more ideally the feature would only apply to subs without inline margins. Similarly, the time delay from in the sibling thread is undesirable for subs that are timed exactly to what's onscreen, though that's much less programmatically identifiable.

Where I live and watch TV (the Nordics), captions for letter-boxed cinematic wide-screen movies are usually in the lower black bar. AFAICR.

I watch everything with CC (few shows I watch have explosions, I need it more for some British accents and Americans mumbling), I never get distracted, but the combination of audio and text combines, I might miss what was said, or not read the CC because I’m looking at my phone, but after the scene is over I could not tell you if I used CC or audio, it becomes one.

Not sure if it’s related, but I also read a lot in general.

It's also a matter of just getting used to it over a (probably fairly long) period of time. I've been watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles since I was 14 years old, so it's just normal for me to have subs/CC.

(Fun fact: This only works for me if the subs are in English. If they are in my native language, German, I get really distracted.)

> (Fun fact: This only works for me if the subs are in English. If they are in my native language, German, I get really distracted.)

Hah, wouldn’t be able to tell you, the only thing we watched in German in years has been Dark, and there we had English subs so my wife (not a native) would have an easier time ;)

It happens super rarely for me as well, mainly the one time a year I watch a movie at a movie theater because they tend to use German subs for original screenings.

When I watch Japanese content with subtitles, my eyes are drawn to the subtitles even though I don't need them, and then I'm doubly distracted when the subtitles are wrong or misleading.

My eyes are also drawn to Japanese subtitles of Hollywood movies when I go the theatre in Japan, and that leads to the same problem. It's a curse.

The only subtitles that I've found useful, albeit still being a distraction most of the time, are the ones in the language that is spoken.

My Japanese is unfortunately not at a level where I could watch Japanese content without subtitles, so I actually need them. But I do agree that it is distracting if they are wrong or translated in a weird way. I'm actually holding off on watching Cyberpunk Edgerunners because I've heard that Netflix's subs are very liberal (or maybe they are dubtitles? not sure).

The worst thing is if the the spoken language and the subtitle language are the same, but the subs are incomplete or don't fully represent what is spoken.

The biggest issue I have with CC is that it ruins comedy. You can literally see the punchline coming, but don’t really get the effect because you miss the timing, and all the vocal subtlety.

Hand timed subs could still preserve the punchline. The problem is many subs are obviously OCR scanned from text.

But the pirate scene has people dedicated to writing subs, and are often credited in them. There is no reason Hollywood could pay someone to curate their subtitles.

That still doesn’t solve things like extended syllables, or rhyming (for words like read that have multiple pronunciations)

>There is no reason Hollywood could pay someone to curate their subtitles.

There is because passion will always create a higher quality product than pay.

Subtitles in the pirate scene are good because the person subbing it cares about the source material.

Same reason some commercial versions of classic or rare movies are terrible quality, same reason Seinfeld on Netflix is cropped to 16:9 rather than 4:3.

Yet people in the piracy scene for no pay will take the visuals from a laserdisc version, missing scenes from a dvd, sound and subs from a Blu-ray, fix the subs and then combine it all into a perfect version of a movie. People who actually care put the effort in And the scene polices trash, 16:9 Seinfeld/Simpsons would get deleted from any good private tracker but Netflix/Disney execs are fine with it.

What about a CC app, you tell app I am watching Film A App shows just you CC for A, benefit you can go back and see previous CC in A without stopping film and annoying other watchers.

Sort CC by character etc.

Play audio for that particular CC at volume you set, so you pop ear bud in to rehear what exactly was said just before the big fight scene.

Search text for CC for film A, get timestamp for that scene, go to that scene (obviously that functionality you can find other places but might be useful to have inside the CC app)

Same for me with this article. I thought it was me and maybe my hearing was just bad from all those years of concerts. I live in an apartment that does not have super thick walls so my choices are (a) subtitles or (b) be a bad neighbor and blast the volume or this article seems to suggest that adding more channels would help understand while still keeping the volume low?

If we're going to use AI why not just use it to normalise the volumes and boost the voice volume. I'm pretty sure voice separation is a more or less solved problem.

Free product idea for someone with more time than me.

Some TVs now come with modes that attempt to do this.

Can’t hear what the actors are saying, and can’t see them either because interior scenes are all now lit like a haunted house at midnight.

I’ve felt this watching game of thrones. I’ve always wondered though, aren’t tvs with hdr supposed to fix this? What should one look for?

No tech can fix incompetence. That being said some say it was just a budget cut(cgi is cheaper if you can't seen anything)

Go on https://www.rtings.com/ and buy any decent OLED TV. Solves this problem entirely.

HDR can help if you’re watching HDR content, which most new content is starting to be.

Streaming? Bluray? The video bitrate can easily be 5+ times higher on bluray

In my case it was streaming - I would think 95% of viewers stream.

HDR helps a bit, but in some cases it makes it worse, because the HDR grade has been done by a colourist on a $15k mastering monitor in a pitch dark room, and assumes that anyone watching at home is doing likewise. The dynamic range crush of the SDR version actually results in a brighter (technically worse, but brighter) picture overall, and is sometimes slightly easier to see than the HDR on a cheaper HDR set with limited contrast or in non-ideal viewing environments (like the average living room with lights on or a window).

To be blunt, they are bad grading jobs when delivering a product to a general audience and there's not much getting around that. At least for HOTD it could be reasonably argued it's most egregious episode was simply one where there were significant filming issues at the time due to weather and they had to make the most of it in post (not very successfully, but starting from a bad base), but if we look at the Winterfell scenes from GOT for example that was just someone completely forgetting about average users.

HDR is the problem. If you change it to SDR it looks great! Unfortunately on my ipad I have to turn it to “low power mode” and that forces HDR off. In Apple’s infinite wisdom they do not have a setting to just turn off HDR.

But why? Why is HDR worse?

I really don't get why they make this stuff so impossible to watch. Some TVs do have different visual modes ("games", "theatre", "movies"), but nobody ever switches those modes when using the TV for something else. And I only check that mode when things are too dark, and it always turns out it's already on the brightest setting.

Can we just agree that unless the TV is set to "theatre" mode, everything needs to be visible in normal daylight?

> Can we just agree that unless the TV is set to "theatre" mode, everything needs to be visible in normal daylight?

That would require:

1. agreeing on what a "normal" amount of daylight is

2. agreeing on the distribution of that daylight (one source vs. many)

3. agreeing on a permissible range of angles the TV must be relative to the light source(s)

4. standardizing which type of ambient light rejection film each TV must use

5. standardizing an average and peak brightness expected from all TV sets

6. standardizing a minimum real (not "dynamic") contrast ratio expected from all TV sets

7. requiring that each TV set sold is calibrated to Rec.709 for SDR and Rec.2020 for HDR

This list is laughable when you examine just how bad a typical "Best Buy™ Black Friday Special!" TV is, even after it has been put through the ringer by a professional ISF calibrator.

And yet this list is approached in the Computer Monitor scene, where boasting about proper color calibration is a selling point, even in a gaming monitor.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/3/23386058/house-of-the-dra...

I think it’s because they assume you’re watching a night with lights turned off?

People watch videos in so different light conditions, places and devices nowadays. Phones, tablets, computer monitors, TVs. Public transport, car (even the driver!) park, restaurant, couch, bed, restroom.

The darkness is especially stupid because most video compression just destroys and ruins everything even remotely unlit.

> Rather than mixing for mono (one-speaker) and stereo (two-speaker) audio—which makes audio sound clearer on basic TVs—sound engineers today often design for a higher number of speakers and then scale audio down for less-capable systems.

Does anyone know if moving to a "3.0" audio setup is sufficient to fix this? That'd be left+right+center channel. Several speakers brands, if I'm not mistaken, do name the center channel as "vocal" or something like that.

Do people with a 3.0 speakers setup or more also have this problem of voices behind harder to discern than they used to?

Or is this just affecting people watching movie using whatever stereo setup?

I'm asking because I've got an "audiophile" stereo setup but don't really want to go to the trouble of moving to an home cinema amp + many speakers.

yes it is. But it can also be solved by simply getting a quality amp that will remaster it for you.

The problem with your setup (if its build for stereo) is that you will have to replace the amp

How would adding a 3rd speaker change anything? The broadcasted signal is still a 2-channel audio, right? Is the amp just going to transform it to M/S and use mid channel for the center speaker?

Well actually what we mean is that some content is not in stereo and therefore you have a missing component.

You can always set your system to dolby sorround even though you dont have the speakers for it, but what will happen is that you will miss a Channel.

So lets say you are watching 5.1 content over 2 speakers and your amp does not break it down for you, you will be hearing the content of the people speaking weirdly low and all effects REALLY loud.

This is because your tv is trying to send you audio on a speaker you are laking and thus it swallows it. This makes the voices of characters sound further away and can be freaky :D

I see, thank for explaining. Yes if you have the option to receive more than 2 channels then I can see how that would give some flexibility. I didn’t realize that TV channels offer 5.1 (I don’t own a TV set).

Saying that if you are receiving a stereo signal - which I expect is the default option - then adding another speaker or changing the amp won’t make any difference, right? Or is there some amp processing technique that improves even a stereo signal?

Yes! but the "problem" here is that some services will send you sorround sound by default trying to get a 5.1 signal to speakers that dont exists.

Its quite a weird feeling if you figure out you did not connect the center speaker after a month, only to realize that "how you could have lived with yourself remains a mistery" :D

I don't know how a sibling responder claims having a 3.0 setup fixes the problem for them but it definitely does not improve anything for me.

I wonder if we are discussing different broadcasting options. If the incoming signal is stereo then adding a 3rd speaker shouldn’t make any difference. If the incoming signal is 5.1 then you either have to downmix or to add more speakers for a better experience. Just using 2 speakers for 5.1 might result in a noticeable signal loss.

I bought a Vizio 3.0 soundbar to see if it would help, and it did a little. But really helped was downmixing to stereo (using Airflow). That was a major improvement.

I have a Marantz receiver (same company as Denon) which feeds a 9.1 system with Dolby Atmos. I still have all the problems this article says, including visual issues with dark scenes in a dedicated, dark video room. The system has been tuned and retuned and nothing can be done about the terrible inputs from these misguided filmmakers, IMO. It is similar to the modern music mixing style of compressing the heck out of everything and minimimizing most dynamic range.

One thing that helped a lot was to add 6dB gain to the center channel. Sometimes that is enough, since the voice is usually put on that channel. I became an expert in navigating the menus to change that one volume, then discovered the Android app that makes it easier.

Unfortunately, I'd say the answer is no.

I have a quality 5.1 setup and I have all the problems everyone is talking about.

The mode I usually use for dialog intelligibility is Mch Stereo, which is basically stereo but using four speakers (the front and sides). I think it's only better because the side speakers are closer to your ears than the fronts.

Also, just having it in 5.1 mode and turning up the center channel 6dB or more works as well, and is probably the best sounding solution because you get the surround audio sounding correct.

But I find it annoying to do that because then I want to listen to music and I have to go through the rigmarole of turning the center channel down again.

I think you would get some value out of a 3.0 or 3.1 setup though, because then you could raise the center channel volume, which is where the majority of the dialog audio is.

Riddle me this, why does stereo mixing done for foreign language versions sound much better? I suspect some combination of you know, actually bothering to mix down to 2.0 rather than 5.1 and hoping for a miracle, or audio mixing overall simply being done in a way that emphasises dialogue over the music score or background sounds.

For foreign versions, dialogues will be dubbed after filming and recorded in a studio so it can sound much clearer.

I like to watch movies in their native tongue, with English subtitles. Then, I attempt to learn the language by comparing the two.

After watching a hundred hours of Norwegian shows, I now know that "tahk" means "thanks".

After ~70 hours of watching Finnish shows, the only word I can recognize is "ok".

Hints:

Moi, hei = Hi, hello

Moido, heido = Bye

Kiitos, kiitti = Thanks

HTH!

Dutch people tell me they learned English by reading the Dutch subtitles on American shows (because the Dutch market isn't big enough to justify dubbing).

But I know enough German to know that the English subtitles only rarely match the German. So how do people learn English this way?

It's easier to learn English with English subtitles, and stop often to Google some new word or idiom whenever you encounter one. I went from average in English comprehension to fluent in ebonics of the Baltimore area by watching The Wire.

I've been watching "Power". It's difficult to understand the street slang, but with subtitles to help I've been learning:

gat = gun

strapped = armed

five-oh = cop

dime = call on phone

Dutch is very similar to English. It is like the illegitimate child of English and German :)

I believe that dutch was invented when interdimensional dragon interlopers tried to learn "human language" but got an assortment of English, German, and French books without knowing they were different languages.

Illegitimate parent, more likely. English is clearly the bastard child here, with its Celtic, French and Norwegian influences.

I also once heard that Dutch uses older roots of many words than German, because for many words where Dutch uses an 'i' (like "ieder"), German uses a 'j' ("jeder"), which is a more recent letter.

Well there are no parents or children in extant languages of course, only closest common ancestors.

Dutch is much more in the middle between German and English while those two are at the edges of west Germanic languages, hence the joke

Dutch is to German like Danish is to Swedish, in the sense that it's easier to understand more from reading Dutch if you're a German-speaker, or Danish if you're a Swedish-speaker, than hearing them spoken. The pronunciation of Dutch and Danish feels like "almost intelligible, except it sounds so guttural, as if they have their mouths full of gravel and porridge". The written text is the same thing as the spoken, except much clearer, because you can see the letters where you can't hear the sounds.

I picked up a lot of French from watching their movies but picked up almost nothing from watching Spanish movies. Wonder if it is the opposite for some other people.

IIRC French voc's overlap with English is between 30 and 40%.

I really miss the 'loudness compression' that was present on many DVD playback applications. We have a family routine of watching a movie together each friday night. I sit next to the stereo, as the 'grumpy dad', and twist the volume control up and down, depending on whether there is character dialogue, or things are exploding.

If I turn it up enough for character dialogue to be audible, the 'exploding cars' parts are deafening. And if the exploding cars are tolerable, character dialogue is inaudible.

DVD players used to have a hack typically called 'dynamic range compression' or similar. If I had a professional movie theater, the wild dynamic range would be cool. But in your basement without hifi dampening on your walls, it doesn't behave well :-/

Apple TV has a feature that does this. It’s why I bought an Apple TV after having problems using a Roku in my small apartment.

I've got two TVs, and a soundbar on one and all 3 have an audio normalisation mods, fwiw.

Denon (and other?) Receivers have a feature called Audyssey which has a "night mode" which does exactly this. I have not used it, just the room EQ correction mode.

It's called "Dynamic Volume" on the Denons.

I do enjoy that there's a big overlap between people who complain that all the dynamic range has gone out of music (the "loudness wars") and people who complain that there's too much dynamic range in TV and movie audio :)

No dig at you, I'm exactly the same. It makes some sense - outside of a conductor introducing the 1812 overture I can't think of a musical scenario that needs to cover everything from a whisper to an actual explosion - but it's still amusing.

Can't hear dialogue? What about not being able to see anything that's going on. Yes I'm looking at you Weiss and Benioff for that travesty that is season 8 of Game of Thrones

This is a big one for me. I'm not sure if I'm just getting older, but half the stuff on TV looks too dark to me. I'll just turn off movies or shows within a few minutes if everything seems too dark and gritty. My ears already are working harder, leave my eyes alone.

There seems to be an effect where the more visual information something is capable of, the more critical we become of its content.

Go back and watch a VHS on a CRT TV, or even a DVD version of something that has a Blu-ray or HD version available to stream. It's abysmal, and yet we somehow managed to love them.

After struggling to create single a receiver profile for modern streaming content to cover the range from "everyone's mouth is full of socks" to "pure sonic agony", I do agree that audio mixing has become something of a lost art.

> There seems to be an effect where the more visual information something is capable of, the more critical we become of its content.

Maybe because when the creators stop being constrained by the medium, they get "creative"?

> Go back and watch a VHS on a CRT TV, or even a DVD version of something that has a Blu-ray or HD version available to stream. It's abysmal, and yet we somehow managed to love them.

Good or bad, at least the full range of colors was used. For example, I've watched tons of Star Trek shows of home-recorded VHS tapes on CRT TV, and I'd still prefer that to watching new Star Trek live action installments in 1080p streaming on a high-quality computer screen, simply because in the VHS/CRT/old shows case, things had colors, and I could actually see what's going on.

It seems to me like its a similar problem -- the video is shot/edited/approved on high-quality monitors and tvs that can reproduce the full dynamic range of the video, but then compressed down to SDR which kills the contrast.

Well, if we're talking about "House of the Dragon", there were a few episodes where they attempted day-for-night [1] production and did a horrible, horrible job of it. This particular f*ckup has little to do with monitor capability or dynamic range, and everything to do with poor judgment through multiple stages of the production pipeline. I honestly don't know how such a high budget production ends up with these shots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_for_night

I'm not talking about any specific show -- this problem applies to a lot of shows. I think what you're getting at is a little bit of a different problem; Specifically, the 'we can fix it in post' mentality.

Even in HDR on OLED some shows still look like they're filmed in a closed dark warehouse at night.

Yeah, there are definitely ones that just don't have great lighting, in any dynamic range. But that's a problem as old as film, whereas this trend towards having everything be lit like it's at the bottom of a well seems to be newer.

Fortunately I missed that one, but I’m watching Better Call Saul now and all the law offices are lit like a steam tunnel at midnight during a lunar eclipse.

i am watching 1899 on netflix and it drives me mad how dark every scene is.

All old movies and series had lighted silhouettes in the night or dark scenes. Everyone knew that it means its dark but you could see what is actually going on. Its a movie not a webcam capture. We already fill in the gaps when it comes to the story, we can manage 'unnaturally' lit dark scenes

From the perspective of ESL speakers this is really bad. Most people become fluent in English by watching TV. If you need subtitles then your listening comprehension will suffer greatly. I grew up on Friends, Star Trek and Simpsons etc, all with very clear speech.

Maybe we need some software to enhance speech and make it more legible. Not just increase its relative volume but also reduce mumbling. We shouldn't have to, but maybe with an automatic solution streaming services could more easily add the option...

Many video playback devices or apps have some way on their remote to do a skip backwards of N seconds, with N typically somewhere from 10 to 30 seconds.

What I would really love would be a way to do that and at the same time turn on subtitles (or captions if subtitles aren't available in your language) for N+10 seconds. A separate button for this would be ideal, but a setting that makes the regular skip backward also do the subtitle thing would be fine too.

Alternatively, I'd be OK instead with a "toggle subtitles" button that toggles between subtitles off and subtitles on (with the language being whatever one was last used).

My Roku TV automatically turns on closed captioning when you use the replay button.

This was demonstrated as a feature of the AppleTV … on stage no less… however I’ve never been able to get it to work so I’m not entirely sure what’s up with it beyond the original demo that I can’t find a video link and time stamp for. Pretty sure it was the days before apple put the keynotes onto YouTube but I’m sure someone with better memory may know the exact presentation and which part to skip to.

It's a Siri feature, press the mic button and say "What did [he/she] say" and it'll rewind a bit, turn subtitles on, and then turn them off right around the point where you asked. I've found it to be a very well implemented feature. If I use it more than three times or so I'll just tell it to "turn subtitles on" for the duration.

Edit: s_weber below beat me to the punch here, I had my draft up too long :)

The Apple TV does this (reversing and turning on subtitles temporarily) if you ask Siri something along the lines of „What did they say?“.

Of course a useful feature is walled off behind a stupid interface method.

Doesn't sound all that stupid to me -- for those people who are into that whole voice interface thing to begin with.

What I'd agree is stupid is if that's the only interface method to get at that feature.

(So it probably is, right?)

So basically studios focus on flashy garbage rather than a good story and acting? What actors say should be the most important part of movie experience, not an afterthought. Same with concerts, drown out mediocre lyrics/singing with beats. Or bars, why even try to understand your date as a person if only short term physical hook up matters?

Somewhat related, I learned a long time ago that each broadcast station (in the USA) mix their audio in a different way during NFL and college football games. I noticed Fox sports mixes crowd noise at a higher level—-drowning out the announcers; my opinion. The other day I walked into our living room and heard the TV (the the Ohio State vs. Michigan game) and I immediately said to my wife “oh, so the game is on Fox?” She said “nope, it’s ABC…oh, you’re right! That’s why it sounds weird.”

There are a few budget-related factors here - remote vs. on-site production, number and type of field-level mics.

One soccer league I watch broadcasts matches in three places: streaming-only, cable-only, and OTA-only.

Streams get the smallest budget ($10k) and have the worst field-level audio, just one mic usually positioned away from the loudest fans and near the benches, which means the coaches and bench players are loud and clear but everything else is muddled. A 20k-attendance sold-out stadium in full-volume cheer sounds hollow. They're also remotely produced with off-site commentators, so the director and audio mixer (who only has the one field mic anyway) don't even know if the crowd is _supposed_ to be loud to the viewing audience.

The OTA-only matches, at 10x or more budget, get mics surrounding the field and behind the goals, mics on field-level cameras, and depending on the venue additional mics in or pointed at the most raucous section. They're also produced on-site with on-site commentators, who modulate their voices along with the crowd noise. More resources and more on-site attention result in a much more dynamic and engaging mix, the director has options to switch to a field-level camera and raise its volume, and so on.

I have Closed Captions / Subtitles on all the time, I cannot watch any movie or show made in the last 10-15 years without it (I would hear 20% - 90% of the dialogue otherwise).

Don't find CC distracting any more, and as an added bonus I am enjoying a lot more foreign content because I'm using CC anyway so why not.

> foreign content because I'm using CC anyway so why not

and then you get to experience the phenomenon where you forget that a movie was foreign at all because you knew what everyone was saying just as well as if they were speaking in english

CC is a transcription. They are not translations.

Closed captioning can provide translations.

If it was specific to transcription historically, it no longer is today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning

Buy a Denon or similar receiver with Audussey dynamic volume. This adds a small amount of lag but is amazing for keeping dialogue clear and loud without having a sound like an explosion wake everyone up in the house.

It’s a good deal better than other attempts to normalize audio.

Be warned that Denon AVRs are a buggy mess that partially break every other update.

I wish I had known that because I really hate my X2400h for it.

The Audyssey auto calibration does make my speakers sound even better but everything else about this AVR is a drag.

My Denon has been great, and I'm very fussy. There's no bugs.

It even has a telnet control protocol. It's great.

One thing I really like about it is you can factory reset it to the firmware it came with originally. So I don't get that nervousness when doing updates that it'll be broken or they'll change something that I don't like.

My LG TV, on the other hand, has been blocked from accessing WAN on my router so it doesn't get updates.

I usually need subtitles to understand what is going on these days due to the mixing. This along with TV shows in HDR being too dark I am going to need to go back to reading books.

Nolan's Tenet is a great example of this.

If someone told me it was on purpose in this one just to be more confusing I would believe it.

Some part are purposely unclear, some video on the matter[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIgznB0-ICo

I watched it twice and hated it. Being confused by the unintelligible dialog is a big part of why I hated it.

I often prefer to listen with a small speaker (sony x12/13 is great) close to my ear. To the sound sounds more natural because we used to hearing conversations in real life at about 130cm. Your tv has to have bluetooth though to make this work or get a tiny computer (Asus makes some good ones) and run Linux Mint on it. Yeah I'm aware this would be beyond a lot of people but for some it can be done.

Still though I wish there was a button I could press to squeeze the dynamic range of loud movie sound tracks. Often when the explosion sound comes in the whole house shakes. Hard can it be?

srsly.

how about they take small fraction of the often ridiculous out-of-place special effects budget and put it towards giving us good audio.

like, just because you can do special effects doesn’t mean you need to jam them in literally everywhere to wow us..

i want to be able to watch a movie with my living room theater and have the audio match my system or in my bedroom and have it be clear on basic ass tv speakers.

take some of that stupid special effects budget and give us proper audio tracks.

sorry this is one of my pet peeves. there is no reason in 2022 that audio needs to be this muffled. they can do both theater quality and basic but they dont—drives me up the wall.

I don't think that the special effect budget has a lot to spare. Often its size is due to cutting on-set costs and already relies on overworking the artists.

I have a 3.1 setup, and I am worried I'll get hearing damage from the explosions at any volume level that will also let me hear clear dialogue.

For all of my BD/DVD movies, I encoded a second audio track with dynamic range compression, but that doesn't help me with streaming.

My receiver (Denon) doesn't offer DRC, instead it has something it claims is "better" called "dynamic volume" that just means I can't hear any dialog for about ten seconds after an explosion, because it's so slow to respond.

What strikes me most as a former professional in film audio postproduction are the national differences on intelligibility standards.

German speaking audiences (where I worked) are used to extreme standards of clarity, to the point where a studio recording quality is what you have to go for. Most German commercial shows and dubs would work just fine as audiobooks. Meanwhile in the US originals there is a litany of mumbling, half words, half sentences spit out, chewed down and all, not only would you have to force actors to do this over here, but everybody would also experience it as bad craft.

Of course this comes from somewhere: recording clean sound on set where the microphones cannot be in plain view is challenging and overdubbing always produces a clean sound if tou don't put in work to change this. Few directors even in Germany are going to make a compromise on set if the sound guy complains (trust me, I have been there and I tried). The German speaking part of Europe as the biggest dubbing market of Europe employs 52% of all voice actors according to wikipedia. But in the end if an audience and a nation of professionals is used to do it a certain way, thay way might persist. US production companies keep getting away with this, so why invest more and risk for getting a sound that doesn't match a audience's expectations?

I use subtitles on everything these days, but I also found a big improvement in hearing/understanding from buying a cheap pair of studio monitors. For speech you sort of want the flat response so the middle range where most speech is at doesn't get washed out. It sounded different at first but after a week I stopped noticing it and now pick up more sound effects and noises in the mix of media that for years I never noticed before. They are often used as the basis for audio mixing and what I want to hear is what the guy mixing the audio is hearing, so why not? Im not trying to replicate a rock concert in my house with earbleeding volumes and the "extra" bass and treble responce used to sell consumer audio equipment and speakers is counterproductive for clarity. Ill be integrating studio monitors into my audio setups for the rest of my life after buying my first cheap pair.

The best part is when you increase the volume because you can't hear the mumbling, and then some sound blasts off and kills your ears and your neighbor's. That can be gun shots, explosions, or worse, the commercial break.

That "up the volume for commercials" is the worst. Not only commercial TV channels do that, but YouTube too.

I'm in the fortunate position of knowing another language than english. While I'd much prefer watching with the original audio, sometimes I watch the dub because it's usually much clearer.

I had this problem massively with the English-speaking parts of 1899

Yep, same here. What a delightful TV show but understanding the actors speach which admittedly is gutteral at times was nearly impossible. It basically enforced CC for me at times.

Yes, the sound mixing in 1899 seemed uniquely bad, which is unfortunate because it’s an otherwise good and interesting sci-fi show.

I watched few episodes in English, then visited my parents who watched dubbed version of it. I usually dislike dub as its usually an 'audiobook' movie. But to m y surprise it was so much better.

Also its so dark (pun intended) just use stronger lighting.

Watching Andor recently this was in full effect: I was riding the volume control since even with a 3.1 setup, actors were still too quiet and explosions way too loud.

Cassian himself mumbles a lot, in my opinion. I watched the whole series with subtitles. How about that show, by the way. Amazing.

I will say it everywhere: Andor is the best Star Wars.

I wish all media came with a "proper nouns only" caption mode. All these fantasy and sci-fi shows can make picking up names and places very difficult.

I agree and disagree. In some cases subtitles reveal information you shouldn't have yet like the identity of characters yet to reveal themselves.

Sometimes I feel like the people that work on movies hate movies (or other people) with a passion.

According to the article movies are often mixed for high-end sound standards, like Dolby Atmos. As the owner of high-end audio stuff, I'd love to have the Dolby Atmos. Yet the streaming services all seem to be limited to 5.1. The HBO app, which I run on a playstation is, wait for it,..., 2.0!

If those high-end audio stream are all available, why aren't they streamed? Or let me rephrase that, where can I get them?

HBO Max supports Atmos on some devices. Don't remember which off the top of my head.

As do Netflix, Apple and Amazon.

I have subtitles on more often than not. My biggest peeve is when the subtitles spoil the name of a speaker we don't know yet /facepalm

It's amazing when you watch some science or engineering video in black and white from the 1950's, how crisply understandable the narrator is.

I feel like a lot of this is due to surround sound audio or lack there of combined with your tv or soundbar set to the wrong setting.

Maybe helps explains why a lot of plotlines nowadays are just watching two people send each other text messages

Studios are designing audio for the top 10% percent of audio systems... solution: go buy a soundbar.

What soundbar do you use? All the ones I've read about say that they make sound worse; it was specifically about quality sound bars like Sonos IIRC

I guess it was a joke comment - most soundbars are not even close to an imax alike sound system

Will a soundbar help me understand accents? That is my main problem. Almost every show I watch has heavy accents for flair (fantasy) or because it was cheaper to do with non-US actors (action). I either have to watch with subs and miss the beautiful shots because I'm reading or rewind a couple times per episode when I can't get something.

Off the top of my head - Northman, just watched it today, great movie, definitely stuff I didn't understand. House of the Dragon. Peripheral. It really feels like every show now.

Only a soundbar with a dedicated center channel, that can be individually adjusted.

So not 2.1. 3.1 possibly.

Soundbar solves this. We have Bose TV Speaker and with its 'voice option' it's amazing. I can hear dialogue no matter the show, movie, doc.

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I was on my phone, but thanks anyway.

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