Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone | Hacker News Reader

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

nytimes.com

29 pointsedward37 comments

Being one of those weirdos still using a proper receiver and 5.1 speaker setup on our main TV, but a stereo pair on our other TV, it's incredible the difference the lack of a discrete center-channel can make. It seems like Netflix et. al are more interested in pushing a 5.1 Dolby mix to everyone instead of detecting whether or not they have hardware capable of playing it properly. My more unpopular opinion is that they (the streaming services) should all be pushing a stereo track by default and have a/the surround mix as a selectable option, because it's become obvious that down-mixing on user's devices doesn't work as intended.

For what it's worth, we keep subtitles on for the stereo TV nearly permanently, while the main TV rarely is a problem - nothing a small boost to the center channel can't fix anyways.

I'm nearly entirely convinced that this is just us millennials and generations adjacent getting old and not wanting to admit it. My friends can't hear the tv, my family can't, but I can and my hearing is very average. I've commented more in depth on a discussion of this phenomenon.

Are millennials now considered old? I have subs all the time on for convenience. It just makes it easier to do other things

It depends on whether you think mid-40's is getting older?

It's definitely when some people's hearing starts to get a bit flakey.

It's not just the hearing capability, I have better than average hearing for someone who is 30 but I still struggle with movies without subtitles since English is not my primary language.

Its hard to understand what someone is saying even if I can hear the sounds, when it just sounds like mumbled gibberish.

Add on top rather arbitrary restrictions on subtitles based on region (on Netflix I cannot use English subs because of where I live), which is even more infuriating.

> I'm nearly entirely convinced that this is just us millennials and generations adjacent getting old and not wanting to admit it.

No, I have seen an audio engineer with golden ears claim that the industry has changed. He has increasingly been directed to mix with cinema sound systems in mind and in accordance with a current quiet-dialogue fad that filmmakers are following. The broad public that watches the content through streaming with a low-consumer-grade sound system is an afterthought in this process.

Exactly. It's much like the music industry (though kinda the opposite), where a bunch of people claim "you're just getting old, music today isn't any worse than in the 1970s". It's not true: the commercial music industry these days is completely different, and part of it is the sound engineering. Back then, they mixed music to be played on Hi-Fi systems at home, and music had very wide dynamic range; these days, they mix music to be played through earbuds in a noisy environment, and music is highly compressed (and the production process is just the tip of the iceberg).

The Netflix show model is highly formulaic. Same cameras and mics, 8 episode budget contract, sent to the same post houses. If you want to work with Netflix, you don't mull over choices or do auteur film, you have an expedient, generic pipeline for mixing, color, etc that produces consistent results.

It's 98% business, just a race to see how much they can make using their method before Amazon or HBO can catch up.

Now I'm peeved about what a low effort crapshoot their mixing is is. I've made a few profiles for my receiver to help with levels and clarity, and we still end up needing subtitles. Oh, this is an action scene? I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't compressed the range out of it and then flat amplified it 12db. An intimate scene follows? Good thing you again compressed the shit out of that hot ass mic mix so we're fighting to pick out words over every rustle of fabric and hair right after we had to turn down the volume. It's atrocious.

No worries, I'm sure the next generation of shows will sprinkle some AI pixie dust over their pipeline to artificially "uncompress" the range again at the end (and generically sort everything that sounds like a voice into one channel, everything that sounds like background noise in another, etc, without context-awareness)

This seems pretty easy to test right? Put on The West Wing (early 2000s) and see if you can keep up. Put on any reality show from the last 5 years and see if you can keep up. I can do TWW, I can't do Bachelor in Paradise. Case closed IMO.

I agree with this including the unpopular opinion.

I’ve noticed this as well. I have a reasonable an entry level 5.1 system, but it’s basically useless to use.

Most center dialogue gets sent to the left and right speakers, essentially defeating the purpose of a center channel.

Netflix started downmixing differently last year.

https://en-us.sennheiser.com/newsroom/new-audio-experience-n...

“For an up-to-date list of content available in AMBEO Spatial Audio, simply enter “Spatial Audio” in the Netflix search field.”

Part of this, I think, is also the shift to dialogue-based scripts. It reminds me of this excellent Every Frame a Painting video that compares Kurosawa’s effective use of movement with the barely-moving, dialogue-driven Avengers films. A huge percentage of films/shows today are what Hitchcock called, “photographs of people talking” and aren’t actually cinematic. If they were more cinematic, hearing every line of dialogue wouldn’t be as important to understanding the story.

Start at about 4:25:

https://youtu.be/doaQC-S8de8

I think that's part of it, but I also think acting styles have changed a lot over the years. In the really old days, actors came from stage acting, where they were taught to speak loudly and enunciate better so people could hear and understand. But these days, mumbling seems to be in vogue.

For everyone complaining that they can't hear dialog in streaming shows, try watching some old movie or TV show from the 1960s (or even 70s or 80s) on the same setup: you'll probably have no trouble understanding the actors. It's just like music: young people keep saying we're just getting old, but it isn't true: things have really changed in the industries.

Actors and directors have changed.

Here's another piece from 2021 that gets regularly reposted, because nothing has changed since then.

https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...

Mumbling is one thing, but most dialogue in a major production (+1-10,000,000$ ?) will be re recorded, at least partially, after the film is made in a process described as ADR.

It’s the audio mixing that’s changed into a faux “naturalism”. Just as you mentioned, 1940s and 1950s had audio mixes with strong dialogue separation. 1970s we’re different with the Easy Rider mentality and slam bam technique of filmmaking (fast and loose and cheap). 1980s and 1990s you return to your he studio system and clarity. Now we have a strange combo - the studio system has returned through the streamers yet the audio is mixed as if it was a small time indie production that can’t afford ADR (no Netflix production will have issues budgeting ADR however).

It’s an audio mixing choice. It will go away.

It's not that mumbling is in vogue, it's that TV really has become far more naturalistic. We expect people to be seemingly acting like actual people.

When you throw in overly enunciated dialog, the kind you had in 1970's TV and 1990's sitcoms, it's jarring and bizarre. You're like, why is that cop talking like they're in a bad comedy TV show, instead of just being a regular cop? It's seriously terrible.

You still get a milder version of over-enunciation in network comedies today. But it just doesn't fit in dramas that depend on the characters seeming like real people. It's not mumbling and it's not lazy actors, it's a very conscious choice to not distract the audience.

Audio mixes have also changed. A false idea of “ naturalism” persists. If you listen to an audio mix to - film from the 1940s, 1950s and 1980s the dialogue is crystal clear above the rest of the mix. Now there’s a tendency to mix it all together which I find makes it harder to hear lines clearly.

That's a good point too. The extreme example of this is how Fellini recorded audio separately in the studio, not while filming.

All major Italian films of the period did so. It was a combination of being able to film faster and the multilingual nature of the actors involved (American, Italian, German and Spanish actors often in the same scene) meant some voices were kept and others were replaced. Essentially the Italian dubbing industry was so developed it was easier faster and cheaper to not record sound. It also allowed more freedom with the camera setups and motion (no shadows of boom mics or the need to coordinate both picture and sound as the camera sweeps through).

So after films that are too dark to watch, we get ones that are also difficult to hear.

Combine that with the apparent popularity for white noise podcasts, and you can see where this is heading.

Start selling halfs of ping-pong balls because we're hoping to just try hallucinating instead of watching created content?

This is why I always turn on subtitles. The only draw is that the subtitles include sound effects and other information that can sometimes be distracting. I see the need for those, but I wish there was an alternative.

I think Netflix and others should provide two sets of subtitles. One for those who need closed captioning because they need the extra information, and a subtitle that only include the dialog.

Another pet peeve of mine is unnecessary audio effects. Once you start noticing it, they are as obvious and unimaginative as the Wilhelm scream. If you absolutely need to add some crickets to prove that the scene is filmed outdoors and not in a studio, go ahead. But don't add dog barks, cat fights and other distracting sounds to make "ambience". Everyone else does that too you know?

Pet owners often hate scenes where two people are talking outside, because there's a big chance someone adds a dog barking in the background and their own pets will react. They would probably pay for extra for an audio track without dog barks.

We need the concept of user agents for our media. Like we prevent ads and enhance fonts for the web, remove pauses for podcasts, compress audio so dialog is intelligible, our video players should remove non-speech parts of subtitles and delay punchlines till they are spoken.

If these things were done properly by the studios, a user agent wouldn't be necessary. I've watched current TV shows with subtitles (official ones, not fan-made) and they had obvious spelling errors in them. Subtitles are a separate track, and the time they're displayed is set in the track info; showing the subtitle at just the right moment is well within their capability, but they just don't care.

But yeah, you're right: someone's probably going to eventually come up with an AI user agent that tries to do these things automatically.

Dynamic range compression helps this issue (stating the obvious). My cheap soundbar has this feature, provided the signal is dolby digital. On PC, the "normalize" audio effect is found in players such as PotPlayer or VLC.

so the solution is piracy

I vaguely remember you can do this in pulseaudio, so technically you can stream nextflix from a linux box to a tv over hdmi. Maybe.

As usual. It's the same solution when you can't get stuff in your region in your own language, or with subtitles for your language, etc.

I think at times, it just has to be either my hearing is going bad or terrible mixing. I have a 5.1 system, upgraded the center channel from a 2 to 5 woofer speaker, have the center channel audio maxed and there are still times I can barely hear dialogue. Sure, I can turn the audio up to 11 but then action scenes make it sound like an actual explosion in my living room.

Oddly, when I listen to music / only audio on the same system, I can keep it at a low volume and hear everything fine.

So, maybe my hearing isn’t going, yet.

That's a dynamic range and auto leveling problem.

Is your comment meant to imply my problem is a ‘dynamic range and auto leveling problem’ because of my particular setup or that it is a problem in general with the source?

The ultimate problem is the source material. Your setup is just trying to compensate for that.

Live theatre already figured out if you keep the principal voices nice and clear in the center channel, and mix the orchestra, chorus, sound effects in stereo, it's a lot easier for the audience to hear the lines. Even on a lousy sound system you can have good results.

This article is terrible. There have been previous articles which basically say studios are mastering for movie theaters or 7.1+ systems and spend no time tuning the 5.1 or stereo down mix and that's why its so low and shitty.

Reads like a Sonos paid article.

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