Because the fuckers producing the shows make the music and sound effects 5x louder than it needs to be but the dialogue half as loud as it needs to be.
It’s because they’re mixing dialogue for the center channel speaker. Most people don’t have a center channel on their TV or sound bar, but some "Dialogue Mode"s will exclusively play the center channel and drown out the sound effects. It’s a trade off, but one that most manufacturers don’t even give the option for.
There was a video essay going viral about this some time ago.
Music loud as fuck, voices soft as fuck, turn volume down and put on subtitles
Yep the sound mixing is dogshit in 99% of movies and tv shows. Also where i come from everything was always subtitled anyway so im used to it
There’s a couple reasons why I use subtitles all time. Firstly I’m getting older and can’t hear as well with background noise. If my wife is banging around in the kitchen I can’t hear dialog from the TV. With subtitles on I don’t have to mess with the volume.
Another issue is media producers (TV and film) have this idea they need to blast you out of your chair with sound effects and music. So if you turn up the volume enough to hear the dialog clearly, you’re going to get blasted by everything else. Trying to manage that with the volume control is damn near impossible. Interestingly I’ve noticed “dialog boost” appear on occasion in sound track options from my streaming provider. I use it when the option is there. That kind of indicates a global problem.
An issue related to sound leveling is actors used to come out of theater where they learned to annunciate loudly and clearly. It seems actors don’t get proper stage training anymore and now it’s okay to mumble and fail to annunciate. A decent director should never allow that.
For me, at least, it’s the fucking bad audio. So goddamn often the sound makes someone difficult to understand so I watch most things with subtitles.
I don’t have to do that with games. Why? Because I get separate volume sliders for music, sound effects, and speech. Trouble understanding just means I need to adjust those to make the speech louder over music and fx.
Why in the hells tv and movie audio tracks don’t have this separation I don’t understand at all.
I’m just deaf and happy y’all’re seeing the light. My father was annoyed with mom’s captions. My wife used them before we met
I’m also hearing impaired and am just really glad that captions are becoming so popular.
It used to be that YouTube was rarely accessible to me. There would be a tiny amount of content that had subtitles (sometimes baked in, like epic rap battles of history does), but the vast majority of videos just weren’t fun for me because I’d miss too much. These days a good chunk of popular YouTubers have curated captions and another good chunk are clear enough speakers that the automatic captions work.
I’ve actually been watching more YouTube in recent times than ever before specifically because I’ve been discovering all this content I previously wrote off. There was recently a post somewhere that introduced me to Technology Connections. And from there, I figured I’d check out some other names I had heard about that might be interesting, Linus’s tech tips and ElectroBOOM, and both had captions, too.
