Most programs,… (especially dramas) play music under the dialogue. Drives me crazy trying to discern dialogue I AM losing my hearing too along with tinnitus T
My 93 yo dad’s hearing loss is selective in ranges that prevent him from distinguishing certain speech sounds. The sibilants. S, F, and similar.
He loves classical music but refuses to get a hearing aid because “the music sounds like it’s screaming”.
I have a Zvox soundbar that claims to use hearing aid technology to privilege speech over background/ambient sound, and it certainly seems to muffle background music. The only trouble with that is that when there’s a concert I want to watch, I have to wire up the TV to the hifi amplifier.
I do use subtitles but they can be irritating when it goes wrong. I assume a lot are machine-generated, but when it “mishears” the name of a character it got right only a minute or two before…
Yes! I tried to watch “The Expanse” and “Bosch”, both highly-rated series, and just had to give up because I couldn’t see what was going on, it was so dim. I’ve had cataract surgery in both eyes which improved the acuity of my vision enormously and other shows (e.g. “Jeopardy”, YouTube videos) are very clear. The only conjecture I’ve come up with is that the producers can cheap out on CGI and other special effects if they keep the lights off.
And I agree with the OP re the dialog. Glad it’s not just me, anyway.
Understanding the spoken word is increasingly difficult for me. I suppose it’s a combination of decreasing auditory sensitivity in the higher frequencies along with dwindling mental processing power to untangle the nuances of speech at speed. But I’m convinced there are other contributing factors.
And, yes, I watch recorded TV with captioning ON. I turn captioning OFF on news programs because their banner ads and crawls interfere. Stories packaged by “foreign” “news” agencies for consumption in North America frequently provide their own on-screen subtitled commentary.
Also, I (try to) sleep with the radio tuned to BBC, so the antics of the BBC hosts bug me more than any other radio hosts except PBS.
-
Broadcast hosts, commentators, public-relations representatives, and experts with and without agendas do not enunciate anymore. In the days before Babba Wawwa, they did, though. I can only believe that elocution has disappeared from curricula for journalists and from job descriptions for public spokespersons.
-
Cheap and gratis “news” feeds from around the world are heavily compressed for transmission and lose a lot of fidelity in decompression.
-
I’m not up-to-date on phraseology, particularly that used internationally.
-
Media producers think it’s cool for their product to have a signature sound, which they can then peddle to the various outlets[1]. This is particularly true of On the Media, which uses greater dynamic range than other programs and features a music track. It’s just too bad that this listener struggles to discern the content over the background. I like the content, but I have to get up on Sunday morning and turn the radio off because I’m wasting effort and using up my frustration quota for the day trying to understand what’s being said.
[1] I realize this exact criticism applies to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, but I don’t recall being so disgusted by my inability to understand the dialog when it was on. Probably, in retro imitation of classic radio shows, particular attention was devoted to ensuring that the words came through.
Let me add that I relocated for work decades ago from one part of the Midwest to another where speech patterns, intonation, vocabulary, and idioms are strikingly different. Since then, I’ve had a level of difficulty understanding at first what people are talking about and ultimately making myself understood in my adopted location. I don’t appreciate the level of day-to-day stress this imposes until I spend an hour or two talking to someone from the community where I was born. I know what they’re going to say before they say it, and hearing it said is merely confirmation of where the conversation is headed. Age plays a large part.
Possibly what makes media so difficult to understand these days is its diversity.
Not just drama. For some unknown reason the BBC like to play music behind speech on things like traffic reports. Why?
Can’t say I’ve noticed that - which station/channel does that?
I do have a thing about irrelevant/extraneous background music in documentary programmes. In dramas, as in cinema movies, music has usually been chosen/specially written to enhance the drama and create the right atmosphere for a scene. All too often in documentaries, it just seems to be off-the-peg plinkyplonk vamp-till-ready lift music which does nothing to enhance the narrative.
Radio 2. Coincidentally, I am listening to one while typing this. They do keep the volume down, but it is certainly there.
Conversely, there is one programme on Radio 3 where a presenter and interviewee talk over the interviewee’s choice of music. I think it must be a multi-tasking younger person’s thing.
Try going into your TV’s sound settings. Some TVs have a specific setting to enhance dialogue, but it can be called different things depending on the manufacturer - our LG TV’s is called Clear Voice and it actually works pretty well. If there isn’t anything like that, look for something called “Dynamic Range Compression” or “Night Mode.” Compressing the dynamic range will make voices louder and explosions etc. softer.
Adjusting the EQ settings may help if the TV has that. Go lower on the bass and higher on the treble.
We ended up getting a Bose sound bar that has a specific dialogue enhancement setting and have been pleased with the overall better quality sound.
Interesting. I’ll just add two observations.
-
My son always turns on subtitles. Always. And he is not hard of hearing. But he’s an obsessive perfectionist and insists on not missing anything.
-
The need for them is not new. I just posted in another thread about my enjoyment of On the Waterfront (1954). I don’t usually turn on subtitles for myself, but I did for this one. For two reasons: (a) the dialog was not always clear, and (b) in this particular movie, the dialog was important.
Sometimes closed captioning doesn’t help. We were watching Frost (BBC or at least British detective show). We were having a hard time understanding so we turned on closed captioning. Virtually every caption had at least one “unintelligible” written in it. I figure if the people who are doing the closed captioning can’t understand it, there’s no hope.