Great article. I thought the problem was the mumbly actors or their accents. Often I say to DH, "Why did that actor decide to go into acting if he can't be understood?"

This has been bothering me lately too. I don't need music in every scene.

The anonymous sound pro also pointed to what they view as an increase in the amount of music in modern movies compared to older films, bemoaning directors' over-reliance on music as "pushing emotion" on audiences and the way music and dialogue are forced to jostle for prominence in the mix.

That's why I use closed captioning on some shows. I agree with Elmer about the music. Drives me batty.

I have long wished that I could edit out background music in movies that I buy on Blu-ray, as often the music is very irritating to me. The worst offender I can think of is Titanic, and I walked out on that movie (which I was watching at Grauman's Chinese theater) because I could not stand the singer in the movie - her voice made my skin crawl, and it was just too painful to listen to.

Another movie with bad music is Lord of The Rings. The theme song to that got to be so tiresome so quickly that I wished I could just turn it off.

I pretty much never go to movie theaters to see new movies anymore. The TVs and sound systems we have now are good enough (for me) for watching movies on Blu-ray, and I prefer to avoid audiences, partly because I want to avoid the noises that they create.

Interesting you should bring this up. My grandnieces and I watched a Netflix movie called A Boy Called Christmas and I had to keep turning up the volume and I still missed a lot. I asked them if they could understand it and they said ”kind of”. It is partially animated soi I dont know if that was the problem. I find myself using closed caption more and more and yet I dont seem to have a problem day to day.

Last night I watched CODA on Apple tv and it was ideal because it is about a deaf family so there closed captions included in much of the movie and people spoke distinctly for the most part. Good movie, by the way.

Glad its not just me!

I've personally not had any hearing loss and hope I never do, but I think speech in general has become harder to hear and understand, whether reproduced or when heard live. I don't know if it's a decline in the level and quality of education of the general public, lazy and changing pronunciation and enunciation practices, or (more likely) a combination of these and more. Dropped syllables, dropped consonants, generally mispronounced words as if unfamiliar (and likely so), all contribute to people's speech sometimes being difficult to follow, even in person.

With movies and TV shows, something to keep in mind when watching from a cable, satellite or streaming source, is that the sound data is compressed and that significantly diminishes quality and clarity. The sound becomes muddy. Sound heard in a theater or from a DVD has much higher quality and more crispness and definition.

The rare occasions I watch the news on TV, I frequently encounter problems understanding reporters and anchors alike, especially with local broadcasts. There's no ethnic component to the prevalence that I've seen. A short list of examples on TV and in real life:

pattern, said as if pa- ern, similarly

water, as if wa-er and

later as if la-er

worthwhile, as if wort-while

and plenty more.

One thing that can help understanding speech is to turn up the volume of the source. I often find when wanting to follow along with programs in a foreign language I understand, I can follow better by increasing the volume. Also, many TVs have poor speakers and sound playing systems. If you have your TV sound connected to an external sound system or a sound bar, the sound resolution should improve compared to listening to the TV's speakers.

I'd heard so many good things about "Yellowstone" and looked forward to watching it. My hearing seems okay otherwise but I had difficulty understanding the dialogue. Unfortunately, closed captioning wasn't available so "Yellowstone" went kaput!

That article is fascinating, Alisande. It certainly explains much of the complaints I have about watching movies in recent years.

Lars, it isn't the choice of music. The issue is they play it as background to the dialogue. The dialogue is hard enough to understand without the added music.

There have been many times I can not understand a line someone just said on a show. I'll rewind it several times and still wont get it. I'll either put on the captions to find out. There have been times I'll have to ask my daughter what was said and she was able to pick up what was said. Then after she tells me, it's like "oh I hear it now".

Friends and relatives who have experienced some degree of lost hearing acuity, those both with and without hearing aids, have said that when there is what I'll call "background noise", they can have trouble hearing and also isolating on a sound they want to hear. Background noise can be the noise of others talking in a crowd or restaurant or party, traffic noise, music, or whatever. Said another way, they have trouble focusing their hearing attention on one of many sounds they perceive.

I'm sure there are some here who have reduced hearing ability or even hearing disabilities, I wonder what they experience?

Thanks for the article. Another pet peeve is lighting. Yeah, it's the dramatic setting, but the dark rooms with one small light get boring fast---they all look alike.

I agree with all the comments above.

This has been a pet peeve for me for a while. The music, the lighting (or lack of) and the dialogue. I usually use the closed caption option.

Juneroses, I am watching past episodes of "Yellowstone" thru Peacock on my Roku. Closed caption is available, if that's any help at all for you.

Thanks--I thought I was going deaf

I use closed caption more and more. I've always used it for British shows and now for Aussie. But overall, I've had to rewind more often to catch what I missed.

Some actors are just ”mumblers”, and all the other factors don’t help.

dedtired, i watched A Boy Called Christmas and actually turned the volume down a lot. It reminded me of when I’d take the boys to the YuGiYo movies, so much NOISE.

Today, even actors *on stage* are miked. They haven't learned to enunciate or project. Lazy, just like pop stars whose voices and ranges are so weak that no one would listen to them without amplification. You want real *singers*... check out the trained voices of operatic stars -- and I don't mean pop stars who attempt range-adapted arias in front of swooning females. You'd have to go back a century to hear a popular tenor who could sing all alone on an empty stage -- John McCormack. You can still hear recordings that, despite the poor level of the electronics of his time, demonstrate his elocution, voice control and range.

There is also the issue of volume levels rising and falling. Why do they do that? One scene you have to turn it up and the next it blasts you out of the room.

I do have hearing loss which is variable as in it comes and goes so I do personally take that into consideration but we seldom watch network TV any more so at least we can go back. I dislike the actor muttering bit. You can sure tell the classically trained stage actor from the not.

If you have a sound bar or surround sound system, you can set it for "clear voice" and it pushes the music to the background ( where it belongs!) and emphasizes the speech. It helps a great deal. I have noticed this on Yellowstone. The John Dutton character uses a low grumbly tone of voice which is hard to understand in general. But we never have to worry about hearing Beth, now do we?

I have worn hearing aids most of my life, for the most, they kept me hearing. Then, as I aged, I would need more powerful and expensive sets. Today I'm in a quandary. A 150-foot tall tree crashed into our ten-foot angle bay window and two feet where I was laying, having fallen asleep watching tv. I had no aids in my ear and we had lost power due to high winds, 99miles flying towards me. As a background story, my husband was in another room fast asleep and he never woke up to the noise. I, on the other hand, heard the crash and the push of the tree go by my body, I was terrified. I screamed and felt things pushing into my body, luckily I had a coat on as we had no heat. I felt sharp things go in near my coat and was so mixed up in my mind in the dark. , I ran down the hall to get our headlights, into the laundry room, and slammed the door, PITCH BLACK, and something fell on my back and I fell down, I woke up with the F.D. standing over me. I had fainted and was in shock. They said they could put me to bed and come back in the a.m. when the rain was stopped and take me for a head scan. At this point, I could not hear so I asked for my aids, put them in, can barely hear. They are thinking the massive amount of sound coming from two enormous trees could have affected my ears. I can't watch tv as I would have to read and not see the actual movie. I can do lip-reading but most show people have their heads down etc. I ended up very sick and still am not well plus I DID have a bad concussion and still not make sense. The reason I'm telling

this is it gives me hope to know that other people are finding it hard to hear. Maybe my ears are not at the end of their life, not that I want anyone to have hearing problems, no-no

We had a lot of damage to the house and so many workers here trying to clear it all. My new window won't arrive for 3 to 4 months. My appt is on Dec. 13th. I can't wait. I must have said "I can't hear you" thousands of times by now. lol

For those of you who use Roku, if you use the player that has the head phone hook up you will find that the sound is crystal clear with the head phones plugged in. I am so glad to read this thread, I too thought that it is my hearing. For the longest time I have said that I can hear it but cannot understand what I am hearing.

Yayagal, that must have left you terrified. It sounds like you were very lucky to of not been killed.

Oh, Yaya, what an ordeal! The important thing is that you survived it, but how traumatic for you. I'm sorry you still don't feel well.

Wow, @Yayagal, what a scary ordeal.

Thank you, @Alisande, for the link to the article. Like many of you, we have closed captions turned on most of the time. I also learned that if I download an episode from a streaming service, I can play it in high definition rather than a more compressed version. There are shows and movies that I gave up on because the video was so dark, I had no idea what was happening. Same thing has been true for some audio.

I had my hearing tested since it has been over 5 years. I had it done because I found it harder to understand TV shows. Speech sounded muffled or like the people were mumbling, especially when there were accents.

It was also because of all the background noise and music. Not just instruments but singers. Who ever thought that was a good idea. I found I have gone from normal/mild loss to mild/moderate loss. We've have a Bose sound bar which helped a little. Worse show is 'New Amsterdam'.

The hearing doctor recommended getting a device that pluged in to the TV and use ear buds or headphones. Avantree has a lot options and they work great. Everything comes in super clear and I can hear it all, even whispers. I tried TV Ears but found them uncomfortable.

Happy to have read this particular thread....I thought I was "not" hearing things properly.

Another contributing factor is the now-widespread use of compressor circuits/devices to tamp down/ remove the normal dynamical range changes in normal speech. A compressor cuts out highs and lows in an audio signal so that the volume level is more consistent. Eliminating the dynamic range makes the sound mushy and with less contrast, less distinct than unprocessed or as sounds as in real life, and harder to make sense of. It's like bleaching out colors from an image so that everything looks like slightly different shades medium gray with little range of difference.

"Compressor" processing is quite different from and unrelated to the "compression" of sound files/sound tracks, done by sampling at lower rates, to take up less bandwidth in transmission.

I've been having problems lately as well. It only seems to happen with some programs though, so I'm not sure that it's my hearing or the audio for those particular programs. Both my parents ended up with hearing issues in their later years, as does my sister, so I make sure I get my hearing tested annually: it's a freebie covered by our insurance so not a big deal to get tested. I do know I have some peripheral hearing loss (as do about half of people my age) but I'm not in the hearing-aid stage yet. I think I'll try headphones.

Good article, and I appreciate you posting it, Alisande. Like many ofnyou, I have replayed a scene, often several times to tr6 to understand words or phrases correctly. And my hearing is fine, it’s the enunciation sometimes, and other times it is the poor sound quality of the transmitted or streamed sound.

Another thing that really annoys me when watching a comedy series is the use of canned laughter. I know the history and why it was used years ago, but in my opinion it has run its course and is nothing but extraneous noise now.

Another one here who has a difficult time understanding what the actors are saying on many programs. I really enjoy British TV, but lately I get frustrated and turn the channel. All I hear is, as mentioned above, "mumbling".

Outside, re canned laughter. My Mom used to say how much she liked The Big Bang Theory. So after getting hooked on Young Sheldon, I decided to watch some of the TBBT re-runs. The canned laughter is terrible. After every line, there is this burst of laughter. What's so funny??

I watch a LOT of British TV, mostly via streaming services, so closed captioning is an easy option. But I turn it off as often as I turn it on. The fact that most closed captioning is hugely inaccurate bugs me far more than a few mumblings and is extremely distracting. BritBox may be the worst. They mishear/misinterpret all manner of common names (placenames and actors), leave out entire portions of the dialog and a plethora of other, smaller but very niggling errors. In fact, the closed captioned dialog is so often wrong I wonder if it is computer generated from just the sound. Any relatively educated human could do a much better job!

Interesting about the captioning mistakes, Gardengal. I've never used the captions, but vowed to do so if I ever make a stab at watching anything from Wales. lol

One of my closest friends, and the one I talk to most often, has a British accent. So you'd think I'd have no problem with British TV. But I often do. And I remember my elderly mother's disappointment when she'd looked forward to a British movie and then had trouble understanding it. It was especially surprising because her parents emigrated from Scotland.

Canned laughter? Ugh.

And I'll add a word to Elmer's list of sloppy pronunciations: recognize. Apparently a large segment of the population has dropped the G. Now it's reckonize.

Note sharp decline between ages 40 and 60 at higher frequencies (Hz).

Riding the volume....yep. I've done it a lot with movies where the music is so loud it blasts you out of the room, and the dialog so soft, you have to crank the volume up, only to have the music blast you again...especially those bass tones that start rattling the windows. So annoying that I have to become my own sound mixer while I'm watching a movie. And it's not just an issue with movies, but with TV shows too. I often find Kelli Giddish hard to hear on L&O: SVU in some of those more intimate scenes and have to put on the CC to catch the dialog. Don't get me started on late night tv where the ad volume is a multiple of that of the TV show.