“What did he just say?”
These are some of the most common words in my household. No matter how much my wife and I increase the volume of TV, the actors in streaming movies and shows are getting harder to understand. We usually end up Subtitles turned on, even though we’re not hard of hearing.
We are not just. In the era of live streaming, with video consumption shifting from movie theaters to shrinking content for TVs, tablets and smartphones, crisp and clear dialogue is the entertainment world’s most daunting technological challenge. About 50 percent of Americans – and majority of young people Watching videos with subtitles most of the time, according to Surveysin large part because they struggle to understand what the actors are saying.
“It’s getting worse,” said C. Lewis, who has run Hidden Connections, a home theater installation company in Alameda, California, for nearly 40 years. “All of my clients have trouble hearing dialogue, and many of them use closed captioning.”
Slurred babble in TV shows and movies is now a widely discussed problem that tech and media companies are just beginning to solve with solutions like speech-boosting software algorithms, which I’ve tested. (More on this later.)
The issue is complicated by myriad factors. In large film productions, professional sound mixers calibrate sound levels for traditional theaters with powerful speaker systems capable of delivering a wide range of sounds, from spoken words to roaring gunshots. But when you stream that content through an app on a TV, smartphone, or tablet, the audio is “mixed,” or compressed to transmit sounds through relatively small, weak speakers, said Marina Killion, audio engineer for the media production company Optimus.
It doesn’t help that TVs are becoming thinner and slimmer in design. To emphasize the picture, many modern flat-screen TVs hide their speakers, which blast the sound away from the viewer’s ears, Mr. Lewis said.
There are also issues with streaming. Unlike broadcast television programs, which must adhere to regulations that prevent them from exceeding certain loudness levels, there are no such rules for broadcast apps, Ms. Killion said. This means that audio can be wildly inconsistent from app to app and program to program — so if you watch a show on Amazon Prime Video and then switch to a movie on Netflix, you’ll probably have to adjust the volume settings frequently to hear what people are saying.
“The Internet is kind of like the Wild, Wild West,” Killion said.
Subtitles aren’t a perfect fix for all of this, so here are some remedies — including home entertainment setup add-ons and speech enhancers — to try.
The speaker will help
Decades ago, television dialogue could be heard loud and clear. It was obvious where the speakers on the TV live—behind a plastic grill built into the front of the set, where they can blast sound directly toward you. Nowadays, even on the most expensive TVs, the speakers are tiny and crammed into the back or bottom of the screen.
“A TV is supposed to be a TV, but it will never deliver sound,” said Paul Pace, director of audio platform engineering at Sonos, a speaker technology company based in Santa Barbara, California. They are sloped and their exits are not directed to the public.
Any owner of a modern TV would benefit from connecting a separate speaker like the Soundbar, which is a wide, stick-shaped tweeter. I’ve tested many amplifiers over the past decade, and they have improved greatly. With pricing from $80 to $900, they can be more budget-friendly than a multi-speaker surround sound system, and they’re also easier to set up.
Last week, I tried the Sonos Arc, which I set up in minutes by plugging it into a power outlet, plugging it into my TV with an HDMI cable, and using the Sonos app to calibrate the audio for my living room space. It delivered noticeably richer sound quality, with deep bass and crisp dialogue, than the TV’s built-in speakers.
At $900, the Sonos Arc is pricey. But it’s one of the few soundbars on the market that has a speech enhancer, which is a button you can press in the Sonos app to make it easier to hear the words spoken. It made a huge difference in helping me understand the mysterious villain of the latest James Bond movie, No Time To Die.
But the Sonos speaker’s speech-enhancer pushes its limits with blatant slang on the Netflix show “The Witcher.” It couldn’t make more comprehensible lines like “We’re looking for a girl and a wizard – she’s got blond hair and an aristocratic face, he’s a mannerless, bleached beast.”
Then again, I’m not sure any speaker can help with that. I left the translation for that.
Dialog boosters in apps
Not everyone wants to spend more money to fix the sound on a TV that already costs hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, some tech companies are starting to build their own dialogue enhancers into their streaming apps.
In April, Amazon began rolling out an accessibility feature, called Dialogue Boost, for a small number of shows and movies in its Prime Video streaming app. To use it, you can open the language options and choose “English Dialogue Boost: High”. I tested the gadget on “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” a spy thriller with a cast of particularly incomprehensible, deep-voiced men.
With dialogue boost turned on (and Sonos speakers turned off), I picked scenes that were hard to hear and jotted down what I thought the actors said. Then I rewatched each scene with the subtitles to check my answers.
At the show’s opening, I thought one of the actors said, “That’s right, I stuck the ring on it—I thought you two were trying to sort things out.”
The actor actually said, “Oh, sorry, you still have the ring — I thought you two were trying to figure it out.”
Excuse me.
I had better luck with another scene involving a phone conversation between Jack Ryan and his former boss as he plans to get together. After reviewing my results, I was delighted to realize that I understood all the words correctly.
But minutes later, Jack Ryan’s boss, James Greer, murmured a sentence I couldn’t even guess: “Yeah, they were using that in Karachi before I left.” Even dialogue enhancers can’t fix an actor’s lack of articulation.
In conclusion
The Sonos Arc speaker was useful for hearing dialogue without turning on the speech enhancer most of the time for movies and shows. The Speech Enhancer has made words easier to hear in some situations, such as scenes with actors speaking in a very low voice, which can be useful for those with hearing impairments. For everyone else, the good news is that installing a cheaper speaker that lacks a dialogue mode can go a long way.
Amazon’s Dialogue Boost wasn’t a magic bullet, but it’s better than nothing and a good start. I’d like to see more features like this from other streaming apps. A Netflix spokeswoman said the company has no plans to release a similar tool.
My final advice is counterintuitive: don’t do anything with the sound settings on your TV. Mr. Lewis said that modern TVs have software that automatically calibrates the volume levels for you — and if you’re fiddling with the settings of one show, the volume may be out of range for the next.
And if all else fails, of course, there are subtitles.