archive.today • Why is everyone watching tv with the subtitles on? - The Atlantic
Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for "Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale" and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it's been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them.
That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones' run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she's got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show's final season, AT&T bought HBO's parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.
You use subtitles because TV audio mixing is shit.
I use subtitles because I am a weeb.
We are not the same.
it's worst with movies because they're typically mastered only for surround-sound and the stereo mix is just lazily down-mixed from that, leading to wildly bad levels for dialogue compared to the SFX/music
wish the film industry would normalize (no pun intended) making professional quality stereo masters because most people are gonna be watching the movie on their built-in TV speakers or on headphones
Also related is that sometimes there's no downmixing at all. The video might be 5.1 surround sound, your device passes that on to the amplifier (or whatever your setup is), and if you are 2.0 or 2.1 it just sends the front left/right of the 5.1. Because the center is usually for dialog, the dialog is weaker than it was meant to be.
The downmixing should usually happen at the level of the device (like a roku) or between the device and the speakers, but it has to be done deliberately, it often isn't set up correctly by default.
I have surround sound and some movies and TV shows sound like shit. Like the center and front is so quiet on a lot of streaming services.
When I switch to games, I need to turn the volume waaay down.
when i was a kid(which was in the 90s) my best friend's dad was deaf, so they always had captions on. i started doing it because i was used to it i think. But now, yea, can't hear shit. And I swear it's not all age.
the one thing i did best in school was reading and reading comprehension so it wasnt a problem for me, i guess some people just read too lowly. I am now remembering when I was working at Blockbuster and i tried recommending some foreign films and after i said it had subtitles they said they didnt want to read a movie. not that it's important at all either.
subtitles are good whether or not the audio sucks shit :anarchista-chad:
I have watched shows without subtitles before. I'm not a native English speaker, but I do prefer subtitles
its just insurance for if you crunch on food or talk when a line is happening, really.
or [masterlevel] predict & deliver the line at the same time but everyone can see if you were correct
There are just some english accents that im not used to- subs help with that. Similar with words that I havent heard before or that I dont encounter often.
Uncritical support for dealing with learning the worst language on the planet
The answer is "shitty audio mixing".
That's always the answer and I don't know why they keep writing this article over and over again
I thought I was imagining things or assumed that my TV's speakers were shit, because I constantly adjust my volume between dialogue scenes and noisy action scenes. It's impossible to find a "Goldilocks zone" volume level because even when you adjust it to be just loud enough to hear the dialogue, everything else reams out your eardrums. Frustrating as hell. So yeah, subtitles for me.
The TV's "auto volume" doesn't really help much either because it just makes movies sound like someone's fucking with the volume randomly.
Most recent show I watched with this problem was Invincible. The dialogue in that show is so much quieter than the sound effects in the action scenes it almost feels like a parody.
I use subtitles for two reasons:
1 When I was a teacher, a majority of my students were not English as a first language, so subtitles helped them follow parts they might have missed due to language barriers and I just got used to it and now prefer it
2 I think I have an undiagnosed auditory processing issue where I feel like I can't filter out words from background noise, so subtitles help a ton with that
subtitles are cool but they also suck for scenes with any sort of tension. If a character dies mid sentence the shock is just ruined because the subtitles popped up first
Also pretty bad for comedy because it interrupts the flow of the joked. And ruins punchlines
This could be solved if subtitles popped up word by word instead of line by line (but of course that would require lots of extra effort to make and sync the subtitles)
Vox did a youtube video about this and the sound engineer they had on gave some super lame excuses as to why "things must be this way": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
If you're genuinely sick of it, and own a laptop/computer, hook it up to the TV via an HDMI cable and under windows 11 turn on "loudness equalisation" Video here for more info .
I haven't even thought about this problem in over a decade, I'm am surprised they haven't fixed it yet though, figured they would have with everyone streaming movies these days, having the audio designed for 5.1+ surround sound cinema usage is a bit silly when no one is watching it that way anymore.
The thing that's frustrating is she does say exactly what the problem is but in the most soy way possible is like "but the studios really don't want to stop doing that" so she just kept talking about the other things that don't really matter.
I don’t get the appeal of the barely lit atmosphere anyways
It's an HDR (high dynamic range) problem. Hexbear(s) wrote this - I don't remember who. I might have mashed up two or three comments together.
This kind of thing looks great on OLED/AMOLED screens with the brightness turned way up, as black on those displays mean that the pixels turn off and it's actually "true black", unlike an LCD screen where the backlight makes it look more like a dark grey.
Also looks good with an HDR display, as the increased dynamic range allows the brightness to pop out more compared to a dark background. When you combine HDR+OLED technology together, scenes like this look pretty good.
But if you aren't using either technology (and most people aren't) - it's going to look pretty bad.
House without subtitles makes many of Hugh Laurie's lines incoherent. I still remember trying to fathom what he was saying in one line that just basically come out as 'mumble mumble MUMBLE mumble mumble'! His people were never really all that good at the English language in the first place either, so that didn't help.
Personallyme it just helps with my ADHD, and also my obsessive compulsions of needing to catch every single miniscule moment of anything I am watching.
Subtitles now are also just much less intrusive than old closed captioning systems. Turning on CC tends to black out like 1/3rd of the screen and the text is unmodifiable. But now that you can change size, color, background, and font, more people feel like they can use them.
I've always wondered why TVs don't have like a built in compressor for this
