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Because everything has shitty mastering.
Or, it’s mastered for theaters, and not remixed for home streaming.
I have superb audio equipment. That's not it. It also sounds like shit in theaters. It is shitty mastering. Maybe for added "realism" or something.
On top of that actors mumble their lines and directors like Nolan seem to like it for some reason.
The difference is most apparent when you watch dubbed content. It's usually much easier to understand because those actors pay more attention to what they're saying and it's much easier to mix.
~Because~ they FUCKED ^up^ the VOLume!!
ADVERTISMENT
Yeah the vast majority of those responses boil down to bad audio mixing and bad audio equipment. When you have an ad 5x the volume as the content and you're playing it all on TV speakers which can handle about 20% of the range then yeah, you won't hear anything.
I mean, I watched probably thirty years of television without that problem.
I can't even imagine how many trips to the tv I would have made as a child of this were the case. My father in law is still watching cable tv. He mutes every single commercial because of the volume. He's almost 80 but he's been doing it as long as I can remember. My wife says it never was like that when she was a kid cause she was the remote.
We sail the high seas so no ads here.
Oh yeah, no ads is the bare minimum I require.
I use it because I'm eating chips.
I watched a video made by a sound engineer on YouTube that explained why this is becoming increasingly necessary.
The volume levels for most modern movies and television shows are all jacked up during some scenes, and practically muted in others. It makes it impossible to keep the volume set at one level, and still be able to hear conversations amidst all the background noise / music etc.
So naturally, people now set the volume to one setting more attuned to the higher volume sounds, and use subtitles to make up for the fact that the dialogue is being drowned out. It has nothing to do with "culture". People just don't want to blow their eardrums or their speakers trying to hear what people are saying underneath all that extra racket.
It has nothing to do with "culture".
About one-quarter of subtitle users say they turn on captions because they are watching while multitasking.
I don't understand how you read the subs while looking away. Or are they listening to something else while watching the screen?
The gist is that I can read faster than the person on TV speaks. I read the line, and then I can go back to reading my book. When the person is done saying the line I just read, I read the next line on the tv, rinse and repeat. If they stop talking I know I need to look because something other than dialogue is about to happen.
That is some impressive reading and multitasking skills! Fair play 😄
Good for you and all, but aren't you interested in the acting? the way the lines are delivered?
No I hate tv, it's the worst medium for me. I just watch out of social obligations, I have people who like the medium and want to talk to me about it.
try compression or limiting. For example, if you have an apple TV, try the "reduce loud sounds" setting. Or if you have a decent audio receiver it should have some compression settings available like Audessy Dynamic Volume.
I live in a townhouse so I use these to reduce noise to my neighbors anyway, but it does help with this issue as well. I rarely struggle to hear dialogue even in notoriously bad movies.
people who make srts and post to opensubs are the real heroes.
Audio processing disorder. I hear very well, it's just difficult picking out words in noisy environments. Being able to see lips helps sometimes as well. Text is so much easier.
Anime was what got me into subtitles, but then I started wanting them for other stuff too due to indecipherable spoken audio. So much whispering or spoken volume being so much lower than the music and effect sounds.
Same here. Anime and foreign films got me used to them, then after a while I used them in everything. Sometimes friends come over to watch something and complain about how distracting they are, but I feel like I'm missing out on stuff if they're not turned on.
some other reason
I do watch with subtitles for all those reasons above but that last one is important if you have watched a lot of subtitles in your life. Sometimes (and it's very rare) there are some freedoms taken by the people writing closed captions. Sometimes it is hilarious and especially if the director/writers of the show are involved. Seeing corrections for political correctness are another hilarity.
Absolutely! I watch Love Island with the subtitles on and seeing “[whining continues]” or “[incoherent] …God” or whatever will always be funny.
The new Naked Gun film has one joke only seen by those watching with subtitles on. It's pretty late in the movie, too.
spoiler
When the owl flies away after helping Frank Drebin Jr., while the owl is cawing the subtitles say "[IN OWL] I'm proud of you, son."
Audio mixing in movies the last 10 years has been absolutely horrendous, I cannot understand what anyone is saying because movies will have super loud sequences where I have to turn it down, then the characters voices are too quiet in between.
Audio mastering seems to be a lost art, Tenet was particularly bad, I had to wait till I could download it with subs to understand half of what was said
Having subtitles on is good when you have little kids, too. Not just because kids are noisy, but also because, even before they start learning to read, they start associating the groups of letters on the screen with the words the characters are speaking, in real time. And of course once they do start reading, it's good practice.
My partner is hard of hearing so she always uses subtitles. It took a minute to get used to but now I can't watch anything without them! It's like alt text on images; we started doing it on the fediverse for accessibility but a nice side effect is that it can give you better context and a lot of the time you'll catch things you didn't hear right
I did it for years until I bought a Soundsystem with a loud center. Then I stopped needing to.
Streaming messes up the audio. That’s why. I don’t know if I can blame the streamers though because it seems like the audio levels get normalized/jacked up from my own handbrake encodes as well.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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