My hearing sucks. There.
Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
341–350 of 738 posts
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Apple TV has a setting called "reduce loud sounds" which helps with this problem. I'm sure you can find it on other devices too. My Sony TV also has a sound setting for enhanced dialogue which might help as well. Can't really help with the actors thing, though I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.
That option actually works great for resurrecting the speech in a movie, but makes all the music utterly flat and boring. With this option on you might as well throw out your expensive speaker setup and use the built in TV speaker. If only there was a hotkey to toggle it on and off, instead of hidden 4 levels down the touch-and-swipe menu.
Even better would be for the compressor/limiter to detect whether the source is music, dialogue or explosion and adjust its parameters accordingly. Come on Apple, make it smarter!
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair the consumer audio stack is crap in the average home. I bet a CRT TV would be a big improvement in audio quality compared to most flat screens on the market.
But shouldn't the product be created for the typical end user and not the 1% of cinemaphiles with a blessed setup? A pretty common complaint is that developers only test things on their latest generation i9, with unlimited ram, and 8k displays.
What is the typical end user? Is it you with your TV? Me with mine? My neighbor with their soundbar I can hear through the walls? The guy on the train with his airpods? There is no standard, its all over the place. You might as well engineer so it sounds good when people actually care enough to string together some half decent components than to take a shot in the dark at building around some audio spec that doesn't exist.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#344does zoom have auto-captioning yet?
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer. A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that. M…
What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup. Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that! Why is sound stuck so far behind?
One big downside of 5.1 is that you now have 6 speakers to place all around you. Depending on the room and layout, that can be hard to impossible to do without looking ugly, or even to do at all.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
A massive number of people don't have anything other than the speakers included in their TV. The next massive percentage of people maybe have a sound bar, maybe with an included subwoofer. A tiny, minuscule, microscopic percentage of consumers will have an external receiver. Maybe they'll have 5.1 on that. Maybe they'll have 9.2. An extremely small fraction, practically a rounding error, will have higher than that. M…
What a shame though! A decent 5.1 setup should be cheap and easy to setup. Of course that’s far from the truth, but good sound is so worth it! Being able to truly enjoy music, movies, we live in an incredible era for content, video is regularly available in 4K and people can play that! Why is sound stuck so far behind?
> Why is sound stuck so far behind?
I know people who have as their primary method of watching movies and TV is on an iPad.
Its not that the tech is stuck so far behind, its a matter of priorities. They just don't care to invest the time/space/effort/money into a fancy sound system. Not even always that they couldn't, just that they don't bother doing so. Sure, many could easily afford a fancy sound system. But they don't care enough to bother figuring out what to buy, figuring out how to connect it all together, going through the whole effort of making sure to use the right remote to get the sound working right, etc. They just want to press play on the one device when they feel like watching a movie, even if its not the best experience possible.
I know a few couples who do own a nice sound system. One partner never bothers to turn on the receiver or use any of the extra devices, they'll just use the built-in apps on the TV and turn the TV speakers up instead of bothering to turn on the fancy sound system already plugged in and otherwise ready to go. Its just not worth it to them to figure it out, so they don't bother using it.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many devices have a night mode to help keep the range of volumes small. The Sonos one is perfect for my use case. It changed my evening life when I found this.
I wish my Denon AVR had a usable night mode. Instead it has a setting called "dynamic volume" that makes it so all dialog right after an explosion is inaudible...
Unhelpful but probably accurate.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#348The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption. People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertain…
Well sure if the actors mumble all the time trying to appear enigmatic, the comprehension is surely greatly improved. I m not american and often i find it very hard to listen to what is said in tv series/movies. This is a new trend in acting btw, older TV was not like that.
Older people are more likely to be alone and the TV helps to break the silence. TV is usually tv shows where people speak properly so that helps i guess
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#349The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption. People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertain…
I wish there was a CC mode for “I’m not deaf, I just don’t catch the quiet mumbly dialog sometimes so give me captions only of the dialog.” Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.) Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, et…
That’s the difference between subtitles and closed captions: one is for people who don’t speak that language but can hear in general, the other is for people who can’t hear at all.
Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
#350Why is it so hard to hear dialogue in modern TV shows and movies?
Because they're producing for surround sound systems you can't be bothered to deploy or operate optimally. 5.1, 7.1, etc. The "center" channel, in particular, is where the bulk of dialog is rendered and if your system can't synthesize that channel extremely well on the loud speakers you have then dialog suffers. Also, if you lack a surround sound system -- say you're using a pair of stereo speakers -- all the audio is mixed to these few loud speakers and the spatial segregation that we two-eared beings use to isolate sound is lost. There is no fix for that; the work was produced with the assumption of surround sound and driving all of that audio through a pair of closely spaced flat screen speakers/sound bar/whatever screws everything up spatially and dynamic range wise.
The audio is tailored for the minority of people that invest in "home theater" while most people, even those that can afford to, don't care enough about teevee to build such a system. In theory one should expect media to support non-optimal cases, and provision for exactly that exists, but this costs more production money to do correctly and so it gets neglected in various ways. Obviously they don't neglect the demanding consumer with his costly home theater setup because they'll get pilloried, so they half ass the other side.