What kind of speakers do you have? Let me say that voices become greatly more intelligible with traditional speakers with a full midrange than modern speakers with exaggerated treble and bass.
What may be happening is that your speakers have a scooped profile, and audio mixes often have a scooped profile too. The sound effects and music tend to be bass and treble heavy, so you hear a lot of that.
But the lack of midrange means voices are hard to understand. You need range that to distinguish vowels, etc
I don’t understand how anyone can watch a movie with iPad or iPhone speakers. They are missing the exact part of the spectrum where important info in voices live. It’s just painful for me to pay attention with those speakers.
My parents were doing this, and I got them a simple Bluetooth speaker with midrange, and they immediately noticed the difference. Their faces lit up.
Judging by the comments here, it does seem there is a "double" race to the bottom of more treble and bass -- on the audio mix side and on the speaker side. So it's a compounding effect, which would explain a lot. So the least you can do is get some better speakers.
Or honestly if you have an EQ, you can just experiment with turning up the midrange and the treble/bass down, although with some speakers this will make things sound bad.
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Also I just skimmed the original article!! Isn't it obvious that the problem is iPad and iPhone speakers ????
I see young people listening to MUSIC on these things and it boggles my mind
They can't understand dialogue out of these crappy tinny speakers, so they turned on closed captioning ?? Makes total sense.
Or are they also using them with ear buds, which shouldn't have the problem? I notice more people NOT using ear buds (annoying people on the train), which makes me think the problem is the speakers