I can't hear without them anymore

Thank you. I thought I was old man yelling at clouds over this. Drives me crazy. The worst is when the sound editor thinks some dumb pop song really slaps and turns the volume WAY UP and drowns out everything else.

And OMG the low talkers. Low talking and dimly-lit scenes are all the rage these days. I think part of it is Galaxy Brain people in the streaming biz thinking this is how they save time and money.

Doesn’t it also have to do with how the sound is encoded and delivered? Most voice is on 5.1 is designed to go center speaker, so if your system lacks a center speaker and you have it set to home audio, instead of L/R it’s gonna be muted.

Literally why I don't bother going to a concert unless I'm extremely familiar with their songs. Every time they sing something new I'm bored out of my mind because everything comes out like the teacher in Peanuts.

In a perfect world, there would be the recommended mix, and then the apps (Netflix, Hulu, etc) would let you adjust the faders the way you can with EQ. Instead of one stream of sound, you can balance the voice/music/fx by yourself. Hell, throw EQ on each of those channels. Late at night and you don't want to bother the neighbors? Let me turn down the bass on the FX and Music channels. Also let me just turn down FX and Music channels in general because I can't fucking hear what the actors are saying.

Edit: I was talking to my wife about this subject and she was like "yeah, I can do this on my Peloton. Adjust the voice vs music"

So yeah. The technology exists. It may not be retroactive. Like movies and shows already made won't have the option (but vocal isolation plugins have come a long way). But we have the technology and bandwidth to do it moving forward.

I get what you're saying and I wish I didn't need subtitles, but it's kind of hard to understand what's going on when 90% of the dialogue in modern shows is unintelligible mush.

I'm with you. If you like subtitles, you do you I won't judge, they just personally drive me nuts. I try to ignore them when I watch with someone else, but they pull my eyes away from the movie. Plus they spoil jokes and ruin the timing.

Also, maybe I have super-ears, but I really haven't struggled to hear dialogue at all in the movies I constantly hear people complain about (mostly Nolan's). I'm genuinely confused about that controversy, because they sound fine to me.

It's really easy to watch the movie, and to catch that one word in the sentence you want to look at without losing anything in the frame. People who watch with subtitles don't read every sentence, more like 30 words per movie, and subtitles and scenes don't change that fast, you have ample time to do some back and forth between the image and the text.

Yeah I prefer when the subtitles are like half a second late so it doesn't ruin the comedic or dramatic impact of every line.

I don't mind using subtitles when I watch movies in my language but when it comes to anime or movies in other languages I prefer subtitles because it's better than not understanding a single word.

Finally someone with the courage to say it! Although if you like subtitles you do you, but I agree with this take, I feel like I get more into the movie without subtitles (which leads to obsessive rewinding if I miss some dialogue but that is the tradeoff). If a movie or show is egregiously hard to understand/ heavy accents then you might need em on.

Unpopular opinion: Subtitles detract from the watching experience more than mishearing some words.

I agree if you can otherwise hear fine, but many people who do use subtitles/captions don't use them out of choice, they use them due to disability: if I don't have captions I will miss 80% of what is being said, rather than the 5/10% that an abled person would.

And the words appear on screen at a different timing from how the actors speak the words, which further worsens the emotional impact you can receive.

This emotional spoiler-ing certainly happens! (Though I personally don't mind it too much) What is particularly frustrating is when the captions don't match what they are saying. Filmmakers, PLEASE don't do this, I understand that you may want to tweak some lines afterwards, but this just makes it so that my brain has to do additional audio processing, (which is the entire reason for captions in the first place) meaning I either have to mute the movie, or slow it down so I can keep up!

I’m right there with you

Hate hate hate subtitles. I 100% agree sound mixing is absolute shite now, and I definitely understand why some people need them (as someone who has audio processing issues myself I really do get it)

But I refuse to watch things with subtitles. They’re way too distracting. Either I’m reading them of I’m trying to ignore them but all my brain is saying is ‘don’t look at them don’t look at them don’t look at them’. Like if I wanted to read something, I’d have a book in front of me

the image on the screen is primary to it.

Exactly. Cinematographers spend so much effort to put everything in the scene in exactly the right place, lit exactly the right way.

Watch, for example, this breakdown of how Akira Kurosawa frames everything in a scene to draw your eyes in certain directions. If you look away and don't see the character looking left and right with shifty eyes, you miss a key part of what's happening. Or, take some of the more famous individual frames in movie history and imagine them with white text on top of them. It's especially bad when it's a very dark scene, or a scene where the key elements are in the shadows.

And the words appear on screen at a different timing from how the actors speak the words, which further worsens the emotional impact you can receive.

Not only that, but sometimes the subtitle ruins the suspense. Like, in the audio version there's a faint sound you can't quite make out, but that's how it's meant to be. But the subtitle says something like [sound of coffin opening].

It does suck that a lot of dialogue mixing these days is terrible. But, I'd rather have to go back and listen again if I missed something than have the entire movie downgraded by constant subtitles flashing up on-screen.

Besides, I think you need to train your ear. It's the same way that people have trouble with foreign accents. When they haven't heard them before it's initially hard to understand. But, over time, you learn to hear that accent better. Similarly, I think people who always use subtitles are losing and/or never developing the ability to hear the dialogue properly, so they have more problem with it, so they continue to rely on the crutch of subtitles. Even though movie dialogue mixing is significantly worse these days, it's very rare that I actually have trouble hearing and understanding the dialogue. It's an effort sometimes, and it's annoying that they're so badly mixed, but I can still understand what's being said and don't need to either go back and listen again or turn on subtitles.

Fucking hate subtitles, the moving words attract my eyes and then i just end up reading and missing the scenes.

I would recommend using face to face conversations to judge your English comprehension.

I am a native speaker with perfect hearing and I still have to use subtitles with any movie made in the past ten years.

No, because people aren't sound mixed in real life.

I dunno, we have a decent Dolby Atmos system I've assembled over the years which sounds immense & has a setting to accentuate speech, yet I always use subs for TV & movies. My brain is hopeless putting names to faces, the subs help me with this (plus slang & accents).

I think it's something to do with how my brain processes sound as I have the same issue with songs - my brain doesnt comprehend lyrics, I don't know the words to songs I've heard thousands of times no matter how well known the song is, maybe a few lines from a chorus but that's about it