“What did he just say?”
Those are some of the most commonly uttered words in my
home. No matter how much my wife and I crank up the TV volume, the actors in
streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand.
We usually end up turning on the subtitles, even though we aren’t hard of
hearing.
اضافة اعلان
We’re not alone. In the streaming era, as video consumption
shifts from movie theaters toward content shrunk down for televisions, tablets,
and smartphones, making dialogue crisp and clear has become the entertainment
world’s toughest technology challenge. About 50 percent of Americans — and the
majority of young people — watch videos with subtitles on most of the time,
according to surveys, in large part because they are struggling to decipher
what actors are saying.
“It’s getting worse,” said Si Lewis, who has run Hidden
Connections, a home theater installation company in Alameda, California, for
nearly 40 years. “All of my customers have issues with hearing the dialogue,
and many of them use closed captions.”
The garbled prattle in TV shows and movies is now a widely
discussed problem that tech and media companies are just beginning to unravel
with solutions such as speech-boosting software algorithms, which I tested.
(More on this later.)
The issue is complex because of myriad factors at play. In
big movie productions, professional sound mixers calibrate audio levels for
traditional theaters with robust speaker systems capable of delivering a wide
range of sound, from spoken words to loud gunshots. But when you stream that
content through an app on a TV, smartphone or tablet, the audio has been “down
mixed,” or compressed, to carry the sounds through tiny, relatively weak
speakers, said Marina Killion, an audio engineer at the media production
company Optimus.
It doesn’t help that TVs keep getting thinner and more
minimal in design. To emphasize the picture, many modern flat-screen TVs hide
their speakers, blasting sound away from the viewer’s ears, Lewis said.
There are also issues specific to streaming. Unlike
broadcast TV programs, which must adhere to regulations that forbid them from
exceeding specific loudness levels, there are no such rules for streaming apps,
Killion said. That means sound may be wildly inconsistent from app to app and
program to program — so if you watch a show on Amazon Prime Video and then
switch to a movie on Netflix, you probably have to repeatedly adjust your
volume settings to hear what people are saying.
“Online is kind of the wild, wild west,” Killion said.
Subtitles are far from an ideal solution to all of this, so
here are some remedies — including add-ons for your home entertainment setup
and speech enhancers — to try.
A Speaker Will Help
Decades ago, TV dialogue could be heard loud and clear. It
was obvious where the speakers lived on a television — behind a plastic grill
embedded into the front of the set, where they could blast sound directly
toward you. Nowadays, even on the most expensive TVs, the speakers are tiny and
crammed into the back or the bottom of the display.
“A TV is meant to be a TV, but it’s never going to present
the sound,” said Paul Peace, a director of audio platform engineering at Sonos,
a speaker technology company based in Santa Barbara, California. “They’re too
thin, they’re downward and their exits aren’t directed at the audience.”
Any owner of a modern television will benefit from plugging
in a separate speaker such as a soundbar, a wide, stick-shaped speaker. I’ve
tested many soundbars over the last decade, and they have greatly improved.
With pricing of $80 to $900, they can be more budget friendly than a
multispeaker surround-sound system, and they are simpler to set up.
Last week, I tried the Sonos Arc, which I set up in minutes
by plugging it into a power outlet, connecting it to my TV with an HDMI cable
and using the Sonos app to calibrate the sound for my living room space. It
delivered significantly richer sound quality, with deep bass and crisp
dialogue, than my TV’s built-in speakers.
At $900, the Sonos Arc is pricey. But it’s one of the few
soundbars on the market with a speech enhancer, a button that can be pressed in
the Sonos app to make spoken words easier to hear. It made a big difference in
helping me understand the mumbly villain of the most recent James Bond movie,
“No Time to Die.”
Dialogue Enhancers in Apps
Not everyone wants to spend more money to fix sound on a TV
that already costs hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, some tech companies are starting
to build their own dialogue enhancers into their streaming apps.
In April, Amazon began rolling out an accessibility feature,
called dialogue boost, for a small number of shows and movies in its Prime
Video streaming app. To use it, you open the language options and choose
“English Dialogue Boost: High.” I tested the tool in “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,”
the spy thriller with a cast of especially unintelligible, deep-voiced men.
With the dialogue boost turned on (and the Sonos soundbar
turned off), I picked scenes that were hard to hear and jotted down what I
thought the actors had said. Then I rewatched each scene with subtitles on to
check my answers.
In the opening of the show, I thought an actor said: “That’s
right, you stuck the ring on her — I thought you two were trying to work it
out.”
The actor actually said, “Oh, sorry, you still had the ring
on — I thought the two of you were trying to work it out.”
Whoops.
I had better luck with another scene involving a phone
conversation between Jack Ryan and his former boss making plans to get
together. After reviewing my results, I was delighted to realize that I had
understood all the words correctly.
But minutes later, Jack Ryan’s boss, James Greer, murmured a
line that I could not even guess: “Yeah, they were using that in Karachi before
I left.” Even dialogue enhancers can’t fix an actor’s lack of enunciation.
In ConclusionThe Sonos Arc soundbar was helpful for hearing dialogue
without the speech enhancer turned on most of the time for movies and shows.
The speech enhancer made words easier to hear in some situations, like scenes
with very soft-spoken actors, which could be useful for those who are
hearing-impaired. For everyone else, the good news is that installing even a
cheaper speaker that lacks a dialogue mode can go a long way.
Amazon’s dialogue booster was no magic bullet, but it’s
better than nothing and a good start. I’d love to see more features like this
from other streaming apps. A Netflix spokesperson said the company had no plans
to release a similar tool.
My last piece of advice is counterintuitive: Don’t do
anything with the sound settings on your TV. Lewis said that modern TVs have
software that automatically calibrate the sound levels for you — and if you
mess around with the settings for one show, the audio may be out of whack for
the next one.
And if all else fails, of course, there are subtitles. Those
are foolproof.
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