“What did he say?”
Those are some of the commonly spoken words in my home. No matter how much my husband and I binge on TV, the actors in streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. We usually finish turn on the subtitles, although we are not hard of hearing.
We are not alone. In the era of streaming, as video consumption shrinks from theaters to content shrinking for televisions, tablets and smartphones, producing crisp and clear dialogue has become the most difficult technological challenge in the world of entertainment. About 50 percent of Americans – and mostly young people — watch videos with subtitles most of the time, according to surveysin large part because they have trouble understanding what the actors are saying.
“It’s getting worse,” said Lewis, who has run Hidden Connections, a home theater installation company in Alameda, Calif., for nearly 40 years. “All my customers have issues hearing dialogue, and many of them use closed captions.”
Garbled prattle in TV shows and movies is now a widely discussed problem that tech and media companies are just starting to solve with solutions like speech-enhancing software algorithms, which I tested . (More on this later.)
The issue is complex because of so many factors at play. On large film productions, professional sound mixers calibrate audio levels for traditional theaters with robust speaker systems capable of delivering a wide range of sound, from spoken word until loud gunshots. But when you stream that content through an app on a TV, smartphone or tablet, the audio is “down mixed,” or compressed, to bring the sounds through small, relatively weak speakers, said Marina Killion, an audio engineer at media production company Optimus.
It doesn’t help that TVs keep getting thinner and more minimal in design. To accentuate the picture, many modern flat-screen TVs hide their speakers, blasting sound from the viewer’s ears, Mr. Lewis said.
There are also streaming-specific issues. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which must abide by regulations that prohibit them from exceeding certain loudness levels, there are no such rules for streaming apps, Ms. Killion. That means sound can be 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’ll likely have to adjust the your volume settings to hear what people are saying.
“Online is kind of the wild, wild west,” Ms. Killion.
Subtitles are far from the perfect solution to all of this, so here are some remedies — including add-ons for your home entertainment setup and speech enhancers — to try.
A spokesperson can help
Decades ago, dialogue on TV could be heard loud and clear. It’s obvious where the speakers live on a television — behind a plastic grill embedded in the front of the set, where they can blast sound directly toward you. Today, even on the most expensive TVs, the speakers are small and crammed behind or below the display.
“A TV is meant to be a TV, but it’s never going to project sound,” said Paul Peace, a director of audio platform engineering at Sonos, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based speaker technology company. “They are too thin. , they are down and their exits are not 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 tried a lot of soundbars over the past decade, and they’ve gotten a lot better. With pricing of $80 to $900, they can be more budget-friendly than a multispeaker surround-sound system, and they’re simpler to set up.
Last week, I tested 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 better sound quality, with deep bass and crisp dialogue, than my TV’s built-in speakers.
At $900, the Sonos Arc is expensive. 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 all the difference in helping me understand the gruff villain of the latest James Bond film, “No Time to Die.”
But the Sonos soundbar’s speech enhancer reaches its limits with the shocking colloquialisms of the Netflix show “The Witcher.” It couldn’t have done better lines like “We’re looking for a woman and a witch — she with fair hair and patrician face, she’s a fashionless, blanched brute.”
Then again, I’m not sure any speakers can help with that. I left out the subtitles for that one.
Dialogue enhancer in apps
Not everyone wants to spend more money to fix the 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 the accessibility feature, called dialogue boost, for a small number of shows and movies on its Prime Video streaming app. To use it, open the language options and select “English Dialogue Boost: High”. I tested the tool on “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” the spy thriller with a cast of incomprehensible men with deep voices.
With the dialogue boost on (and the Sonos soundbar off), I picked scenes that were difficult to listen to and wrote down what I thought the actors said. Then I watched each scene again with subtitles to check my answers.
At the opening of the show, I thought an actor said: “Right, you put the ring on her — I thought you two were trying to work it out.”
The actor actually said, “Oh, sorry, you’re still wearing the ring — I thought you two were trying to work it out.”
Oops.
I had better luck with another scene involving a phone conversation between Jack Ryan and his former boss who plan to get together. After checking my results, I was happy to realize that I understood all the words correctly.
But a few minutes later, Jack Ryan’s boss, James Greer, muttered a line I couldn’t 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 conclusion
The Sonos Arc soundbar helped to hear the dialogue without the speech enhancer on most of the time for movies and shows. The speech enhancer made words easier to hear in some situations, such as scenes with actors who speak very softly, which can be useful for the hearing impaired. For everyone, the good news is that installing even a cheaper speaker without dialogue mode can go a long way.
Amazon’s dialogue booster isn’t a 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 has 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. Mr. Lewis says modern TVs have software that automatically calibrates sound levels for you — and if you mess up the settings for one show, the audio for the next one can be messed up.
And if all else fails, of course, there are subtitles.
