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Comment by jschveibinz | Hacker News Reader

Two reasons from my perspective, other than my ears are getting older:

1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.

2. Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content, and CC helps to cut down the cognitive load of “translation” while being entertained. Frankly, I enjoy the diversity of content, but I don’t want to have to work hard to watch TV.

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> 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.

I've found this really frustrating. I constantly have to control the volume when watching a movie. Commercials are also obnoxiously loud. It made me wonder whether the TV could automatically "balance" upcoming sounds so that quiet scenes are never quiet and loud ones are not too loud.

Some TVs and receivers have a night mode that does what you want. It's basically a compressor that cuts off the high peaks.

I've always been told that the ads are not really louder, that's another compression technique at work. There's no dynamic range and everything is at the top of the volume range. ( I think it amounts to the same thing )

Apple TV has a "reduce loud sounds" setting that basically does this

I've also noticed a prevalence of mixing background noise/music into dialogue scenes which often overpowers the main dialogue, or overlaps in audio range enough to make it hard to hear. Add in sub-par audio equipment, or equipment which is compelled to emphasize one end of the audio over the other - and you have a recipe for difficult to understand dialogue.

Turning on the closed captions is an easier solution than fussing with the audio in many cases.

I was once told, by a salesperson in a TV store that this was essentially "by design" and that the solution they're taught to present is to "buy a soundbar". From his understanding, in the quest to get thinner TV manufacturers sacrificed built-in speaker size and quality, which results in the effect you describe. I am not sure how much is sales patter and how much is truth...but I bought a sound bar!

Built in TV audio has always been bad. That said some TVs are starting to use the screen as a diaphragm now, which is interesting.

It's not "by design" so much as bad audio setups are going to sound bad, and a lot of people don't know how to shop for or care about it.

The smaller speakers in a TV naturally compress the dynamic range because they can't get loud, and especially can't get loud in the lower frequencies that travel more easily through walls. Getting good speakers actually makes the dynamic range problem worse since the loud parts get even louder and travel through walls even easier.

Soundbars have really good margins though, so it's unsurprising that that's the solution they sell!

If you don’t have a Center channel speaker, the vocals are regularly inaudible

> Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content

This is why they are always on in our house. I think people who understand fine take for granted how hard accents can be.

My wife is ESL. She understands me fine, and the 'neutral tv accent.' She can't understand a word my father says(Appalachian accent). Can't understand British people, Boston accents, etc. She's learning, slowly, but I've never even thought about how amazing it is we're able to process all the different ways people speak, rather seamlessly.

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