Can't really help with the actors thing, though I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.
You can have both though. A great example is Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s never mumbled a line in his life and you can understand everything he says during quiet dialog. You can be true to life, quiet AND understandable.
Its almost all about projection. You can come across as a "quiet" speaker and still manage to be heard when you're projecting and enunciating properly. Projecting isn't about being loud, its about being heard.
I have a tendency to mumble a lot when I'm not thinking about it. Thinking about projecting my voice brings things across better, and its not really all about being louder.
I think that you can have both, but you can't always have both. Because it doesn't always make sense to.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what hyper-realism would contribute to something like Star Trek. The show confidently embraces the fact that it's basically a bunch of fairy tales for nerds. That's what allows it to be as great as it is.
Not everything needs to be The Wire (even though that was great too, if you enabled subtitles).
omg that's embarrassing, but I guess it's true
But, if I hadn't seen maybe two episodes, I might have the same impression.
How often do you see Captain (!) Picard out of uniform? The character of Picard-as-officer is constantly on stage, he's the master and commander of an entire starship!
Second most often, we see him on the Holodeck, where he's playing a captain playing an actor playing a role! Of course he chews the scenery there.
But when we see Jean-Luc, the civilian, something changes. All the Royal Shakespeare is invisible, he's an old man who carries a great burden, and has put it down for just a moment.
Patrick Steward is very, very good at what he does.
This does help, but at some point Apple increased the compressor’s release time so that it’s far too quiet even 10-15s after the loud transient. I wish they would make it behave more like a brickwall limiter.
Before that it worked perfectly and better than my Denon receiver :(
If only there was a hotkey to toggle it on and off, instead of hidden 4 levels down the touch-and-swipe menu.
I just find that stage acting sounds very unnatural. So do news anchors and you will find the same sort of unnatural voice in older classic films. No one talks like that in real life so of course it's something that is going to detach the tv show or movie I'm watching from reality if they speak like that. Does that make it impossible for me to enjoy the classics? No, but they pretty much never pull me into the story in a way that makes me forget for a second that they're actors doing a performance.
Or, if standing with a few people you know outside, is every sentence you speak replied to with a request to repeat yourself?
I bet not. Maybe it happens sometimes, but my point is, being able to understand what someone says, regardless of how they say it, is the key part here.
Yet it sounds as if you believe most people are barely understandable? Including yourself?
And for example, listening to much of the dialog out there, the Picard reference. The guy is in command of the flagship of a fleet, in the military, and would not be in command, in that position, if there was any inability to clearly issue orders, and to communicate fluently.
Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
A CEO? An ex-world class military retiree? Someone working in upper management of the NSA? These people will be heard.
There are indeed roles featuring the "regular person", but if you mumble, if you define your speach style as mumbling, that means you employ the word "mumble" to differentiate you, from how most people speak.
Otherwise you wouldn't be mumbling, you'd just be speakkng.
So that all said, I think your assertion is unfair.
A great example is this video of Baltimoreans attempting to say "Aaron earned an iron urn." [1] The same person says it how they would naturally and with "proper" enunciation. With "proper" enunciation he was very easy to understand, but it was also not authentic to how he actually speaks.
> Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
Yes, but there's just as many, if not more, that aren't. I'm not saying it's unrealistic for say, a CEO or a news reporter to have adapted a "General American" accent. I don't think it's weird for even most characters to have an accent that is very understandable to most Americans. I just don't think you can or should expect that actors always speak in a certain way just to make it understandable to the most amount of Americans.