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Here’s why closed captions are important even if your hearing is fine

Tyler Cowen alerts me today to a blog post by Ben Pearson titled "Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand." That's right up my alley, and it's one of the reasons I don't see as many movies as I used to. It's also why I always turn on closed captions when I watch movies at home.

Anyway, according to Pearson this isn't because my hearing has deteriorated. It's for a host of other reasons, which I will paraphrase:

  • Christopher Nolan is an asshole
  • Actors are too full of themselves
  • On the set, sound guys are treated like shit.
  • Everyone wants to play with all the new toys, often with crap results.
  • Laziness.
  • Theaters these days are run by bored 22-year-olds.
  • Streaming services compress the sound and have varying standards for decompressing it.
  • Lots of TVs have lousy sound.

Some of these strike me as more credible than others, but read the whole thing if you also find muddy sound in movies an increasing headache.

52 thoughts on “Here’s why closed captions are important even if your hearing is fine

    1. HokieAnnie

      I invested in a sonos sound bar and sub speakers to get better sound, also gifted my elderly parents with a sound bar for the same reason though they also use hearing aids and closed caption. Yes investing in better sound and the right setting can improve things. But it can't help when watching shows like Sheltand or Vera hahaha, need captions to translate to American English hahahahaha.

  1. painedumonde

    Similar to what bharshaw has typed, movies today are about pew pew and kaboom, not whispers in a lover's ear or considered conversation. Irony and sarcasm, on the other hand hve the same levels and intensities of sound as the action sequences.

    1. George Salt

      I find that I'm constantly increasing the volume to hear conversations and then throttling back when the kaboom comes. Really annoying.

  2. arghasnarg

    > Christopher Nolan is an asshole

    I will say, Trying to watch Interstellar annoyed me so much I turned it off.

    I generally don't pay much attention to the names behind movies - much like sports, I just don't care - but now that I know this, I won't bother trying again with his output.

    1. realrobmac

      Anyone else unable to reply using this comment section suddenly? I can post new comments but can't reply.

      My big beef is movies where there is lots of loud music and sound effects but all the dialog is whispered. This seems to happen a lot. In real life, people seldom whisper when speaking to one another. People generally want to be heard when they speak. But in movies whispered dialog has become some kind of signifier of seriousness.

      1. realrobmac

        Ok so just bad UI design then. I though I was posting a new comment when I was posting a reply. Gotta love this comment tool.

        1. Jerry O'Brien

          About half the commenters here have at some point posted a top-level comment when they meant to reply to some other comment, seems like.

          1. KawSunflower

            I think that it seems to occur when a comment takes more time than usual - as when taking time to "step outside" the box to review & edit or simply entering a long comment slowly. It seems to change from being a reply to a previous post, so I try to recheck.

      2. golack

        And the sound jumps between commercials and the show. I guess they want you to hear their pitch when you're on the toilet.

    2. Solarpup

      "Tenet" is well-nigh unwatchable thanks to the sound design, and allegedly was made intentionally so since Nolan wants you to devote your full attention to his movies. No sitting at your laptop commenting on blog posts while watching TV, like I'm doing now.

      Yeah, my hearing isn't what it used to be, but I do have a good 6.1 sound system that I have balanced for where I sit, and with "Tenet", cranked up with the volume high, playing with different cinema sound filters, I still struggled to hear what the heck they were saying in most of the movie. It went from "I have to devote my full attention to this to hear it" to "this isn't worth the struggle, Christopher Nolan is an asshole".

      I also find BBC TV shows tend to have pretty poor sound, but allegedly that's because they do a lot of natural recording on site, and tend not to do any over-dubbing of dialog back in the studio. Capture it live, or not at all.

    3. Martin Stett

      "Following" is a good little picture, but then people started throwing money at Nolan.
      Stanley Kubrick used to go to theatres doing roadshow presentations to make sure the projectionists go the sound and picture right.
      Nolan was 44 when he made "Interstellar." Kubrick was 43 when he made "A Clockwork Orange."

  3. weirdnoise

    Another reason: hearing loss. Not just age-related, but from both private and public entertainment (earphones, concerts, etc -- even movies themselves) and workplace noise.

  4. jharp

    I’ve never be able to hear worth a damn and it’s gotten progressively worse.

    My theory is tinnitus (I’m a sufferer) is an auto immune disease that destroys ones hearing.

    And more sound triggers more tinnitus.

    So I’ve opted to turn the TV off.

    And if I’m wrong I really don’t care because I find sound quite annoying.

    Any of you other oldsters growing more fond of the quiet?

    Oh, and the varying volume just pisses me off. Just not going to listen to it any more.

  5. rational thought

    It does make me feel better to hear this as not understanding what is being said makes me fear I am losing my hearing.

    And not just sound. Also the tendency to use dark lighting and you cannot see what is going on either.

    1. KawSunflower

      Yes - all of those unpleasant murky shows aren't worth the time. Maybe that's supposed to be artistic & add to the drama, but even tinkering with tint & contrast becomes irritating.

      1. Crissa

        Many of them I can't make out the characters so I'm lost after awhile. Being a touch face-blind I need visual cues to tell me this is that person or other.

    2. Salamander

      Yes, and yes! I've been turning the volume way up during programs, to understand the dialog, then way WAY down during the ads, because even at near-zero volume, the banal, bellowing pitch still manages to come through. I never want to see or hear Joe Namath again.

      I've got "vision issues" and the darkness of the teevie screen, not to mention a whole lot of images posted on the web, makes appreciating them really difficult. I thought the Game of Thrones episode, "The Long Night", which was in fact, shot at night with only that "illuminaion", was unwatchable. First watch, I just listened to it. Second time, with television tuned properly, in a totally darkened room, it was significantly better, but they needn't have bothered with costumes or special effects on my account.

      It's good to hear (heh) that difficulty understanding the dialog isn't totally a product of age. Off the teevie screen, I don't have much trouble with comprehending human speech.

    1. coaster

      Mumbling dialog in movies seems to be a thing now. When I watch old movies, I can understand everything. Now I have to depend on closed captions.

      Sometimes as an experiment I've put on headphones, turn up the volume, and listen to mumbled dialog, and still can't pick out the words. I guess whoever writes closed captions has the script to follow.

    2. Salamander

      You can listen to the Berlin Phil while watching stuff, if you just stream episodes of the old Babylon 5 show. HBO's got a very good restored version. And they also don't have the "modern" drowned dialog effect. Fewer explosions, too.

  6. DFPaul

    Hmm, wonder if this means watching foreign movies will come to be seen not as snobby but rather as a protest against inhuman or incompetent technology.

    Anyway the filmmakers whose work I'll bother to see in the theaters are Almodovar, Kore-eda and the Dardenne Bros. and they all have yet to make a movie in English. So I have no need to complain. 🤓

  7. rational thought

    I can forgive dialog being hard to hear or absent from movies that emphasize sound effects like explosions. Because that is the point of those movies and what the audience is going to them to see. If you prefer generally a more intellectual sort of movie , you can choose to go to that .

    But, in a movie where the dialog is the basis of most of the plot and you really need to hear what is being said to follow the plot, making it hard to hear is unforgivable. And a lot of this is an attempt to be even more sophisticated and thinking that whispered dialog adds to that . It doesn't. You could have the most intelligent profound and witty dialog ever in a movie and, if the audience cannot hear it , it is wasted.

    And someone pointed out that , in real life , people really rarely whisper. True . And , even if you cannot hear exact words in conversation, sometimes your brain can fill in the missing parts from what you do hear , seeing the lips and the context . Plus because most people use simple predictable words in normal conversation.

    In pseudo intellectual movies , the language used is often totally unrealistic and more literary and high level vocabulary . Making it hard for your brain to fill in gaps.

  8. George Salt

    I watch lots of retro TV and I can follow the dialogue just fine, even with the TV volume set pretty low (10 on a scale of 100). Then, when I stream a newer show, I'm constantly cranking up the volume to hear conversations and then I have to furiously throttle back the volume when the sound effects kick in.

    I think the older generation of actors came out of theater, where diction is important and actors learn to deliver a stage whisper. Also, in the name of authenticity, actors are affecting heavy accents that are often impossible to understand.

  9. Altoid

    Another possible element for movies might be that so many are made for the global market, which can be so important for profitability. If you make a movie in English, what happens in non-Anglo distribution? You're going to add subtitles, in which case the English dialogue quality doesn't matter, or you're going to dub in a target language, in which case the English dialogue quality doesn't matter. If the English-speaking market has trouble making out the dialogue, you just say they don't understand the artistic purpose behind doing it that way (hey, it worked for Altman in MASH, let alone Nolan!) So sound quality is still not an issue they need to worry about.

    1. rational thought

      Not sure that is true as much for us movies made for the foreign market, at least for Europe.

      Most younger Europeans learn pretty decent English in school and are fluent enough to watch TV or movies in English without subtitles. At least if the language is normal conversational and clearly enunciated. But use more high faluting vocabulary and mumble and whisper the words, and they cannot follow without subtitles. Which degrades the experience.

      We are complaining here about the minority of the dialog in probably a minority of movies we native Americans cannot understand. But, really, we understand the vast bulk of movie dialog.

      But a non native speaker might be totally lost for most of the dialog where a native American could make it out in context and filling in what they miss.

      If making American movies for a market ( say china) where it will almost all require subtitles, correct that dialog sound does not matter. But, if for a market with mostly non native English speakers who know English well enough to not need subtitles unless your poor sound makes it needed, this issue may be even more crucial.

      For native speakers, you often do not hear every sound in normal conversation but you just fill in what you miss, usually subconsciously without being aware of it. For mostly fluent non native speakers , that is hard.

      I do have some European friends who did comment that they enjoy watching older us TV shows from 50s to 70s as they can easily follow the language and it helps them learn. But more difficult with more recent shows.

    2. Crissa

      They completely re-mix the sound.

      Voices in those remixed versions are usually easier to follow! And I'm not fluent in anything but English, but I can follow enough Spanish or Japanese to pull out words I don't know and look them up.

  10. Altoid

    The article is pretty good but audio degradation across media is a topic I've been focusing on for several years now and I think the author overlooks a wider and deeper problem affecting almost all aural media these days. It's that we now have so much capacity to deliver the full range of sound accurately that, ironically, almost nobody pays attention to how the sound is generated and transmitted. There are now very few technical limitations to be compensated for, and so production people have gotten lazy and lax about sound (this doesn't necessarily include the sound people mentioned in the article, of course).

    Early telephones, radio, and movies all were very limited in the frequency range they could reproduce. Normal (young) human ears are taken to respond up to 20,000 hz. Phone systems, the first of the modern audio systems, could only carry about 150 (maybe even only 300) up to 3,000, which misses a lot of the consonant information in speech. Radio and movies were similarly limited when they came along. All were also inherently noisy and had limited dynamic range to boot, so the difference between speaking inaudibly softly amid noise and speaking way too loud was a very small one, compared to normal in-person speech or even the stage.

    Given all this, movie and radio producers, directors, and talent all knew they'd have to focus hard to get dialogue across-- enunciate clearly, keep their volume within a narrow dynamic range, and place mics carefully to catch the dialogue (and be prepared to re-record movie dialogue in a sound booth for the final cuts, which the article seems to indicate they're not doing so much anymore).

    Now, production people have very few technical limitations they need to worry about when it comes to sound. In theory, we can now capture and reproduce audio through essentially the full human frequency range and the full dynamic range, and what can't be caught during production can be digitally massaged afterward. With limitations gone, in other words, there just isn't a problem they think they need to pay attention to. Little things like enunciation and volume consistency and mic placement-- almost everything involved with sound production-- can all be an afterthought.

    And this carries over into radio and podcasting, TV zoom remotes, and vocal quality in cell phones. In all these cases, the median speaker, or listening experience, can range from okay to just god-awful. FM, as in NPR, has been getting particularly bad this way lately, but if I were a sound guy setting up zoom remotes for TV I'd be tearing out what little hair I have left over the shit audio that people are sending me. It would be all I could do to get the volume about right. Then I'd then have to throw up my hands and just go off into the corner and cry, or punch the walls. I don't even want to think about trying to do sound for some of the podcasters I've heard.

    But I have an additional non-technical umbrella explanation for why so many sound producers don't care about audio quality. I call it the soft tyranny of the normal-hearing. I'm not among them. But if you are, you don't have much trouble with material reaching you that has too wide a dynamic range, because it's set up for people like you. You just don't need to pay any attention to it.

    Back when sound production had to compensate for equipment limitations, sound was ironically much better for people like me. It was produced and output in a comparatively narrow dynamic range, and was handled very carefully at all production stages to make sure it overcame those built-in technical obstacles and emerged in its most intelligible form.

    Theoretical capabilities of current audio technology have done away with that. What we end up with is sound production tailored to what normal-hearing people can usually grasp, most of the time.

    A result is that for people who aren't normal-hearing, our sound experience has degraded pretty seriously over the past 20 or 30 years.

    1. KenSchulz

      Concur on radio (almost all my listening is to NPR services). Too much use of dynamics for emphasis and expression. I assume that in early days they taught the on-air talent to use pacing and tone, and to maintain a fairly constant volume. No more. Classical dj’s included, there are those that drop their voices into inaudibility, for example at the ends of sentences. Listening is especially difficult in a car, where constant background noise is unavoidable.

      1. Salamander

        Ditto. I listen to almost nothing but NPR -- we have two NPR stations in town, plus their classical station. Whenever the news switches off-studio reporting from some bystander, the volume drops to near-inaudible. And I'm generally either in the car, or cooking while listening.

        (I still miss The Prairie Home Companion, which always came on during my "cooking time" on Saturday. Even the increasingly lame "Live from Here" in the same timeslot was somewhat entertaining.)

      2. Altoid

        I think you're right about the early training for relatively level volume. Some of NPR's founding generation sounds like they had that training but at some points were encouraged to cultivate quirks that included dropping off at the ends of sentences; I'm thinking of Susan Stamberg and Bob Edwards in particular. Among the current generation I'd say Wade Goodwin, the Texas cover guy, stands out for voice control but the rest just don't think about it, or more likely are actively coached and directed to widen their dynamic range. (Also to gasp when they inhale, but that's a different topic.) I think the sound they're going for is more "conversational" and younger, indicated by talking fast. I think that's a fundamental mistake, but it isn't my call.

        I've long thought that one reason why AM-radio wingnuts get such loyal audiences is because they generally don't give in to the dynamic-range temptation-- if anything they tend to hector at level volume and tone both. Maybe the crossover with evangelical-style preaching has something to do with that. But their audiences skew older and probably the level volume makes them feel viscerally more comfortable. Glenn Beck (who's probably not keeping that audience so much these days) is a lunatic but content aside, his technique is very good.

        Going back, Reagan was trained that way and is still pointed to as an exceptionally able speaker because of his delivery. I can think of very few people in public life today that anyone would cite that way.

      3. johnwmcn

        Our local NPR station had terrible discrepancies in volume between various local feeds and the nation feed. My wife found this article about such things: https://current.org/2014/07/why-youre-doing-audio-levels-wrong-and-why-it-really-does-matter/

        After some back and forth with the station and sending them the link, the boss got the on-duty engineers to make some changes and now things are much better. We knew there had to be a solution because a previous NPR station we'd listen to managed to do it right.

  11. treeeetop57

    My pet peeve is important plot points being given in oblique angles of tiny texts on tiny phones. Even on my huge tv, I have to go back, pause, and walk up to the screen just to see what is being said. Grrrrrrr.

  12. Gilgit

    I remember Siskel & Ebert reviewing the new innovation Digit Audio in movies. This must have been around 30 years ago. They concluded that it made the music better, but the voices were harder to make out. They hoped that would be improved as the technology matured. But, even though the creators now have complete control over how clear the voices are and how loud to make the music, voices are still often hard to hear.

    Of course, the audio does vary widely from movie to movie. Plus, not every old movie had good sound. The first time I heard Alien I assumed it was a bad copy, but there are several scenes where it is very hard to understand the dialog.

  13. Winslow2

    We use CC because my spouse's original language is Spanish, so accents (British, Southern) are sometimes difficult for him to process.

    Plus we're slowly going deaf.

  14. Rattus Norvegicus

    As a confirmed audiophile, but not extreme enough for those of my tribe who think my system is shit, I will say this behalf of home systems:

    1) If you buy a modern flat screen TV without having at least a high quality soundbar or a real surround sound system with a subwoofer, you sound will suck.

    2) Compression is not a huge factor. Most compression schemes throw out sounds which fade into the background. In my experience what this means is that high frequency sounds like cymbals have an abbreviated decay which causes some problems. However, Netflix uses Dolby Digital+ which has a higher bit rate than the original Dolby Digital. It gives you 7.1 channels of pretty damn good sound.

    3) It is really hard to mix for a home environment because homes differ so much. I have $4000 in speakers sitting in my living room. The sub rocks pretty hard and the surround effects work pretty well, although if I had a Dolby Atmos system they would be better.

    I went and saw Dune in a theater a couple of weeks ago and didn't have any dialog troubles, and while the soundtrack sounded great, it wasn't that much better than the presentation in my living room. A good home 5.1 (or better a 7.1) system will do a pretty good job of presenting a soundtrack. A cheap soundbar or even worse the speakers in a TV will sound horrible, though.

    1. n1cholas

      Isn't part of the problem that dialogue is often on the center channel which isn't as solid of a channel as right and left?

      It seems like changing your audio settings to make the center channel as upfront as the side channels might help, in addition to getting a decent sound bar with a good center channel.

  15. Vog46

    You start losing your hearing from the day you were born - it follows a pattern of decay. It is made worse by hobbies, occupation etc.
    I have struggled with my hearing and went to an ENT to get it checked, after I had retired from my job with state government. My hearing had declined but was not out of the range they anticipated
    3 years later I went back and I had gone outside the normal hearing loss parameters for my age. I asked if I needed a hearing aide. He was very succinct he said "you will reach a point where you will feel like you need them. When that happens come back and we will fit you for one. I have the justification to get the insurance to pay for them, but they are very bothersome to most folks. When you get frustrated enough to put up with them you will decide to get them."
    My loss seems to be in the high frequency spectrum especially.
    But I do note that advertisements are louder on the TV, and more easily understood. For THEM it seems to be more important to make sure the viewer understands what their trying to SELL rather than the TV networks who don't care, so long as you watch what they produce

  16. cephalopod

    I have always struggled with dialog. My hearing is great - I just struggle to match the sounds with words, especially if I can't see the speaker's face. I probably have some kind of sound processing disorder. My mother has the same problem.

    Closed captioning is a lifesaver. Because I have to read everything anyway, there is no barrier to watching stuff in other languages. The youngest learned to read quite well because she wanted to follow along with my Korean dramas.

    1. Crissa

      Damn those Korean dramas are good. I hate that I rarely have the time to spend paying attention to the tv to watch them.

  17. ScentOfViolets

    Chiming in with my own idiosyncratic experience, sometime in the teens I had my hearing tested. The results? I had the hearing range of a thirty-year-old; not quite the 20 - 20,000, but close. Unfortunately, as it turned out, I had problems with distinguishing sounds. IOW, I 'heard' conversations just fine, but I had problems distinguishing the separate words. I forget what that was called, but what it means is that if I'm at an event with six conversations going on around me, I can't tell the sounds apart, even at high volume. One conversation, even at low volume, I can hear just fine.

  18. Crissa

    The sound mixing is the biggie.

    If you listen to say, the Spanish-voice version of any Disney/Marvel show, the music and laugh track is much quieter than on the English-voiced version.

    And this repeats alot, and those are well-mixed, to the point you wouldn't know they used voice-over,

  19. Goosedat

    English subtitles may be needed for movies that have English/Scottish accents and I use them quite a bit. A streaming service that links to French TCM does not provide subtitles. The other night I happened to see Crimes at Midnight and could not understand one word of dialogue (except when John Guilgud delivered his lines.) I think this was due to the poor quality dubbing of dialogue in the studio rather than compression, but who knows?

    1. Martin Stett

      "The other night I happened to see Crimes at Midnight and could not understand one word of dialogue (except when John Guilgud delivered his lines.) I think this was due to the poor quality dubbing of dialogue in the studio rather than compression, but who knows?"

      Gielgud's diction remains legendary among Shakespearean actors. In "Chimes" both Baxter and Rodway do short imitations of him as they quote his character. Most of the non-Anglophones were dubbed in post. The whole production was a miracle of Wellesian improvisation.
      The much imitated Battle of Shrewsbury was filmed in a park in Madrid with about 100 extras; filmmakers with vastly bigger budgets have never come close.
      https://youtu.be/etNNWp0aW-Y

  20. Heysus

    I am not hard of hearing. My hearing is acute. I stopped watching movies, in the theatre or on TV(which I no longer own) as I could not hear the dialogue. The background music became the forefront and if the actors were speaking it was a whisper or a shout. Nothing in-between. I don't miss them at all. Give me a book, audio is good, no music.

  21. kahner

    this seems like a lot of conjecture and no data for old guys to explain why the kids these days don't make movies right and the reason we can't hear the dialogue isn't because we're old.

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