Does anyone else find it hard to understand what is being said in films?

[Turquoise]

I think there are three things at play here.

1. The dialogue is recorded separately and then overlaid onto the film, meaning the movements of the actor's mouth are very slightly out of sync with their voice. If you compare and contrast it with a TV show which was filmed live on set, you'll notice the difference.

2. So many actors mumble. I can barely understand anything Marlon Brando says in The Godfather. It's just a bunch of husky exhalations to my ear.

3. The dialogue is artficial. Nobody talks in quips or riddles or really long poetic sentences. Same reason I can't listen to audiobooks.

Do I have poor hearing? A low verbal IQ?

Does anyone actually understand what's going on in a James Bond film or do we just like watching fight scenes and spectacles that are really a machine gun?

 

[Endless Torment]

I think modern sound mixing just fucking sucks.

 

[Cougar Pump]

It's a very widespread phenomenon nowadays, a combination of factors:
- Poor sound mixing or, to be charitable, a more true-to-reality mix at the expense of vocal clarity. It used to be that actors would enunciate to deliberately enhance the vocals, and during production more emphasis was placed on clarity than accuracy. Now that seems to be less true.
- Most sound is mixed for surround and down-sampled for stereo. This is a problem if you don't have a surround setup with a strong center channel where the vocals will mostly be mixed. Most stereo down-mixing does not place enough of the center channel into L/R, and so the vocals end up weak.

Best solutions are:
- Have a surround setup with a strong center that you can boost
- Consume media with the original surround mix audio track and ensure there's no resampling going on in the pipeline (either by you or by whoever mastered the media)
- Turn on subs

Using subs is pretty standard now, and IMO it's mostly due to voices being harder to understand in a lot of modern content.

 

[Übertroon]

You should have your hearing checked

 

[Pedophobe]

Is this on your TV or in general? Dialogue isn't normally noticeably out-of-sync even in movies but I have seen it happen with some setups.

 

[clara red bottoms]

Do I have poor hearing?

Yes

 

[Turquoise]

You should have your hearing checked

Can you type that a bit louder, please?

 

[卐卐卐]

The dialogue is artficial. Nobody talks in quips or riddles or really long poetic sentences. Same reason I can't listen to audiobooks.

You may be slow

 

[Glory To Arztotska]

I tend to play video games with subtitles on even for English-speaking characters so I'd say yes.

Some sort of auditory processing snag I think.

 

[Mesh Gear Fox]

Yes, I watch with subtitles. I have some hearing loss so it can be difficult to discern everything.