Thank you. I thought I was old man yelling at clouds over this. Drives me crazy. The worst is when the sound editor thinks some dumb pop song really slaps and turns the volume WAY UP and drowns out everything else.

And OMG the low talkers. Low talking and dimly-lit scenes are all the rage these days. I think part of it is Galaxy Brain people in the streaming biz thinking this is how they save time and money.

Doesn’t it also have to do with how the sound is encoded and delivered? Most voice is on 5.1 is designed to go center speaker, so if your system lacks a center speaker and you have it set to home audio, instead of L/R it’s gonna be muted.

I saw a video that blamed some of it on advances in microphone technology. Actors used to speak directly into a mic but now sets have a bunch of tiny microphones hidden everywhere to pick up sounds.

In a perfect world, there would be the recommended mix, and then the apps (Netflix, Hulu, etc) would let you adjust the faders the way you can with EQ. Instead of one stream of sound, you can balance the voice/music/fx by yourself. Hell, throw EQ on each of those channels. Late at night and you don't want to bother the neighbors? Let me turn down the bass on the FX and Music channels. Also let me just turn down FX and Music channels in general because I can't fucking hear what the actors are saying.

Edit: I was talking to my wife about this subject and she was like "yeah, I can do this on my Peloton. Adjust the voice vs music"

So yeah. The technology exists. It may not be retroactive. Like movies and shows already made won't have the option (but vocal isolation plugins have come a long way). But we have the technology and bandwidth to do it moving forward.

I get what you're saying and I wish I didn't need subtitles, but it's kind of hard to understand what's going on when 90% of the dialogue in modern shows is unintelligible mush.

It's really easy to watch the movie, and to catch that one word in the sentence you want to look at without losing anything in the frame. People who watch with subtitles don't read every sentence, more like 30 words per movie, and subtitles and scenes don't change that fast, you have ample time to do some back and forth between the image and the text.

I'm with you. If you like subtitles, you do you I won't judge, they just personally drive me nuts. I try to ignore them when I watch with someone else, but they pull my eyes away from the movie. Plus they spoil jokes and ruin the timing.

Also, maybe I have super-ears, but I really haven't struggled to hear dialogue at all in the movies I constantly hear people complain about (mostly Nolan's). I'm genuinely confused about that controversy, because they sound fine to me.

I totally agree. The subtitles are so obtrusive that I’m unwillingly forced to look at them and it distracts from the video. They also completely ruin comedic timing. My wife, however, needs the subtitles on, so I live in a subtitle household now.
I’ve never had a problem generally understanding the dialog even with the terrible sound mixing, but the subtitles have ruined a bunch of jokes and completely block things I need to see on the screen very frequently.

Yeah I prefer when the subtitles are like half a second late so it doesn't ruin the comedic or dramatic impact of every line.

I don't mind using subtitles when I watch movies in my language but when it comes to anime or movies in other languages I prefer subtitles because it's better than not understanding a single word.

Yeah I agree, I think subtitles make the viewing experience worse. But the solution is better mixing, not just no subtitles

For me, it's several things:

As others have mentioned, sound mixing sucks on a lot of newer movies. Watching a movie with a pleasant max volume could render dialogue inaudible. Holy crap, that last batman movie was hard to watch.

While I watch movies, there are often a lot of things happening around me. The dog might be playing around, my girlfriend is having a phone conversation or there are noises from the kitchen. I am not great at mentally filtering out sounds, so subtitles help a lot.

I live in a country where subtitles have been around my whole life. Now that TV is on-demand rather than linear TV with hardcoded subs, most services enable subs by default, and it doesn't really bother me.

Because the sound is mixed for 50 speaker theater setups, and they don't bother remixing it for home theaters.

Industry is cutting corners, and are oddly prejudiced against inferior home theaters, even though that seems to be where the vast majority of media is consumed nowadays.

Also any lines that depend on timing of delivery (mostly jokes) get completely ruined

I can't read while I'm also trying to see things!

I would recommend using face to face conversations to judge your English comprehension.

I am a native speaker with perfect hearing and I still have to use subtitles with any movie made in the past ten years.