archive.today • Why is everyone watching tv with the subtitles on? - The Atlantic
Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for "Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale" and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it's been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them.
That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones' run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she's got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show's final season, AT&T bought HBO's parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.
Vox did a youtube video about this and the sound engineer they had on gave some super lame excuses as to why "things must be this way": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
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If you're genuinely sick of it, and own a laptop/computer, hook it up to the TV via an HDMI cable and under windows 11 turn on "loudness equalisation" Video here for more info .
I haven't even thought about this problem in over a decade, I'm am surprised they haven't fixed it yet though, figured they would have with everyone streaming movies these days, having the audio designed for 5.1+ surround sound cinema usage is a bit silly when no one is watching it that way anymore.
The thing that's frustrating is she does say exactly what the problem is but in the most soy way possible is like "but the studios really don't want to stop doing that" so she just kept talking about the other things that don't really matter.