Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529989
the only ones with statistics to back it up. The reasons for it are less concrete and somewhat open to interpretation. Listening environment is a factor—people are able to watch evermore content on the go. You can watch a movie on your phone on a flight, bus, or train, and this is inherently not an ideal playback situation from the standpoint of ease of listening, as good as noise canceling headphones are getting. Living spaces have changed since the 1970s when there was lot more thick carpet and drapery in the average home, whereas home design today is comprised of more flat, hard surfaces and open, reverberant space, which can be considered a step backward from an acoustics point of view. There is a cultural and psychological aspect to subtitle use, which is largely generational and skews certain ways in different age groups. You might expect that older demographics use subtitles more often, and you'd be right—there's data to suggest that older, more naturally hearing-impaired viewers have a hard time understanding dialogue even when all the other factors are working in favor of intelligibility. But it also skews up for younger viewers, and the reasons for this are less obvious: Younger audiences don't have the life experience and familiarity with different dialects, lexicons, and accents that people who have been around longer and experienced more have stored away, so there's a higher chance they won't catch something the first time. Coupled with ever-shortening attention spans and distracted viewing from the effects of social media and instant gratification culture (this is the "these damn kids" part of the article) and you have a perfect recipe for increased subtitle use in that demographic. Jokes aside, I do believe that distracted viewing is a major component here. A good percentage of parents I have spoken with about this (file this under "anecdotal") have told me that their kids have admitted that they turn on subtitles "just in case," so that they can "half-watch" and then jump back and read them at any point, and some said they switch between reading them and just listening, depending on the context. Now I find I can't not read subtitles if they are onscreen; my eye is just drawn to them regardless of how easy I find the dialogue to understand, so clearly this is another subjective, possibly generational thing. Probably the most frustrating factor for our community will be changes in TV set design. There has been a general decline in the size and quality of built-in TV speakers, and as a result, we see a downward trend in audio quality in TV sets. One big takeaway was that the main- feature buyers claim to be looking for in a TV is thinness of the unit and its bezel, so manufacturers sacrifice sound quality for a thin profile: Sound reproduction is likely an afterthought to many consumers. Manufacturers are also prioritizing volume over sound quality, and ironically, some of them may end up spending more still on limiting and normalizing software to get the most perceived level out of the cheap components at the expense of sound quality—it's entirely possible that if they'd just spent that budget on a better integrated sound system, they could have ended up with better sound with less effort and cost. That's a little speculative, of course. The other side of this is that many manufacturers also make and sell soundbars and other audio components, so they're perhaps not motivated to dissuade consumers from also buying an external sound system. There is an upshot here in that there are improvements currently being made in this area. One of our contributors, Derek Barrentine, worked on the Sky Glass TV set in the UK, which has a built-in six-speaker soundbar that supposedly marks a vast improvement over the average TV set sound system. I haven't heard it myself but the fact that they prioritized this is a welcome change. he panel delved into the effects of stylistic changes that have taken place in TV and film production over the last few decades. TV content has become much more cinematic, with bigger budgets and cheaper & more advanced VFX contributing to much more conceptually epic shows with far more dense soundtracks, which can inherently create mixes with dialogue that is more crowded or obscured. There has been a trend toward rushed production schedules in which the sound department may get less and less time to set up, rehearse, and properly capture takes. Acting styles have also become more subdued, with less projection and clarity in dialogue delivery (frequently informally termed "mumbly" or "tough guy speak") compared to the more theater-influenced styles that used to be more prevalent. There is a case to be made that this last issue is one of the bigger contributing factors affecting intelligibility, as dialogue that would be hard to discern if you were in the room with the speaker in real life is certainly going to have a hard time when recorded on a noisy T M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 39