In particular, do people filming TV shows find the need to use them anymore? It's getting worse and worse, but I don't know if I'm going deaf or if the sound guys making TV shows are really more interested in the sounds of cars driving by, clothes rustling, and all other environmental sounds than they are in the people talking.

It's getting to the point where I'm having to watch TV shows with the closed captioning on just so that I can understand what the fuck people are saying. Add to that the fact that half the time they seem to forget to include the closed captioning halfway through the show and I'm getting more and more frustrated. Anyone else have this problem?

Are you watching on a surround sound system? Try messing around with the pro logic modes, bumping up the volume on the center channel, etc. I do agree that the basic mixing of the average TV show tends to not give enough volume to voices, but I've compensated by bringing down the volume on my left/right channels and bringing up the volume on the center. Obviously won't help for standard stereo recording, but it takes care of most things I watch.

Yeah, I can try that, but I shouldn't have to. In fact, I specifically got a new stereo system in the hopes that they were just mixing TV shows for surround these days and I was just missing out by having only stereo. Seems I was wrong.

Um, yup, every time I've had that problem (can't hear dialogue but the music and sound effects are loud) it's because the center channel speaker is turned down too low.

Overall, I've found surround systems generally have center channels default far too low. Early on when surround systems were first being manufactured, they'd even put weaker amps on the center channel so that you had to really crank the center channel to hear the dialogue at all.

On the other hand, I don't think it would hurt too much if the monologue were mixed into the front left/right a little more than it usually is. It obviously depends on the particular movie/show you're watching as to how things are mixed, but in most cases, it seems voices only make a token appearance on the front left/right channels. I know the idea is to have separation from music and effects, but it seems goofy to have the most important part of a show be almost entirely dependent on one out of six speakers.

It's not just an HD home theater issue. I've found my self hitting the instant replay on my Tivo in order to catch some comments that are mumblegarbled. This is on a 10+ year old RCA stereo telly.

Have you considered the possibilty that it might, at least in part, be due to simply getting older ?

No doubt hearing gradually deteriates as you get older and most of us here are reaching that age where the first signs of ageing start to appear.

I haven't noticed any change in my hearing, but I have noticed other signs of ageing occuring. I have been short sighted since I was in my late teens, but I have started to notice that I need to take my glasses off to read small print, so bi-focals can't be far away.

The surprising change that I have experienced, that I wasn't expecting, is the change in how quickly my body heals. A few years ago if I banged my shin and picked up a graze/cut it would only take a couple of weeks until there was no sign of the injury at all. Nowadays while the initial wound heals just as quickly, the remains of the scar stay visible for many months afterwards.

On the plus side, I am now the lightest I have been for ten years. Now at 217 lbs, still a way to go to get to my target of 190 lbs though. I finally found a change in diet that had the desired effect (I just don't eat too many carbs after 3pm, simple eh ?).

Hmmm, that got kind of off topic...

I suppose it's possible, but it's not like turning up the volume helps. It's that the voices are so much quieter than everything else, so if I am going deaf, then it's selective to that range of frequencies, which I suppose is possible.

Oh, and, in particular, I have no trouble whatsoever understanding TV shows that were recorded more than ten or fifteen years ago, and, in fact, often have to turn the TV down when I watch one of them. (Unless it's a British TV show, where you guys always seem to have had a fetish for recording every clothes rustle.) Howto shows also don't seem to have the problem.

Okay, first, my complaint that the environmental sounds are louder than the voices has absolutely nothing to do with how many audio channels were recorded. It has to do with the fact that the voices are mixed too low. Period. Second, the fact that I can fix this by turning up the center channel is just a fortunate artifact of how audio is mixed these days. My point is that it should be mixed properly to begin with and those people that like to struggle to make out what's being said should be the ones forced to turn down their center speakers.

And there's not a phase problem. Oddly enough, my reciever takes those old mono programs and pushes them through more than one speaker, and since I can understand them fine, that's not the issue. Also, I have the same problem with the new stereo that I had with the old one with different speakers and different speaker cabling. And I just hooked the new one up and took care to make sure I didn't swap phases.

Well, apparently the problem is living in Raleigh, as basically everyone I know IRL has the same problem.

Maybe it's your cable provider or something. Doesn't seem to be a problem here.

DirecTV.

Just to chime in, I've got my center channel set 2 or 3dB higher than the rest of the speakers, and that seems to moderately help the situation. Of course, with the sad state of modern TV writing, it's unclear that you're missing much.