Rabbits Against Magic by Jonathan Lemon for August 31, 2023

Subbed is always preferable to dubbed. /animepurist

Back when Oasis was the biggest band in the UK, MTV and VH1 added subtitles to their interviews shown in the US.

Just not youngsters…subs on let you enjoy more of the nuance of the dialogue.

So it’s not just me! I thought I was going deaf. So the sound quality and the actors’ articulation really are different these days. Whew….

There’s few things more disorienting than when the subs and the audio are different words.

I’ve started using closed captioning because the music drowns out the dialogue in scripted shows. News, outdoor and sports shows are OK.

[Ha!]

I don’t get it! Why is the music so LOUD you can’t hear the dialog?

The good news, according to Onnalee Blank, the four-time Emmy Award–winning sound mixer on Game of Thrones, is that it’s not your fault that you can’t hear well enough to follow this stuff.

It’s not your TV’s fault either, or your speakers—your sound system might be lousy, but that’s not why you can’t hear the dialogue.

“It has everything to do with the streaming services and how they’re choosing to air these shows,” Blank told me.

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.

✁

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.

“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness."

“So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.” ✁ ✁

~

The Atlantic

Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On?

Curiously, the commercials have no trouble at all being heard…

should have put in a different color

I’m guilty of this! Does that mean I’m young?!

Great concept! (audience applauds)

I need real-life subtitles. My rock and roll ears aren’t holding up so well these days.

I hate it when the CC dialog preceeds the spoken words, especially at a moment when it ruins the surprise of a scene.

Jonathan, I’m honored! You read my comment on Shoe yesterday:

“I put captions on because most actors “act” and I can’t understand a word they are saying. And also for the Brit stuff, no one can understanding what they are saying”

And your art is great, as usual and today’s libretto is funny thanks for a great comic

I am delighted to have helped…

My parents used to have closed caption battles. My mom had trouble understanding the British actors in some of the BBC mysteries on PBS. One such program was watching John Nettles as Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby on “Midsomer Murders”. Nettles had a tendency to let his voice drop as he spoke and my mom found it difficult to comprehend. She used to call him “Chief Inspector Mumbles” and would ask me to turn on the closed captions. However, my dad would complain, as he found the captions distracting.

I prefer subtitles.

Not just young people.

mumblemumblemumble (mumblemumblemumble)

Mr. Wiggly: Wiggly is in the 1st panel wondering what our 2 heroes are babbling about. The reason he doesn’t understand is that worms have no ears.