Makes sense actually. Now that you mention it I can imagine Casablanca to be enjoyable to "watch" even with my eyes closed. A lot of the black and white stuff. I guess they were (better) written, more like plays, with actors projecting their voices. Now they do the mumble whisper thing, even native speakers are forced to turn on subtitles for increasingly terrible plots.

BTW you should know my comments had a +5 and now are being downvoted by the woke mob, who know what is best for you.

Off topic but have you noticed a trend in modern movies that it's harder to hear dialogue?

I find the music and background noise is so loud in modern movies that I struggle to hear some of the characters talk.

I thought I was just getting old but recently watched some older movies and found they were much easier to hear.

Well, now that you mention it. My take on this is pretty subjective because I am not a native english speaker. While I watch a lot of english-movies these days, I was brought up with a rich world of overdubbed movies in my native language. These overdubs tend to have a very good quality when it comes to clarity because they are always done in a studio afterwards. When I started to watch english movies, I was thrown into an abyss of very hard to follow dialogue, but that was mostly because I was not used to hearing the actors speak on set during whatever they were actually doing.

However, that said, I do also feel it is getting harder with more action-loaded productions, which is basically everything in the past 10 years or so.

Afaik, a lot of modern AAA dialogue gets re-recorded in the studio these days, and is then mixed to be inaudible in post because fuck us I guess.

Part of the problem with modern movies is they're designed for surround sound 5.1 systems or similar. In those systems, the middle front channel is generally used for dialogue, but that channel often gets entirely dropped when remixing for stereo systems. This predictably results in inaudible dialogue.

This was discussed on HN a few months ago, but I can't find a reference to that thread.

That’s one problem, not the only one.

If there’s a root cause it is that they make movies to get Oscars, not to be watched by the audience.

Some receivers have “dialogue boost” or otherwise let you adjust each channel individually.

More and more we just leave subtitles on, as too much dialog is easy to lose in the rest of the sound. I think it’s also a difference in how movies are made now; compare the pacing of Rocky with anything modern. Older movies stop the action to dialog; modern movies have quips over explosions

I've noticed my kids watch movies with the subtitles turned on because of this.

When I first got Disney+ because an ex-girlfriend wanted to watch Wanda, the app was misconfigured to have the audio description turned on. It's a pretty weird show, so it took me 3 episodes of being confused by the weirdness of the show to realize something was really off and it wasn't meant to be watched like that. Took me forever to find the setting to turn it off; and it got a bit more watchable after that.

The “subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing” on modern videos are a wonder and amazing. We regularly use subtitles because it can be hard to hear the movie over the kids, but SDH is great if you are mainly listening. Highly recommend everyone try it sometime.

Sometimes it is even a separate “language track” that describes what’s happening.