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NY Times Article About Normal Hearing People Turning on Closed Captioning Because of Bad Speech Streaming

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Interesting NY Times article by Brian Chen in the Tech section. He said speech recognition can be difficult even for normal hearing folks with streamed media because movies, especially, are made for high-quality audio systems in theaters, and TVs are getting thinner and don’t have the greatest built-in speakers. He also attributed the compression/decompression of streamed media as part of the problem. So even normal hearing folks are turning on closed captioning to help cope.

He looked at adding an outside speaker to a TV system (it helps, he said) and Amazon Prime’s new speech-boosting feature. That also helps but is not a magic bullet, he concludes. In the end, he said some actors just have bad enunciation, and there is no cure for that.

Sorry the article is behind a paywall. The article is better than my poor summary!

Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)24

Article says: “About 50 percent of Americans — and the majority of young people2 — watch videos with subtitles on most of the time, according to surveys1, in large part because they are struggling to decipher what actors are saying.”
If better-hearing folks struggle with this, no soundbar or speech-enhancing software will save us either… For me, one of the advantages of subtitling is that this taught me to speed-read at a very young age (in the Netherlands, all foreign broadcasts have standard subtitling). On the minus side, the quality of the transcripts, especially here in France, is often atrocious.

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