I enjoy special effects and thumping bass as much as the next man, but like most of you I imagine, I care a lot about dialogue. I don't treat movies and TV as rollercoaster rides — I engage with their plots and themes, and I can't do that if it's difficult to follow what characters are saying. Give me intelligible dialogue on a cheap soundbar over muffled conversations on 7.1-channel home theater system.
You don't need to upgrade your devices to get clearer conversations, though. Chances are there's at least one accessible solution that will fix dialogue without having to resort to subtitles. Your options will depend on the exact hardware combination you're using, naturally.
Look for different labels
If you're relying on your TV's internal speakers, this is pretty much your only option. The good news is that any recent TV should have some sort of dialogue enhancement option built in, located under one of its Sound or Audio menus. Bear in mind that TV makers frequently like to rebrand this tech — Roku calls it Speech clarity, for instance, and Sony sometimes refers to it as Voice Zoom.
What does this tech do in practice? Depending on the implementation, it boosts vocal frequencies, isolates them, and/or turns on dynamic range compression that lowers loud sounds while raising quiet ones. One way or another, voices become more prominent in the audio mix. Some platforms may offer different levels of…