Watching a new show and constantly changing the volume is one of those small issues that has only gotten worse. Loud action scenes blast you back in your seat, then someone starts talking, and you can’t make out a word. Sometimes, the show was badly mixed, but that’s not always the case. The usual issue is a combination of things that started long before the content ever reached your TV, and it may be the reason you canโt hear the dialogue.
TVs are too thin to hold good speakers
Flat screens look great but sound terrible
When televisions used chunky cathode-ray tubes, their sheer physical bulk was actually great for the sound. A CRT set had to be deep, and it was about as deep as its screen was wide, since the internal electron gun needed that length to work.
That bulk was awful in every practical sense. It was heavy and power-hungry, and it had to be away from the wall at a distance that always made sure my other stuff would fall in the space it made. However, all that internal cabinet volume worked remarkably well as a speaker enclosure. The upside was that manufacturers could fit large, forward-facing drivers inside with plenty of room to breathe, and those drivers could make genuinely full sound.
This was clear enough through the low-mids and upper bass that dialogue landed naturally without you having to think about it. Then came the race to make televisions as thin as possible, and audio paid the price. It is such a contentious thing to say, but if you know about speakers, then you know that the space you give them matters a lot.
Modern LCD and OLED panels are usually under 25 millimeters deep, which sounds impressive until…