Garbled Dialog - TV's Biggest Audio Problem?

By Thomas Hannaher

More and more people can't understand dialog on TV shows and movies – because Hollywood is experimenting too much with audio mixing techniques, because TV sound systems are worse than ever, and because 95 million people are over 50 years of age and have some degree of hearing impairment. Some details...
1. Hollywood is using more adventurous audio mixing techniques – often resulting in unclear dialog. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post recently described a blockbuster Hollywood movie of having "a muddy, thuddingly loud sound design, in which the score and similarly thumping sound effects render spoken dialogue a submerged garble." She's not the only one complaining. Dozens of articles in the last two years complain about soundtracks with muddled, hard-to-understand dialog. From Downton Abbey to the Walking Dead to football announcers, it's an epidemic.
2. TV manufacturers put very little effort or expense into TV speaker systems, often using half-inch

speakers aimed downwards. The dark secret of TV manufacturers is that they don't care about sound quality. For years TV designers have been in a market-share war, trying to outdo the competition with thinner, sleeker TVs...which simply aren't big enough to hold good sound systems. The sound systems in most ultra high definition TVs – with tiny, downward-facing speakers – do not sound as good as the sound system in a 1952 Philco black and white TV.
3. Over 95 million U.S. citizens are over 50*...and many of them have some hearing loss. The result is that huge numbers of people are finding it increasingly difficult to understand dialog on television broadcasts.
So what's the solution? A quality TV sound system, preferably one that puts a focus on vocal clarity. For most people a five-speaker surround sound system is not the answer. They're too complicated, and too expensive.
Sound bar home theater systems offer a much simpler alternative – but most of them do not include center channel speakers, and very few of them even attempt to address the issue of dialog clarity for people with hearing impairment.
ZVOX Audio now offers TV sound systems that include a feature called AccuVoice® that
uses hearing aid technology – a combination of dynamic compression and equalization to bring vocals forward, while minimizing the interference of other sounds. This feature creates a new category of TV sound system...one that doesn't even have name. But it's a very important category. Just ask three people over 50 if they can understand dialog on their current set. You might be surprised at the answers you get.

* 2010 U.S. Census data.
® ZVOX and AccuVoice are registered trademarks of ZVOX Audio LLC.

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