Needing subtitles to follow a conversation on screen feels so normal today. That’s because it isn’t a hearing problem for most people. It was built for a setup you likely don’t have. However, you can increase the volume for just the dialogue; you just have to know what to press.
Movies are mixed for theaters and sound awful at home
Your two speakers cannot handle a full theater mixed
I hate the way sound is mixed in movies today. I usually watch older movies with my family to show them old winners, and the mixing felt like it wasn’t made to be watched at home. Movies and TV shows seem to be put together on dubbing stages that are carefully designed to match the exact sound pressure levels you’d get in a movie theater.
It’s smart that sound engineers are going for a theatrical feel, using formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X to create this big, immersive audio environment. The dynamic range is massive, and you can have a whisper and then an explosion, and the difference between them can be 40 or 50 decibels.
In the theater, dialogue sits almost entirely on a center channel speaker that’s placed right behind the screen, so music, sound effects, and all the action can come at you from every other direction without ever getting in the way of the words. However, all that really falls apart when you realize it only works for theaters.
When that same mix gets compressed and sent to your home, everything falls apart. Your living room doesn’t have acoustic treatments. There’s background noise from the fridge, the street, or the air conditioner. You’re constantly reaching for the remote to turn things up and down.
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For some reason, the dialogue is always too low, and the sound of the music and explosions is way too high. The worst part is that a full 5.1 or Atmos speaker setup at home isn’t very common. Most people I know just have a TV or soundbar that has to take all those channels and fold them down into just two speakers.
The center channel holds the dialogue, and it has to get split and mixed equally into the left and right speakers. Because you have two speakers playing the same voice track from different positions, the sound waves interact in the air and cancel each other out in certain frequencies.
There is so much that goes into this, but basically, needing subtitles isn’t always on you. It’s because of how media is mixed lately.
Look for voice boost or night mode to balance the sound
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There are a few ways to make the dialogue stand out more, and I do this on every single TV I have. You can usually find them right in the Setup, Audio, or Sound menus on most TVs. These options are built-in digital signal processing modes that are specifically there to help make voices clearer.
The bad part about this is that each brand uses its own name for the feature, so finding the right one can mean digging through many confusing menus. On LG TVs, you’re usually looking for something called Clear Voice or Clear Voice Pro. You can select that manually in the Sound Mode menu or let the TV handle it automatically with the AI that adjusts things as the movie plays. On other TVs, you’re looking for something called the Dialogue Enhancer or Voice Mode. I’ve also seen one called Voice Enhancement and Active Voice Amplifier.
If you’re using an external streaming device, you might see it called Voice Boost, Speech Enhancement, or just plain Voice Mode. There is probably a reason that every manufacturer has a different name for this feature, but it has only made things more complicated for the user.
If that’s not enough, you can use Night Mode, Dynamic Range Compression, or Loudness Management. I like using it when the other option isn’t enough. It normally acts like a volume balancer that compresses the dynamic range to smooth out sudden loud spikes.
Boosting voices could mess with the rest of the sound
Clearer words could make big scenes sound a little flat
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This isn’t a simple fix that will be perfect the minute you start using it. Any kind of digital signal processing tends to mess with the audio quality. Mix engineers spend a lot of time calibrating the dynamic range so that quiet, whispered dialogue can be heard clearly alongside much louder background effects, all to make you feel a certain way. This is not as simple as it sounds.
When you switch on dynamic range compression, auto-leveling, or automated voice boosts, you are directly changing and probably distorting what the mixers wanted. You’ll squash the peaks so much that a big, sweeping action scene could end sounding flat and lifeless in the worst-case scenario. Also, boosting certain vocal frequencies can add in-phase issues, pre-echo, and a metallic or hollow quality to the music playing behind the dialogue.
It’s noticeable, especially if your volume is higher. However, it’s not so noticeable that it destroys the quality of the movie itself. If you were looking for movie theater-quality movies, you should either go to a movie theater or set up a home theater yourself.
For anyone who can’t afford it but wants better sound from their TV, you can get a soundbar from Amazon for under $100. This is a small but great way to improve the quality of the sound.
This isn’t perfect
Turning on dialogue enhancement won’t give you a perfect result. You’re overriding choices that sound engineers made deliberately, and that can hurt the sound. However, for everyday watching, the difference between straining to catch every third word and actually following a conversation is worth a small hit to audio quality. If the built-in settings still aren’t cutting it, a soundbar does more work than most people expect.