I'm nearly entirely convinced that this is just us millennials and generations adjacent getting old and not wanting to admit it. My friends can't hear the tv, my family can't, but I can and my hearing is very average. I've commented more in depth on a discussion of this phenomenon.
The Netflix show model is highly formulaic. Same cameras and mics, 8 episode budget contract, sent to the same post houses. If you want to work with Netflix, you don't mull over choices or do auteur film, you have an expedient, generic pipeline for mixing, color, etc that produces consistent results.
It's 98% business, just a race to see how much they can make using their method before Amazon or HBO can catch up.
Now I'm peeved about what a low effort crapshoot their mixing is is. I've made a few profiles for my receiver to help with levels and clarity, and we still end up needing subtitles. Oh, this is an action scene? I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't compressed the range out of it and then flat amplified it 12db. An intimate scene follows? Good thing you again compressed the shit out of that hot ass mic mix so we're fighting to pick out words over every rustle of fabric and hair right after we had to turn down the volume. It's atrocious.
No worries, I'm sure the next generation of shows will sprinkle some AI pixie dust over their pipeline to artificially "uncompress" the range again at the end (and generically sort everything that sounds like a voice into one channel, everything that sounds like background noise in another, etc, without context-awareness)
> I'm nearly entirely convinced that this is just us millennials and generations adjacent getting old and not wanting to admit it.
No, I have seen an audio engineer with golden ears claim that the industry has changed. He has increasingly been directed to mix with cinema sound systems in mind and in accordance with a current quiet-dialogue fad that filmmakers are following. The broad public that watches the content through streaming with a low-consumer-grade sound system is an afterthought in this process.
Exactly. It's much like the music industry (though kinda the opposite), where a bunch of people claim "you're just getting old, music today isn't any worse than in the 1970s". It's not true: the commercial music industry these days is completely different, and part of it is the sound engineering. Back then, they mixed music to be played on Hi-Fi systems at home, and music had very wide dynamic range; these days, they mix music to be played through earbuds in a noisy environment, and music is highly compressed (and the production process is just the tip of the iceberg).
It's not just the hearing capability, I have better than average hearing for someone who is 30 but I still struggle with movies without subtitles since English is not my primary language.
Its hard to understand what someone is saying even if I can hear the sounds, when it just sounds like mumbled gibberish.
Add on top rather arbitrary restrictions on subtitles based on region (on Netflix I cannot use English subs because of where I live), which is even more infuriating.
This seems pretty easy to test right? Put on The West Wing (early 2000s) and see if you can keep up. Put on any reality show from the last 5 years and see if you can keep up. I can do TWW, I can't do Bachelor in Paradise. Case closed IMO.
