More than once I've found myself activating subtitles to understand what someone said in Spanish, but the situation is much worse when it comes to English. A growing number of English speakers are surrendering to subtitles as they fail to capture the actors' dialogue, and the question is… why? A couple of years ago, the folks at Vox offered us a very good answer, and it remains perfectly valid today. Are the actors, the sound, or both?
I admit that my English for "holding a conversation" has several gaps, but I always think I can understand any movie or series dialogue without help… until I end up turning on subtitles. Now, I'm not alone: complaints from viewers about not understanding what an actor says are multiplying online, and it affects both screens. What's happening? The folks at Vox went looking for an answer in early 2023 and found it thanks to Austin Olivia Kendrick, a professional dialogue and ADR editor. The most interesting part? Austin admitted that she also turns on subtitles.
Subtitles in the Same Language: A Fad or a Necessity?
The problem is more complicated than it appears on the surface, but it starts with technology: older microphones not only had significant technical limitations, but they also forced actors to "direct" their voices to get a good take. Today, a normal scene has an average of two main microphones, and each actor has their own hidden "lavalier" to ensure nothing escapes. That means actors can adopt a much softer and more natural tone, confident that the microphone will capture their dialogue.
Of course, "natural" becomes a double-edged sword, and the video cites Tom Hardy, an extraordinary actor with a certain tendency to mumble. This is where the editor comes in: Austin describes her work as "doing surgery on words", but she's not a magician either. If a dialogue is beyond any editorial magic, it's necessary to move to the territory of ADR, or "Automated dialogue replacement". In essence, the actor re-records the affected line in a more controlled environment; however, ADR is a tool with little use these days, for a simple reason... money. Actors, editors, engineers, everyone must get their share in those sessions.
The next step is frequency separation. In other words, "you have to make room" for the voice to come out clean, without interference. So why not "increase the dialogue volume" and be done with it? Unfortunately, such an edit would destroy the dynamic range, that is, the range between the quietest and the loudest sound. A low voice cannot have the same volume as an explosion, because the effect would be ruined. As if that weren't enough, the dynamic range drags its limits, and to highlight a sound, you have to lower the volume of the rest, or we enter clipping and distortion.
Obviously, we can't ignore the director's decisions. Without a doubt, the most emblematic case is that of Christopher Nolan, criticized multiple times for the audio of his films. The official explanation? He refuses to mix audio for movie theaters that aren't up to par, something similar to what George Lucas did at the time (who ended up founding THX with Tomlinson Holman for Return of the Jedi). That brings us to the biggest piece of the puzzle: Many of the audio tracks we hear in series and movies were not mixed "for us", but for movie theaters. For example, Dolby Atmos is a monster of 128 tracks, but all that content must be reprocessed (downmix) for 7.1, 5.1, conventional stereo, and even mono.
To finish... speakers. The ones that come in new TVs are horrible. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, same situation. Besides being ultra-compact, in most cases they don't point at the user, pulverizing any possibility of getting clear sound. In short, turning on subtitles is the path of least resistance to solve a very complex problem, one that won't necessarily disappear in the short term.
