You’re not going deaf. It’s your TV.

We use closed captions when watching most TV shows (we don’t use it for Jeopardy and a few other shows). We just can’t understand what people are saying, especially the dialog on British shows. We assumed our problem was advanced age.

 I discovered, in a recent New York Times article, that 50 percent of Americans and most young people use subtitles, especially on streaming services such as Netflix. According to the article, the main problem is the speakers on your TV. Because TVs keep getting thinner and more minimal in design, their speakers are tiny and crammed into the back or bottom of the display where they blast sound away from your ears instead of toward them. One solution is to buy separate speakers, called soundbars. They cost $80 to $900.

 

But the problem is more complex than just bad speakers. To begin with, there’s the technical aspects of mixing, calibrating, and compressing sounds that must meet different specifications for different devices. There’s also the creative trend of “realism” in filmmaking. That is, actors no longer use “elocution” techniques, such as distinct pronunciation and articulation. These speech patterns would sound phony to us. Realistic dialog is often fast paced, mumbled, and accented. What’s more, music and other sounds compete with the actors’ speech, and darker imagery makes it more difficult to see mouth movements.

No wonder we—and most people we know—use closed captions.

Now, for your edification, I looked up what “closed” refers to. Here’s the answer: Closed captions can be turned on and off by the users. Open captions cannot.

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