It’s hard to convey in text but I completely flummoxed a worker in a British train office when I wanted a ticket Birmingham, saying it like the city in Alabama. Finally the person in the next booth said in a very clipped way, “Oi, 'e means Brmng’am.”
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Lucky you.
It has nothing to do with sound settings or accents for many of us.
Auditory processing disorders are difficult enough without being told we just don’t know how to set up our devices. We do know: we set the Closed Captioning just fine.
Edited to add: I owe @anon61221983 a refreshment!
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My wife immigrated from the UK and not long after she got here, there was an issue with a take out order so they called her, and they just could not understand her south London accent. After several tries, she just handed me the phone to fix it. Next day, she started working on Canadianizing her accent and now it’s very slight. I totally understand why she wanted to change her accent (being trans, she wasn’t a fan of being from the UK anyway), but dang do I miss that accent sometimes.
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It’s always been impressive to me just how much an accent can vary from one part of a country to another, even over pretty small distances in relatively small countries. For example I was riding my bike around Ireland and could barely understand some of the people with the thickest accents in the Southwestern part of the country (the land of some of my ancestors) but I know that I wasn’t alone- plenty of native Irish folks from just a short distance away also have difficulty understanding them.
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Not really a thing, since the human ability to hear certain tones/decibels declines as we age.
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Then you know exactly what it’s like trying to order in a Newcastle branch of WImpy.
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I would hesitate to describe this as a trend, so much as general progress. There have been periods where people have almost been expected to lay on regional accents a bit thick, and that might constitute a trend of sorts.
Listening to Patrick Stewart’s memoir recently, I learned about how and when he worked on his received pronunciation, and I reflected that, much as greater diversity in theatre and the arts is welcome, not only have we lost something intangible through the deprecation of RP, but actually the arts are far less open to people of less privileged class backgrounds now, than they were in the 50s.
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Black Country dialect is pretty distinctive (I’m not personally a fan, but there are a lot of people that take its preservation in culture very seriously) - in the same area there’s a town called Wallsall that is properly (that is, according to the inhabitants) pronounced more like ‘Warsaw’. This can present distinct problems when trying to buy train tickets home…
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Personally I find some built in tv speakers are actually easy to hear dialogue on as they emphasize the mid to high range. Similarly higher end speakers and setups are pretty neutral in their freuqency response so things sound clear to me.
Im contrast, some economical surround systems or soundbars sometimes really blast the lower frequencies creating a system that sounds fancy but I cant understand a thing.
That being said some mixes are just terrible on almost any system, and it takes some serious channel balance tweaking and dsp to not have the dialogue get burried in a sea of sound. Especially if I am trying to watch quietly while the kids are asleep.
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Damn, I think I got a little something at 14,500, but pretty much nothing for all of these.
Time marches on…
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When we know it’s a Guy Ritchie flick going into the player… on with the captions every damn time.
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“… convinced over farty-five sheep have been stolen.”
So, five of them (not much, really)… and all flatulent.
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small unobtrusive speakers that aren’t even aimed at ears are awfui for dialogue, especially when they are tuned to have “bass” for music.
And that’s what a whole generation of watchers have grown up with-- ever since the introduction of flat screen tvs.
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A very good point, i’ve done a bit of work in the screen industry and one of the things discussed is how poor representation is of people working behind the camera that are from working class backgrounds.
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Indeed, it does.
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When I lived in New York, I used to order a tall Americano and several times the server would ring it up as “two” Americanos.
And almost no one could understand how I pronounced the letter “N”
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That’s a great line! So many good lines in that movie.
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Like from 15 years ago I had the idea of a reality show spoof (ala Reno 911 or The Office) called “Keep Rolling!” where a camera crew follows around the camera crews for reality TV shows like Survivor or The Amazing Race or Love Island. It would be spoofing mainly the reality show contestants, through the eyes of the production people who have to manage and film the chaos.
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Yep. Center speaker is best for dialogue.
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