This is the real reason why TV audio has gotten so bad

Watching a new show and constantly changing the volume is one of those small issues that has only gotten worse. Loud action scenes blast you back in your seat, then someone starts talking, and you can't make out a word. Sometimes, the show was badly mixed, but that's not always the case. The usual issue is a combination of things that started long before the content ever reached your TV, and it may be the reason you can’t hear the dialogue.

TVs are too thin to hold good speakers

Flat screens look great but sound terrible

When televisions used chunky cathode-ray tubes, their sheer physical bulk was actually great for the sound. A CRT set had to be deep, and it was about as deep as its screen was wide, since the internal electron gun needed that length to work.

That bulk was awful in every practical sense. It was heavy and power-hungry, and it had to be away from the wall at a distance that always made sure my other stuff would fall in the space it made. However, all that internal cabinet volume worked remarkably well as a speaker enclosure. The upside was that manufacturers could fit large, forward-facing drivers inside with plenty of room to breathe, and those drivers could make genuinely full sound.

This was clear enough through the low-mids and upper bass that dialogue landed naturally without you having to think about it. Then came the race to make televisions as thin as possible, and audio paid the price. It is such a contentious thing to say, but if you know about speakers, then you know that the space you give them matters a lot.

Modern LCD and OLED panels are usually under 25 millimeters deep, which sounds impressive until you realize there's essentially no room left inside for speakers. OLEDs are usually the worst for this because they're so focused on picture quality that they leave almost nothing for audio.

You get the audio equipment stuffed into tiny drivers that then get cramped and poorly sealed in whatever space is left. To fit at all, those speakers end up pointing downward along the bottom edge or firing straight back toward the wall. Neither direction points at the person watching.

Wall-mounted televisions are worse because if their speakers are not facing you, they're just banging off the wall. So while having a thin television looks cool, it comes at a huge cost if you're not willing to buy a soundbar.

Movie sound setups are not the same as a living room

Shoving surround sound into stereo squashes the dialogue

Big-budget movies and prestige TV shows are mixed in dedicated sound studios built to mimic commercial cinemas. These stages use elaborate speaker setups like 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Atmos, and so on. Every sound has its own carefully assigned channel. Dialogue goes almost entirely through a central speaker, while music, ambient noise, and action effects get spread across the left, right, and surround channels.

That separation is the whole point, because the mixers want your ears to naturally pick out a voice when it isn't competing for space with everything else. The problem is that most people watching at home have a standard TV with two speakers. So before that content ever reaches you, it has to be collapsed from a full, multichannel mix down to basic stereo, and that process quietly destroys the voices.

One of the issues is that many directors today deliberately let music and sound effects overwhelm the dialogue in certain scenes. I hate it the most, but it's usually just a stylistic choice to create a more cinematic, lifelike feel. That's fine in a real theater when it is seen as it is supposed to be, but not while streaming.

Those loud action sequences spike the peak volume average, so you can barely hear what people are trying to say. Streaming platforms also generally compress audio files to reduce the amount of data being transmitted, and that compression strips away subtle details that help voices sound clear and distinct in the first place.

By the time a movie's theatrical soundtrack has been folded down to stereo, normalized, compressed, and finally pushed through two tiny downward-firing speakers, the music and effects still carry their punch. That's because they were designed to survive that journey, but voices weren't. They get squeezed, drowned out, and phase-canceled at every step, and even a flawlessly mixed soundtrack doesn't stand much of a chance by the end of it.

You'll need extra gear or menu tweaks to fix it

Adding a soundbar lets you actually hear the voices

If you want to fix your TV's audio, the most straightforward option is to stop relying on its built-in speakers and get a soundbar. Thin TVs just don't have the physical space for decent speakers, and a soundbar solves that by putting larger drivers in a proper enclosure that actually points sound toward you instead of down at the floor or back at the wall.

If dialogue is your main issue, stepping up to a 3.1-channel soundbar makes a noticeable difference. The dedicated center channel focuses specifically on voices, which gets around the problem of speech getting lost in the mix.

For a bigger upgrade, a full surround sound setup with an A/V receiver and 5.1 or 7.1 speakers is the way to go. This puts each audio channel exactly where it belongs in the room. It costs more and takes up more space, but it also means the audio doesn't have to go through the compression and processing tricks that tend to muddy things up.

If new hardware isn't in the budget, your TV's audio settings are worth digging into. Look for options like "Dialogue Boost," "Night Mode," or "Dynamic Range Compression" in the audio menu. While they aren't the perfect alternative, they work better than doing nothing at all. It is also worth checking whether your TV's audio output is set correctly for your actual setup, because feeding a 5.1 signal to basic stereo speakers tends to make everything sound muddled.

TVs are changing

A soundbar helps, but it's another device, another remote, and another cable to manage. Sure, some of the solutions will work, but they're just more work. What's frustrating is that the underlying issue is because of decisions made by display manufacturers and sound engineers who aren't really thinking about someone watching alone on a couch at night. Knowing why it happens doesn't fix it, but it's good to know why this happens.