Everything You Can Try if You Can’t Hear Dialog in Movies and Shows

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If you struggle to hear what's being said in the movies and shows you're watching, just know you're not alone. Whether your hearing is less than ideal, or the sound mixing could be better, or you're trying to watch and listen to something without disturbing the rest of the household, there are a lot of reasons why dialog might be hard to pick out.

The good news is that there are quite a few ways to fix the problem so you don't have to put up with missing out on dialog, which is a crucial part of understanding and enjoying what's onscreen. These are the options you can try, depending on the devices and apps you're using for streaming.

Check the Options in Your Apps

Your first port of call should be the apps you're using to watch whatever it is you're watching. At the very least you should be able to turn on closed captioning, and the option shouldn't be too hard to find: In most cases you'll see a closed captions icon (something that looks like a speech bubble) when you pause what's onscreen.

With Netflix, for instance, the icon is in the lower right corner. Select this, and depending on the film or show, you'll see a range of different audio and subtitle options. This feature isn't just for understanding what's being said in a foreign language; you can quite easily load up English closed captions for English dialog.

Some apps go beyond closed captions. Take Amazon Prime Video, which includes what it calls a Dialog Boost mode. You can find it on the closed captions menu. If you pause what you're watching, click the captions button (the box with lines across it) and choose one of the English Dialog Boost options. The feature uses AI (of course) to boost any spoken dialog that’s quiet relative to the rest of the audio.

YouTube TV is another streaming service with a built-in feature that can help: Pause anything you're watching, select the gear icon, then make sure Stable Volume is selected. This feature makes sure volume levels are consistent across dialog and other types of sound, and in theory will give you a better chance of hearing dialog.

Open the Settings on Your Devices

If changing those settings inside your actual apps doesn’t help, it's likely the device you're watching on will have a few options you can try. We can't cover every single TV and streaming box here, but the Apple TV 4K has an option to enhance dialog. With a film or show paused, tap the sound settings icon (a small sound wave inside a circle) to find the Enhance Dialog settings.

On several Sony Bravia TVs, meanwhile, there's something called Voice Zoom. You can enable it by going to Settings and choosing Display & Sound > Sound > Sound Customization > Voice Zoom. Other TVs, including models manufactured by Samsung and LG, have similar features—though the names of those features and where they can be found vary between manufacturers and model ranges.

Another option is to find the surround sound setting for your TV or streaming device and make sure it's correctly configured for the number of speakers you have. If your hardware is set up for a 5.1 surround sound system but you're only using two speakers in a stereo configuration, for example, some dialog might be lost.

If there's nothing on your streaming device, check your soundbar, if you've got one. These soundbars very often come with features for boosting the volume level of speech. With any Sonos soundbar, for instance, you can turn on Speech Enhancement inside the Sonos app for Android or iOS: Get to the Now Playing screen for your soundbar, then tap the Speech Enhancement icon (it looks like a small figure speaking).

Listen Through Headphones

Another option you've got here is listening through headphones, which means you can turn up the volume as much as you like without annoying the people you live with (or the people who live next door). We've previously written in more detail about connecting wireless headphones to your TV, but in short you simply need to find the right setting on your television and then put your Bluetooth headphones in pairing mode.

Let's take Roku TVs, streaming sticks, and streaming boxes as an example. One option is to install the Roku app on Android or iOS, then connect a pair of wired or wireless headphones to your smartphone, and listen to the audio through your phone while the movie or show plays on the big screen.

Another option is to connect a pair of Bluetooth headphones wirelessly to your Roku TV or device. (Not every Roku device can do this, but a lot of them can.) From the main Roku menu on the home screen, choose Remotes & devices > Wireless headphones > Add new wireless headphones and follow the instructions on screen.

This is one advantage of watching movies and shows through streaming apps running on a game console (like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X): They're set up with wireless headset support in mind, so you'll find plenty of headphones on the market that can connect to your console in seconds, and then stream the audio from your movies and shows straight to your ears.