Can’t hear the dialogue in videos?
The music swells, the explosions are painfully loud, and the actual line of dialogue is a mumble. You turn the volume up and both get louder — the dialogue is still buried, and now the loud parts hurt. This is a mix problem, not a volume problem, and volume is the wrong tool for it.
Why speech gets buried
Film and TV are mixed for a room with separate speakers, where dialogue sits in its own centre channel. Your phone folds all of that down into one or two tiny drivers. The centre channel loses the space it had, and the music and effects that were meant to sit behind it land right on top.
On top of that, phone speakers produce very little low end, so mixes get compensated in ways that push the midrange around. Add a noisy bus or a running tap and the frequencies that carry speech are the first to go.
Where speech actually lives
Intelligibility of speech sits mostly between 1 kHz and 4 kHz. Consonants — the sounds that let you tell “fifteen” from “fifty” — live at the top of that band. Fundamental voice tones are lower, roughly 100–300 Hz, but that region mostly adds body, not clarity.
So the fix is not more of everything. It is more of the band that carries words, and less of the band that masks them.
The settings that work
- Lift 1–4 kHz. On a five-band equalizer that is usually the middle and second-from-right sliders. A few dB is enough; too much makes voices harsh.
- Cut the lows. Pulling down the 60 Hz band takes the rumble of music and effects out of the way. Counterintuitively this makes speech feel louder even though you removed energy.
- Leave the top alone or trim it. Very high frequencies add hiss, not words.
- Turn off Dolby or surround virtualisation. Widening effects push the centre image outwards, which is exactly the wrong direction for dialogue.
- Then add a little overall boost if the whole recording is quiet.
Do it once, not every time
The reason people give up on equalizers is that they set them for one video and then have to undo everything for music. Save the setting as a profile instead — a “dialogue” profile and a “music” profile — and switch with one tap.
Loudi ships a Voice preset that does exactly this shape: midrange up, lows pulled back. It applies to the device output as a whole, so it works in any video app, and you can save your own version as a profile. A limiter runs the whole time so the boost does not turn into crackle.