Clear dialogue can make or break the viewing experience when watching movies or TV shows. Whether you’re diving into a dramatic film or binging your favorite series, crisp and clear dialogue ensures you don’t miss a single word. There’s a growing contingency that a lot of modern movies and shows have dialogue that is too quiet or hard to understand. This has spawned dialogue-enhancing algorithms with streaming services like Amazon Prime Video. Still, people are having issues hearing voices in movies and TV. Could wearing headphones be a solution to this?
Many factors go into sculpting the soundtracks we hear in our media, with professional mixers and editors making sure we’re hearing a balanced mix coming through our home sound systems. Most movies and TV adhere to a level of dynamic range that places dialogue at a specific loudness range. Dialogue is certainly an important part of the mix, it’s not always the loudest part of it depending on the scene. In my experience, dialogue is mixed in a way that forces you to lean in and pay attention. It’s an artistic choice, but it’s a choice made based on limitations during production.
What Makes Headphones Great For Dialogue?
Many factors can determine whether or not a set of headphones is optimal for listening to dialogue. Open-back headphones work best for movies and TV due to their extended soundstage which is the closest experience to listening to speakers. A wider soundstage allows for dialogue to sound more natural like the physical voices are coming from the screen and not from inside of your head. You’ll also want a pair of headphones that have good midrange clarity. Most dialogue sits in the mids, so having headphones that emphasize these frequencies is ideal.
Best High-End Headphones for Dialogue in Movies and TV
Sennheiser HD Series
Sennheiser is known for its refined sound, and any selection from their HD series open-back headphones should do the trick. Whether it’s the HD 600, 650, 660S2, or 800s, you should get exceptional dialogue clarity that feels crisp and natural. The open-back design of these headphones allows for greater immersion that does justice to most soundtracks within the visual medium.
This is especially true for the HD 800s, which have one of the best soundstages you’ll hear, clearing the right amount of space for the dialogue, sound effects, and music to perform equally. It’s a very pricy headphone though, and the other HD models like the 660S2 still do a great job extracting the nuances of voices.
This popular studio headphone is a great fit for your home theater setup. The 1990, with its superb detail retrieval, is able to highlight the softest whispers in your movies and TV. If you enjoy the soundstage that open-back headphones grant you, but also cherish isolation, the 1990 considers both aspects. You get a less airy feeling that Sennheiser’s offerings give you. As a result, you get a similar level of immersion and midrange clarity that feels more controlled.
The Meze Empyrean is the most premium headset I’ll mention. This planar headphone has incredibly lush qualities where dialogue is extremely clear. While the Empyrean is a big investment its rich sonic personality is unlike a lot of headphones you’ll hear. It will definitely enhance your film/TV-watching experience unfolding every detail in a cinematic landscape.
Going back down to a more affordable range we have the HiFiMAN Ananda. There are a couple of good planar headphones from HiFiMAN, but I think the best for hearing better dialogue from movies and TV is the Ananda. Out of every headphone from HiFiMAN’s lineup, the Ananda provides the most balance and accuracy and makes dialogue very easy to localize.
One of the absolute best headphones for critical listening makes for one of the best options you can make for hearing better dialogue. It extracts all the details you could need from voices, with a level of precision that is hard to replicate. With the LCD X, dialogue will never feel more lifelike and natural.
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