Deafening Volume Levels at Cinemas Nowadays - Permanent Hearing Damage?

Manxman_in_exile

What I find interesting is watching the Talking Pictures channel on TV.  (I know - this thread is about the cinema, but let me finish...).

For some years my wife and I had thought we had become progressively deaf because no matter how much we turned up the volume on our TV we found it almost impossible to follow the dialogue in modern films without turning on the subtitles.

Once we started watching our preferred B&W films on Talking Pictures we realised that our hearing was not as bad as we thought it was.  The real problem was the intrusive background music in modern films (and BBC documentaries) and the habit of method actors to slur all their lines so that they all sound like a drunken Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

Watching (or listening to) a "proper" old film with actors speaking clearly and with minimal or no music over the dialogue was a revelation.