Movie sound mixers understand dialogue partly because they have rehearsed it

Evidence

To achieve high scores in speech intelligibility, a signal-to-noise ratio of 5 dB is good, and 15–20 dB nearly perfect. Noise, in this context, is everything other than the speech we want to hear. When several people talk at the same time, the noise is speech itself, and the sound spectra are very similar, making discrimination more difficult. In movies, the biggest problems are in the multichannel programs. Sound mixers pay great attention to dialog, but they have advantages over the rest of us. They get to hear each section of a film many times as they develop the audio design. They may know the dialogue before they even hear it and understand it even if they don’t pay attention. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1905

Categorization

• XREF: Explains why professional evaluations of loudspeaker/intelligibility differ from consumer experience — relevant to earlier chapters on listener training and preference testing.