Few things are more annoying than the way sound is treated in the mass media. I can hardly stand to listen to our Sirius/XM radios any more because the in-between-songs blurbs and jabbering are about 20 dB louder than the songs.

"Stop yelling at me!!"

Neither J nor I can understand Jonny Lee Miller (Sherlock) on Elementary very well unless we turn the sound up...

Also, we're at the mercy of the way our brains interpret sounds. E.g.:

J Acoust Soc Am. 2007 Oct;122(4):2365-75.

Contribution of consonant versus vowel information to sentence intelligibility for young normal-hearing and elderly hearing-impaired listeners.

Kewley-Port D1, Burkle TZ, Lee JH.

Author information

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of information provided by vowels versus consonants to sentence intelligibility in young normal-hearing (YNH) and typical elderly hearing-impaired (EHI) listeners. Sentences were presented in three conditions, unaltered or with either the vowels or the consonants replaced with speech shaped noise. Sentences from male and female talkers in the TIMIT database were selected. Baseline performance was established at a 70 dB SPL level using YNH listeners. Subsequently EHI and YNH participants listened at 95 dB SPL. Participants listened to each sentence twice and were asked to repeat the entire sentence after each presentation. Words were scored correct if identified exactly. Average performance for unaltered sentences was greater than 94%. Overall, EHI listeners performed more poorly than YNH listeners. However, vowel-only sentences were always significantly more intelligible than consonant-only sentences, usually by a ratio of 2:1 across groups. In contrast to written English or words spoken in isolation, these results demonstrated that for spoken sentences, vowels carry more information about sentence intelligibility than consonants for both young normal-hearing and elderly hearing-impaired listeners.

Emphasis added.

(sigh)

Cheers,
Scott.
("Quit mumbling!!")