I know age is affecting my (and my wife's) hearing..

But I've long suspected there was more to it than that.
Besides unintelligible dialogue, wild variation in levels, particularly from scene-to-scene and between dialogue, music and sound-effect sequences convinced me more was at work.

Part of it is that we watch almost all our movies on video disc, and that the degree of sound tweaking the technology now allows on our equipment far exceeds our understanding of how to control it. (Why should I have to navigate four nested levels of menus to boost the treble a bit? That's not my job.) I still do not know what Surround, Dolby or any of that shit means, much less what it does. I realize modulating sound is as complex and subtle as modulating imagery, but I understand optics and image processing as a professional, I was trained that way. All I know about
sound is volume, woofer and tweeter, and that's all I ever want to know.

Many years ago I noticed something else. The British dramas I like to watch on PBS have awful sound, particularly when dialogue is involved. And I refuse to believe only Americans are good sound engineers. I know all Brits sound like they have a mouthful of haggis, regardless of which regional or class accent they are so expertly delivering, but I soon realized there was more of a technical issue involved. I suspect their recording, playback and mixing gear may not be fully compatible with ours, although they seem to do a great job with musical recording.

Incidentally, I suspect the season 5 of the Expanse is a cheap bootleg Chinese knock-off. The video quality is good, with one exception, I believe its been compressed so that the color space is truncated, that is, the contrast has been squeezed (the data has been forced into fewer histogram bins) almost to the point where you can see density slicing.

But at least, the sound quality is good.