These are things I'd like to see available now that should be possible given current technology as opposed to pie-in-the sky things like "I really want a teleporter".

For example, I am getting very tired of watching TV shows where the (supposedly) background music is so loud that I can barely make out the dialog. In some cases the BG music is not even music; it is just a loud whining cacophany. The music/whining starts out quiet but gets louder and louder to build dramatic tension. This, I can only presume, is due to either the writers

  1. are so poor as to be unable to create actual dramatic tension through their writing
  2. assume the audience is too stupid to react appropriately without excessively loud music
  3. intentionally want to drown out bad dialog that they created

Surely, instead of developing even higher resolution screens, the industry could spend some money to implement separate audio channels for the BG music/score, and everything else. That way I/we could adjust the music to a level that would allow us to hear the actual dialog.

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Over here(Belgium) we have a technology called 'undertitling'. So even when it is muted we still can follow the dialog.

We have that too except here we call it closed captioning. But that's not a fix. It's a work-around and if I wanted to read what was being said I'd just pick up a book.

Another tech advance that can be done right now.

For both TVs as well as computers (particularly laptops) - the ability to plug in headphones without muting the sound coming from the builtin speakers.

I am hearing impaired and my wife is not. I have a device (pendant) that can connect to my laptop via bluetooth or by cable so that the signal gets transmitted directly to my hearing aids. I want a softwate switch that would allow me to cable in without muting the speakers so that my wife and I could both listen to the audio. If we want to do that now I have to plug in a splitter with my cable in one output and exterior speakers in another.

commented: Good point. I am trying to think about how it could be done since I believe that it is a physical switch (isn't it?) that disconnects speakers +0

@RJ. I can write that almost all TVs mute when you use the headphone jack. When Amazon Prime Day had the Toshiba Fire TV for a very good price I picked that up as my first 4K TV. Well, it's UHD and I agree what a mess they made with the naming.

OK, so the headphone jack turns off the speakers and there's a bug in their audio software that causes dropouts so this model (50 and 55 inch share the same design) so it's definitely a DO NOT BUY until they fix that since you would be very annoyed at the bug. This BUG only shows up when you use the Headphone jack!

That aside I did order up a Toshiba sound bar to connect with HDMI ARC and CeC so I'm using a single remote which is very nice.

-> As to your voice issues, this TV is performing far above prior TVs we've had as to dialog. I still have the closed caption on but find I don't need to see it most of the time.

Our big-ass TV in the family room is a DayTek and it is an odd one in that the audio jack does NOT mute the TV, and there are separate settings for the audio out for volume, treble, bass, etc. I haven't seen that feature on any other TV. I can plug into that without affecting anyone else. We have an old (very very old) Hitachi crt-TV at the cottage that has two audio jacks. One mutes the regular audio and the other does not so I plug the non-muting into a bluetooth transmitter for my cyborg ears.

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