As I have impaired hearing and am awaiting a hearing aid, I have trouble understanding much of the speech in films - unless I tape them and playback several times. I tried using stereo headphones connected to the headphone socket of my tv and find that the background noise in a lot of scenes is very obtrusive and I can hear the dialogue better as mono. My son, with perfect hearing, has noticed the same effect. Why?

Hmmm, that's interesting - the only thing I can think is that stereo sound is likely to enhance background noise and surround effects whereas mono doesn't attempt to do this. I may be totally wide of the mark on that though!

I've noticed similar senario's when listening to films in 5.1, sometimes it can be difficult to hear the main dialogue due to all the other things that are going on. A little fiddling with the sound options usually sorts this out for me.

So possibly Dan is right, stereo and 5.1 enhances other sounds to create a richer texture and overall output, where as a mono output will put the focus on the primary sound in this case speech/dialogue.

True Mono sound, when coming from a television is simply both Left and Right stereo soundtracks mixed together. Nothing fancy.
If you have tried slightly pulling out the headphones socket to achieve “Mono” you are really only getting one channel of information – right or left – in either case you will have effectively removed a little of the other channels background effects/music
In the stereo mix, centralised sounds – such as speech is usually mixed - are shared between right and left channels and are “in phase” so that, for the listener who listens in stereo – as long as they are equidistant from both left and right speakers - psycho acoustically, the speech appears to be coming from the centre.
However, for the hard of hearing it is often more easily noticed that what you have really are two streams of sound, intermixed with different background sounds.
Couple this with the modern techniques of embedding Left + Right + Surround information in the stereo tracks, things can become difficult for those with less than perfect hearing.
Of course those who lose parts of their hearing differ in just what they lose and so it is difficult to be absolute about how to assist. Certainly one of the commonest methods to aid communication is to SHOUT! - In other words simply increase the volume :o)
This method will not work for everybody.
As daft as it may seem Alan may find that using a Dolby prologic system of some kind might be of help.
Why? Because Dolby surround processing will separates the five encoded channels and thus the centre channel volume can be controlled separately. Alan may find that thus he can find a balance that is more acceptable to his ears. In the most extreme of cases, one could even remove the speakers from right, left and both rear speakers – this should effectively remove the vast majority of background- music, effects and all - though I wouldn’t advise this as it is not intended to be used this way!
If Alan wants to share his listening with others, there are Dolby processors available specifically for headphones, and while they generally are not as successful as speakers for separation of sounds, they can be quite effective.

Mike

Thanks for your detailed and informative posting Mike.
As I said in my reply today on the
"Height" thread, my new tv is a Lodos with a headphone socket. I can vary the speaker sound independently of the headphones so my family can enjoy the tv also. I have the speaker mode set to stereo.
All the adjustments are performed via a menu; the sound menu has a headphone submenu on which I can adjust the vol and balance (and store for all channels). I can set the headphone sound mode to mono or stereo but this cannot be saved for all channels and has to be reset everytime I change channels or switch-on. I do not have 5:1 sound and think it would probably be wasted on me as my hearing drops off about 3Khz (I have been tested and found to need a hearing aid in both ears). I can hear sound but have troubling understanding some speech - I can hear bass very well.I look forward to receiving my digital hearing aid from the NHS and finding whether I will be able to hear the tv speech normally again.
Thanks everybody for your responses.

There's an easier way. Go to Maplins and get an adapter that will fit on the end of your headphone plug and converts it to mono.

Alternatively you can solder the two positive wires together on your headphone cable.