An Ignoble Experiment: 😩 It’s not your ears, it’s your TV

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🎙️ It's the weekend, which means I'm on the radio. Los Angeles and Orange County, good news: You can now catch the show Saturdays, noon to 3 p.m., on KEIB 1150 AM. Everybody else, find your local station here. With over 500 stations, I'm closer than you think. Practically in your passenger seat, minus the backseat driving.

Settle into Saturday, friend. Back in the olden days, you flipped through 57 cable channels, declared “there's nothing on,” and watched a rerun of Matlock anyway. Now you've got 57 apps, 14 profiles (who is Guest 3?) and one remote that lives in the couch dimension next to your reading glasses and the good scissors.

Nielsen calls all this scrolling “content discovery,” which is a fancy way of saying “your dinner is now a cold, sad brick while a trailer screams at you in surround sound.”

📺 When you sit down to watch some thing, how long does the average person spend deciding what to stream? A) Two minutes, B) Five minutes, C) 10.5 minutes or D) 20 minutes, at which point you close the TV, open your phone and watch a stranger repot a plant for 45 seconds. Make your pick, the answer is waiting for you at the end.

🌅 Woke up to a blaring alarm today? Rude. A sunrise alarm clock wakes you up gradually. No more shocking your system. Right now, you can grab this one.* Your body will thank you. — Kim

TODAY’S DEEP DIVE

Say that again?

ChatGPT/Kim Komando

🤯 WOW! More than HALF of Americans watch TV with subtitles on, and the top reason isn’t hearing loss. It’s the audio: muddled mixes, thin-TV speakers that fire at the wall and streaming compression. Your gorgeous 4K screen ships with the sound your 1998 tube TV would laugh at.

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

“It’s too loud!” I say that a lot. It’s the nightly ritual in millions of living rooms: Turn it up. Now it’s blasting. Turn it down. Rewind. “What did she just say?” Nobody knows. Roll subtitles.

Sound familiar? You’re in the majority. And no, it’s not your ears.

Blame your beautiful TV. As screens got thin, the speakers shrank into slivers that fire at the wall, not at you. Movies get mixed for theaters with dozens of speakers, then squeezed into your flat slab. Streaming compresses the audio again for good measure. Add today’s mumble-first acting style, and you’ve got crystal-clear pictures with mud for sound.

The studios broke it. You get to fix it.

🆓 Takes only 2 minutes

Dig into your TV’s sound settings:

Dialogue mode. Samsung calls it Amplify or Clear Voice, LG has Clear Voice Pro, Sony has Voice Zoom. Different names, same job: Push voices forward.
Kill the fake surround. Those “virtual 3D” modes smear dialogue everywhere. Off.
Night mode is secretly great. It squashes the gap between whispers and explosions. Exactly your problem.

📱 Now fix the apps

Netflix: While a show plays, open the Audio & Subtitles menu and pick English - Stereo instead of 5.1. Stereo mixes are built for TV speakers.
Prime Video: Amazon hid a gem called Dialogue Boost. It only works on their original shows and movies, like The Boys, Fallout and Jack Ryan. While a program plays, open the Audio menu and pick English Dialogue Boost: Medium or High. AI lifts voices out of the mix.

🎧 My hardware picks

Wireless TV headphones change marriages, I’m not exaggerating. Swiitech’s models (33% off, $60) plug into the TV, reach the recliner and have voice enhancement built in for better dialogue clarity. Need surround sound and triple the range? Go with these Sennheiser headphones (49% off, $180) if you can swing it.

One of you blasts a program in the headphones, the other enjoys the TV at a human volume.

The ZVOX dialogue-clarifying soundbar is a compact 10-inch speaker built on hearing-aid technology, with six levels of voice boost that pull dialogue out of music. It also levels out those sudden commercial blasts. It’s the gadget I recommend most to anyone who says the TV “sounds like mumbling.”

If voices are hard to follow at dinner, too, not just on TV, that’s worth a hearing check.

Tonight’s test: dialogue mode on, stereo in Netflix, Dialogue Boost in Prime. Watch one episode. You might finally retire the rewind button.

Funny thing: The only audio my TV ever delivered loud and clear was the commercials.

🎯 Send this to someone who owns the remote AND the rewind button. You know exactly who.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

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📺 YOUTUBE: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW

Watch now or bookmark for later

Bryan Johnson already took blood from his own teenage son. Now the anti-aging mogul says he’s cloned himself as a newborn to grow spare organs. His words, not mine.

Plus, Flock license plate cameras are in your neighborhood, while the company’s own CEO reportedly dodges the tech. (Read that twice.) I got an HOA letter about someone destroying them.

404 Media’s Matthew Gault on data centers and whether they’re quietly padding your electric bill. And a listener built himself an AI wife. A bad one based on movie villains. First man in history to engineer more nagging into his life. On purpose.

Watch now before everyone else is talking about it. 👇

▶️ He cloned himself. Now he wants the organs. →

WEB WATERCOOLER

🚨 Photos need dead bolts: Someone could be digging through your private photos, and they may not have used anything more sophisticated than a convincing message and your recycled password. Criminals hijack cloud and social accounts, then sell intimate images or use them for extortion. Adults and kids are both in the crosshairs. Turn on two-factor authentication, then help your teens do the same. It’s free, and a five-minute task beats blackmail. Give your private life a safety lock, not a welcome mat.

Confirmed means maybe: How is this even legal? Your confirmed airline seat can apparently disappear while you’re walking to the gate. American Airlines’ AURA system reportedly predicts whether travelers will miss tight connections, then rebooks them before they arrive. Passengers who made it early say they found seat assignments stripped and tickets given to standby travelers. That leaves people scrambling for another flight, a refund or both. Paying for certainty was so yesterday. The computer gets final boarding call.

🧴 Stop ignoring your body’s warning signs: Nails that snap off. Hair thinning faster. Skin that looks tired no matter how much sleep you get. These aren’t random annoyances. They’re your body telling you collagen production has dropped. After 35, you lose up to 1.5% of your collagen every year. I put a scoop of NativePath Collagen in my tea every morning because it’s the only thing that really helped. Get 53% off plus free shipping and gifts before it sells out.**

📸 Stalker map updated: Imagine your teen’s car passing a roadside camera, then showing on a private map searchable by police far beyond your town. That’s a real problem behind Flock Safety’s network (paywall link). Officers reportedly used it without warrants to track people across county and state lines, including, get this, ex-partners. Flock started tightening standards and requiring chief approval for cross-jurisdictional searches after The Washington Post investigated. All it took was one major newspaper. I wonder what else is happening behind the scenes.

Dinner gets refunded: In December 2024, Grubhub was accused of misleading drivers about earnings, restricting customers’ access to accounts and money and padding its app with as many as 325,000 unaffiliated restaurants. Now 640,038 people will split $23.8 million. That’s less of a windfall and more like finding your missing tip under the corporate couch, but it’s still just desserts. No application or link, the FTC is automatically sending eligible folks checks or PayPal payments based on company records.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

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I never leave home without mine. Whether I’m traveling, running errands or relaxing at home, Active Noise Cancellation lets me enjoy whatever I’m listening to without distractions. When I’m outside, I switch to Awareness Mode so I can hear what’s happening around me. They’re comfortable, sound fantastic and pair with both my phone and computer at the same time.

Raycon’s Everyday Earbuds Classics are the perfect back-to-school companion.

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DEVICE ADVICE

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Put those new TV sound settings to the test tonight. 😏 Head to Movie-Map, type in a film or series you like and it’ll surround your pick with similar choices. The closer a title sits to yours, the closer the match. Pick one, hit play and see if the voices finally sound clearer. Movie night and a hearing check all in one.

🔋 Wonder where the battery went? Your iPhone keeps a running tab on which apps are eating the most power. Open Settings > Battery, then scroll to View All Battery Usage. You can see every app’s share and even break it down by day. 😅 Would you like a dead battery? They're free of charge.

🔐 A thief wants more than your money: He wants to be you. Everything riding on your name, your credit, your tax refund, gone. Silent until you’re sitting at a loan officer’s desk getting told “no.” I ditched LifeLock for Coveron. Real-time dark web monitoring, instant alerts, half the price. Be the guy nobody can fake. Save 66% with my deal.*

👤 Getting friend requests from total randos? Facebook has a setting that can cut them down. In the app, go to Settings > How people find and contact you > Who can send you friend requests? and choose Friends of friends. It won’t block every scammer or weirdo, but at least “Bitcoin Brian” has to work a little harder.

😒 Dashcams fail at the worst time: That memory card records nonstop, and over time, it can start throwing errors or missing footage. On most models, go to Menu > Settings > Format about once a month. Before formatting, make sure to save any clips you need. Don’t have a dashcam yet? This basic $50 setup comes with everything you need, plus loop recording, so it handles the deleting for you.

👀 Bill looking fishy? Car repair, medical charge, contractor invoice, whatever made you say “HOW much?” Before paying, ask for an itemized bill with parts, labor or codes. Paste it into a chatbot and ask: “Explain every charge in plain English, flag duplicates or anything unusual, compare prices and tell me what’s worth questioning.” Could save you from paying more than you should.

KIM’S DAILY DEALS

As an Amazon Associate, some links pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. Keeps this newsletter free. Thank you.

📱 Call it a win

Accessories worth phoning home about.

🔊 Prop and play: Cell phone stand (15% off, $22)
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Instant mini theater. Stream, scroll or video chat hands-free while the Bluetooth speaker boosts the sound. The anti-slip base keeps it planted, and it folds flat. Beats propping it against random stuff.

Image: JTEMAN

🤖 Power pal: Meet the Uno (39% off, $33), a power block that looks like a robot. Its cute little face shows the charging status at a glance.

Ride along: This handlebar phone mount (20% off, $16) snaps onto your bike in seconds and holds tight through shakes up to 100 mph.

✨ Clean connection: Ordilend’s cleaning kit (27% off, $13) clears out phone ports and other nooks where lint and grime love to hide.

💻 Ready for a new computer? Browse my top 20 picks before you buy. →

Prices and deals were accurate at the time of publication.

WHAT THE TECH?

Image: @Lmg2kool via Instagram

🔋 Charge it to the wind

What if your Cybertruck could charge itself while driving? And what if we simply ignored every follow-up question?

An AI-generated viral clip shows one sporting a massive rooftop solar panel like a 6,500-pound electric beach cabana. Real Cybertrucks carry roughly 123 kWh of battery, meaning a couple rooftop panels would be bringing a juice box to a house fire. Don’t get me started on wind resistance.

But aesthetically? Cool. Nothing says “saving energy” like driving around with a dining-room table strapped to your roof.

Check it out.

LOGGING OUT …

🎓 What you learned today: Your TV’s mumble problem may be fixable with some sneaky settings, private cloud photos need two-factor dead bolts before criminals turn them into leverage, an airline’s algorithm may decide your confirmed seat is up for grabs, and Flock cameras can turn license plates into a searchable movement map. Not bad for one email. Nuns are going viral on TikTok, monks are selling coffee online, and somehow the most disciplined people on the internet may be the ones in monasteries. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how they’re using modern tech without letting it take over their lives.

The answer: C) 10.5 minutes. Yep, that’s per session, up from around seven minutes in 2019. Do it once a night, and you’re past 60 hours a year, more than two and a half full days, watching menus instead of shows. You’re paying for the buffet but spending your evening reading the menu at the door.

Here’s how to beat the scroll.

The 30-second rule: The moment someone recommends a show, add it to that service’s My List or watch list right then. Future-you sits down with a preapproved queue.
Use a universal search app like JustWatch to find which service has the thing you want, instead of opening four apps like a detective.
Decide before you sit down. Pick the show while the popcorn’s popping. The couch is where decisions go to die.

Still stuck after five minutes? Rewatch something. Nobody ever regretted The Office. (Seriously.)

Ten minutes of scrolling to watch nothing? That’s a series finale I didn’t see coming.

😴 Snoozed on this one? The Vivilumens Sunrise Alarm Clock is an alarm, sound machine and dimmable lamp, all on your nightstand. Check it out here.*

📻 Listen up! My national radio show is airing all weekend across the USA. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch the entire show on YouTube. I’m wherever you are.

🖼️ Print one photo this week and stick it on the fridge. The cloud is storage. The fridge is a museum your family actually visits. I always knock on the fridge door before opening it. Just in case there’s a salad dressing. — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

HOW’D WE DO?

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Vivilumens, JTEMAN, @Lmg2kool via Instagram

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