I find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I've never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?
For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.
mpv --audio-channels=mono 'urlhere'
--vf=lavfi="hflip"
Another fun one I bind in input.conf
ctrl+shift+r cycle_values video-rotate "90" "180" "270" "0"
I also have these binds for unbalanced audio, mainly used with 5.1 audio to sound better on headphones or stereo speakers, and the \ bind one seems to make normal stuff slightly louder also, so sometimes I hit it when I don't wanna turn up my speaker knob for one video.
\ af toggle lavfi=[dynaudnorm=f=100]
| af toggle lavfi=loudnormSo when things are mixed "improperly" (it's subjective), it's very distracting to me. I don't need to force mono everywhere, but it's very common in amateurish channels, and surprisingly also in movies and TV shows. Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side. Like, somebody speaking to the left of the camera, and it comes 100% on the left channel and 0% on the right one. It's so unnatural and annoying to me.
If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.
I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.
Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)
"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over."
This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...
Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.
I have carla running at all times and put all of my system audio through various loopback devices (browser, voice conferencing, and music/system) and then apply varying degrees of compression to them (no surprise sounds, hard limiting to hear quiet people, and bypass -- respectively).
Of course everything goes through an extra limiter at the end to avoid clipping.
I also send the voice conferencing input and output through RNNoise, so I can avoid emitting terrible sounds and avoid hearing them as well.
People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.
The reason for this is that I can change browsers (or games or voice apps) and they all think I'm just using a normal mic and headset, but it's actually like 10 LSP plugins and various routing.
Still doesn't feel that complicated when you do a little bit at a time.
I find this genuinely baffling; I lived for nearly a decade as a bachelor in a basement apartment where I had a big TV setup, but out of respect for my upstairs landlord listened to nearly everything on wireless stereo headphones, and I can’t recall ever experiencing this.
Perhaps they're using a weird media player?
This is personal experience, but it is the personal experience of my specialist telling me. [1] is some less anecdotal information on the subject. My use of the term "game over" was specifically for audible speech interpretation.
Lip reading is indeed something I'll probably need to get better at into my mid-30s and beyond as things continue to degrade. My hearing loss is low-frequency-first (Meniere's Disease [2]).
[1] https://www.cochlear.com/au/en/home/diagnosis-and-treatment/...
[2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/menieres-dise...
I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?
However, I also hate knowing that I'm hearing mono audio where stereo could be used. 99% of the videos I watch don't have panning issues, so to just turn off ALL stereo seems like such overkill to me...
I don't watch that channel any more.
I remember being put into a sound proof booth and wearing headphones and being played pure tones from a generator and being told to press a button when I heard the tones. With hindsight, tinnitus would have played merry hell with those tests, especially at the frequencies they seemed to concentrate on. Yes, my memory is fine!
Did the treatment help? Probably not. I recall what the sounds of tinnitus were as a very young child and they are same now.
Since around aged 45 (I'm 53 now) I have experienced brief spinning/dizzy spells. I find them quite easy to counter. I first noticed them whilst wearing skis which was a bit disconcerting.
Having read up on your link to "Meniere's Disease" - that's probably what I ... have, for want of a better word. However, the dizzy spells for me are transitory and not certainly not minutes or hours.
I gave up smoking around six years ago after 30 odd years tabbing. That probably doesn't help either.
My point is that your faculties are very complicated and the science is somewhat lacking. Putting a name to a basket of symptoms may not even be helpful in our case. I am a (was) a really good swimmer but diving below around two metres deep used to really hurt unless I gently worked down and popped my ears.
In the end I think I have mild symptoms compared to many but I don't have many people to compare notes with. What becomes normal over years and decades hides a lot of things.
Based on my personal experience, you will automatically get better at lip reading or deducing what is going on via body language etc. I also have to wear glasses ...
Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you find a way to live with whatever conditions you have. We have a surprisingly impressive array of sensors and back end processing gear. The eyes are amazing in being able to scan a scene with a tiny aperture and the brain to stitch together a very accurate scenario of what is where and doing what. Touch and all the rest are available, all the time. The next time you catch a ball, pick up a pen, kiss the missus/husband or whatever, remind yourself of how amazing that is, and you are.
Instead of digitally recreating your voice so people like you more, have you considered getting some psychotherapy? Maybe? :/