A graphic of the sounds of near silence.

Call this a tale of two ears. I’ve been lucky. Lived through the sixties and seventies rock era going to stadium concerts in which the audio waves were as physically buffeting as ocean waves, playing the radio as loud as possible without blowing the car speakers, and then, later, investing in high end stereo that didn’t freak out at high volume. My hearing is somehow intact. I can still hear the mail jeep approaching half a mile down the road, the oven beeping done in the kitchen downstairs, and the thump of a cat jumping off the counter. My wife can’t do any of these things.

She suffers from tinnitus. Not from rock concerts. Some high end noise she heard repeated too long in her younger years. As did my father and grandfather. There’s still such a thing as too loud, but too soft to make out is an even bigger problem. In the old days of PBS my Anglophile dad was denied access to Masterpiece Theater and other programs he would have loved because the quality of BBC sound recording was so pitiful he couldn’t understand what the actors were saying.

I used to turn my nose up at movie subtitles. Haughtily disdained to “read a movie.” But my wife has a better more exploratory approach to film productions than I do. She showed me the Russians and the Germans, from Eisenstein to Fritz Lang. I learned that watching subtitles isn’t really reading a movie. A proper mind can multitask the print and spoken words without sinking into a pseudo-intellectual mire.

So we learned, in the age of Netflix, to enjoy movies and TV series from Scandinavia, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Korea. Subtitles get to be like breathing, automatic and unworthy of remark.

Two more steps to my recommendation. In the old old days Brit movies were all acted by Oxonians with perfect enunciation and more than a dollop of Shakespearian stage training. Even bad recording did not bury their consonants. Nowadays we are inundated in their productions with every variety of regional accents, many of which are almost impenetrable to the best American ears. Including my freakishly good ones. So now we immediately turn on subtitles for everything English, Irish, Scottish, and Australian. (Doesn’t help with Welsh shows. Indecipherable no matter what.)

The final step is a two-parter. With all the proliferation of viewing venues — cable, on demand, Netflix, and other streaming services — the sound levels vary tremendously from program to program. Even in media you’d expect to be exempt, producers don’t seem to care much about vocal sound anymore. On the network series “Elementary,” Brit actor Jonny Lee Miller can’t seem to raise his voice above an inaudible whisper. Worse, all women under the age of 25 in American TV swallow all their consonants. Even I can’t make them out. Can you?

Subtitles have become our default. I got tired of asking my wife if she could hear, only to be told she couldn’t. Now there’s the rare occasion when we look impishly at one another and decide to go commando — no subtitles.

I bet a lot of you can’t hear too well anymore either. Many of us who grew up in the rock era can’t hear worth a damn. Try the subtitles. They may make your life more fulfilling in this particular media realm.

Hear me? Sure you do.