system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
At this point I'm convinced that there's some kind of requirement for every person responsible for mixing audio to be legally deaf.

Everything is always so damn loud compared to speech. Video games, TV shows, Movies... Doesn't matter, the "background" music will always be louder than any "foreground" sounds. 

"hurrdurr super expensive studio audio setups!" I don't care, I don't have such a setup at home and I seriously doubt many others do. If you can't properly mix audio to sound good on most devices that will be used to listen to it, you can't properly mix audio.
gpt
It's definitely not hardware, I have a pretty high end setup and I still have to turn music levels down on most games.

It's the mixing that's awful.