Jellybones said:
Maybe if someone could explain to me the whole sub/dub deal I might get it.
In general, people prefer subs because the original version has the audio as the original authors intended it. Subs also generally get rid of the common issue where a short Japanese phrase becomes a long English phrase, or vice-versa.
A good example is something that came up recently in #srb2fun. "osuwari" is Japanese for "sit", and is used constantly in Inuyasha as it's the command Kagome can use to punish Inuyasha. However, "osuwari" is a 4-syllable word. "sit" is a one-syllable word, which led to the dub using "sit, boy" instead so Kagome's mouth didn't keep moving after the word ended. While it's frequently easy to add words to the end of something to prevent that issue, it's very hard to do it the opposite way, and short phrases becoming longer in English is quite common. This'll cause parts of the original dialogue to be dropped in translation because there simply isn't room.
There's also the issue that the Japanese version frequently has a much higher budget for voice acting, which means they can get people that don't sound absurdly stupid to voice the characters, something that dubs had a major problem with up until recently. Even if I can't understand Japanese, most of the time the Japanese audio simply sounds more natural than the English audio because the voice acting is of higher quality.
Now, personally I think a _good_ dub is far better than a good sub, because then I can understand it naturally. The sad reality, though, is most dubs really suck, and Sonic X is a perfect example of a terrible dub, even ignoring 4Kids censorship. That's why most people, myself included, prefer to watch anime subbed.
