General > General Technical Chat
Why do commercials sound so blasted loud?
Connecteur:
I have a soundbar connected to my TV, and I am constantly adjusting the volume up so I can hear content, and down to avoid the loud blasting sound of commercials. The same is also true for broadcast and streaming content, and on radio as well.
I first heard this mentioned as a complaint on a phone-in radio show back in the seventies, and sound engineers have been adamantly insisting that it isn't happening ever since. I gather from the technical explanation that sound levels are not actually higher, but they sound that way because of how they were processed. Something about dynamic range I guess.
In 2012, the FCC was mandated by the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, which prohibits commercials from being louder than the program on TV. In spite of this, I am always straining to understand the content of a program until I boost the volume quite a lot, and then every time a commercial comes on, I feel I'm getting blasted out of the room until I grab the remote and reduce the volume. It never stops. My TV even has a setting to keep everything near the same volume, but it doesn't seem to work.
Is there an answer to this, or are we going to get the perennial reply from sound engineers that it's not happening?
Gyro:
--- Quote from: Connecteur on November 18, 2021, 04:49:09 pm ---I first heard this mentioned as a complaint on a phone-in radio show back in the seventies, and sound engineers have been adamantly insisting that it isn't happening ever since. I gather from the technical explanation that sound levels are not actually higher, but they sound that way because of how they were processed. Something about dynamic range I guess.
--- End quote ---
Yes, I think they get around the rules by using a lot of dynamic range compression - which probably accounts for the lousy sound quality of some of them. In terms of an answer to it, I guess wait for the multi-decade loophole to be closed. The broadcasters aren't going to do anything about it because they are depending on the advertising revenue.
I remember when Topfield PVRs (Toppies) with open APIs were a niche product here, a few people tried writing TAPs (apps) to detect adverts to allow skipping, but as far as I remember, nobody had much success.
I suppose it might be possible by detecting the average audio signal level rather than peak, but of course that could only work when the audio is in the analogue domain (rather than HDMI).
ejeffrey:
Yeah, it is just heavy dynamic range compression. The quietest sounds are not much lower than the loudest sounds so the average is higher and it is continuously loud rather than intermittently loud.
SiliconWizard:
Yep. Just compression.
And it's unfortunately easy to work around any law that "prohibits commercials from being louder than the program on TV". Because it's all in the definition of what is considered louder in objective terms. Where are the formulas in the law? ;D
TimFox:
Another abuse, especially on US radio commercials, is the use of speed-up audio technology on the legally-required information at the end of the commercial. On television commercials, there should be a requirement that the text for disclaimers (such as "has not been evaluated by the FDA" for "supplements") use letters at least as large as the contact information (phone number or website) so that they are legible by the consumer.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version