I sitting here watching the Uinv of Texas vs. Notre Dame game on ABC and they have the background noise so loud that you cannot hear the announcers. You can make out what the color guy is saying if you try, but the play by play guy is not even as loud as the crowd. Maybe one word is three?
Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as those bozos rarely know what they are talking about and are usually wrong when they do, but my GQ is, doesn’t ABC have engineers whose job is to keep this from happening? I mean, those announcers have to get paid (probably a goodly sum for each game). Why drown them out with useless noise?
Just to make sure there’s nothing wrong on your end, try the following:
Make sure all your speakers are actually working.
Make sure the base and treble settings aren’t turned all the way up or down.
Make sure the balance isn’t turned one way or the other.
If you are running your audio through a separate sound system, make that the treble, base, and balance are correctly set on the sound system as well as the TV.
Try playing with the base, treble, and balance to see if it makes it any clearer.
It’s just the TV speakers, no separate system. Speakers work fine. I’ve been watching football all weekend and didn’t have this problem with the others. I’ll admit, the crowd noise was loud for the Auburn game, but you could still hear the announcers. No problem with the audio on the commercials, either. It’s just game announcers.
It’s very annoying, like those restaurants where they play the “background” music so loud you can’t hear your dinner guest.
Just in the last couple of minutes, it seems to have gotten better.
I’ve had this problem pop up occasionally. For me it was a matter of turning the TV’s audio preset to a different setting, like from default to theater or something.
That was sort of my guess. I rarely watch games but when I do I’ve noticed the crowd noise usually comes through the rear speakers so my first thought was that the OP has the front and/or center speakers turned off, accidentally unplugged or mixed incorrectly. Even with just a regular TV, it may have been a matter of bumping an audio button on the remote that turned on some type of fake surround sound and brought in the rear channel(s) that you’ve never heard before which is why the crowd seemed louder.
You could test this out by finding another football game to see if you still have the problem and then cycling through any audio setting you might have to attempt to fix it.
Most any action/war movies made in the last 10-20 years will have the background noises in the rear channels as well.
Interesting… I don’t watch college football, but have noticed this before with college basketball and some NHL hockey games. I always assumed an incompetent sound engineer was the problem – I never thought to try to adjust my audio settings.
Messing with the bass and treble won’t help. As noted, the problem is in the channel’s surround mix or more likely, the remote production outfit’s mix. The announcers will or should come through on the surround center channel.
Unless they’re completely inept at mixing sound, switching your cable box or speaker system to stereo rather than surround should make the announcers audible.
I’ve had this problem for a while now. I almost only watch Premier League or la Liga football where you actual WANT to hear the announcers. I read on one site that it may be cable box settings. I had a look at mine and the sound was set to mono. I changed to stereo, problem solved, announcers came through loud and clear. Phew.
There are several possible causes. Even though the OP probably has solved his problem somehow in the last 11 months, somebody else might still be having the issue.
They mix the crowd noise loud because that way the TV audience can feel the excitement. They think that makes the advertising work better. it might, but they’re vandalizing their product. Friggin idiots. Then again, I recall the old saw that if you’re not paying for it then you’re not the customer; you’re the product. So the TV folks are supporting their true customer: the advertisers.
If you have a modern flat-screen TV, the speakers are probably on the back. Which means they’re projecting the sound directly into your wall, not into your room. This muffles & mumbles the sounds. Which doesn’t much affect how the crowd noise sounds but makes it harder to hear the now-fuzzier commentator dialog. The effect is non-linear, so shows the commentators are loud and clear enough to still stand out even after bing muffled a bit. But if they were already mixed a little weak, this extra muffling hides them completely.
Some shows are mixed for 5.1, surround, stereo, or some other encoding. A common sports mixing is commentators predominant on the center channel and crowd noise predominant on left and right. Played on a TV without a center speaker the effect is very quiet commentators.
I had the same complaint. I bought a sound bar for my TV and the difference is night and day. The speakers face me, not the wall, and I can more or less adjust crowd noise volume separately from commentator volume by altering the center vs left/right mix.
This was a huge improvement for not too much money.
This is often because the same music is fed to the speakers inside the (noisy) kitchen also. The workers there want to hear the music, so they turn it up (and the volume control is usually right there for them). A fairly simple fix is to have the kitchen speakers on a different circuit than the dining area, but most restaurants aren’t wired that way.
I sometimes watch live baseball on TV with the sound off and the AM broadcast playing on a small portable radio. Much better commentation although often they’re out of sync with each other by a 5-15 seconds.
Other times I just bag the TV altogether and listen to the AM radio. Old school, but still pretty darn nice.
What I’d really like is the audio equivalent of my DVR where I could go to some online library of AM broadcasts of my team, then pull up e.g. yesterday’s game and stream the sound while being able to fast forward in 30 second jumps to kill the commercials. That’d be awesome.
Something to combine the streamed AM audio and my DVR’ed vid recording would be even cooler. No ads *and *quality announcing. What a concept!