I apologize if this has already been covered. I searched the archives but didn’t come up with anything.
Without touching the volume control on your television, commercials come through LOUDER than the program. Is there any way to automatically moderate that? Some handy little device for the cable signal to pass through that picks up on and prevents the elevated volume?
Hmmm…
Perhaps a brief explanation of what’s at work wouldn’t go astray.
Effectively it comes down to dynamic range. If we think of the volume levels of your normal programming as being somewhat analoguous to say, the lows and highs of the Rocky Mountains, then what happens as we listen to a program is that our ears get used to the “average volume level” of the source signal. The average height of the Rocky Mountains “region” might be say, 8,500 feet - even though the peaks are as high as 16,000 feet.
But then, imagine if someone came along and filled in all of the valleys so that the lowest point was no lower than 8,500 feet. Then, on top of that, imagine if someone used a huge bull dozer and shaved all of the majestic Rocky Mountain peaks above 12,000 feet so that they were as flat as table top. Then, lastly, imagine if you raised the entire “region” so that those table tops were now 16,000 feet high. In effect, you would have raised the “average height” of the Rocky Mountains region to about 12,000 feet or more. And THAT is what sound engineers do with TV commercials.
Rightly or wrongly, the producers of TV commercials believe that louder is better. Purely at a consumer point of view, most of us would disagree of course - but still the myth persists.
Indeed, at a musical appreciation level, the syndrome is known as LOUD WARS. And the thinking goes like this… if you were to take 100 people and give them a listent to some old classic tunes, and then, give them a listen to a new tune. If you were to do the TV commercial “overkill compression” trick on the new song, and then, if you were to ask those 100 people “Which of the following songs SOUNDS the best to you ear?”, well… research has found that 99 out of a 100 people will point to the LOUD new song as sounding best, even if it’s not that great a tune.
Well, amongst true hi fi afficionados, and more than a sizeable proportion of top flight recording engineers the world over, this trend in the last 7 years since the advent of incredible software mastering systems for digital music has resulted in an increasing number of modern albums now sounding like plain out and out annoying TV commercials - loud? No doubt… but with all of the sonic subtlety of steamroller.
A classic example, and forgive me for hijacking this thread now but it all relates to sound engineering is the latest album by Foo Fighters. THeir previous album won a Grammy as Best Rock Album of the year, and it was really, really well produced and mixed. But this latest album? The band got a new producer, and the guy totally, utterly bought into the LOUD WARS mentality. Everybody, to a man, agrees that the new album sounds like dogshit and isn’t a patch on the previous one.
The same thing, apparently, happened to Rush’s latest album as well.
In short, the same technology is being used on all of this stuff… from professional albums thru to TV commercials - by squashing the bejesus out of it, you can squash more and more of it up towards the theoretical ceiling of maximum volume on your recording medium, and more than a few people regret the day that digital music was ever invented now as a result.
In Led Zeppelins day, it was the supreme challenge to get an album as powerful as theirs to be committed to vinyl without your stylus jumping out of the grooves.
Nowadays, any 16 year old kid can buy ACID PRO v4.0 and download Waves L2 Maximiser and produce something as loud and as annoying as ANYTHING you’d care to mention anywhere.
Oddly enough, it’s also part of the reason why die hard turntable freaks maintain that a really expesnive turntable is superior - the dynamics involved are far more realistic and lifelike.
So, in answer to your original question… the only TRUE response is to fit a volume expander with a negative compression ratio of say 0.4 : 1 in your circuitry. What this would do is it would raise the volume of your quiet parts, and then, when the volume of your signal passed a certain threshold, that volume support would drop off and the loud parts would come thru untouched. What would this achieve? It would make your normal “quiet programming” seem as loud as the annoying TV commercials, and then you would merely lower the overall volume level to your tastes.
It’s an irony that everybody constantly forgets about your master volume level. Young kids talk about having epic sub woofers in their car systems etc. Any damn fool can raise or lower the volume level of a bass signal. The trick, when trying to come up with something consistent is NOT to think in terms of decreasing your loud parts - rather, the trick is to raise the volume of your quieter parts and then lower the overall mix.
The answer given by Boo Boo Foo explains it quite well. The FCC passed a rule a number of years go saying the volume level couldn’t be higher for commercials but some companies have made their sound more forceful by “filling in the gaps”. My TV is eight years old, but it has an “automatic volume level” that keeps the sound pretty even during those “loud” commercials. I’m sure most newer TVs have that feature now.
Just to complete the information in the above posts, the technique is called “compression”. Very descriptive term, you are compressing the dynamic range of the signal by amplifying the quiet bits (or more correctly, you reduce the volume of the loud bits and then amplify the entire signal). Makes it sound louder without any of the peaks actually being any louder than the original peaks.
The idea that the ads are broadcast louder than the programs is a nonsense because the maximum loudness is limitted by the strength of the transmitter which is controlled by law.
Even if a program is louder than the ads they may sound louder because:
Advertisements often contain music and very fast speech.
An advertisement will sound louder in comparison if it follows a particularly quiet part of a program, these variations can be many decibels, enough to shock the viewer.
Lots of high-frequency sounds are used in ads. They are more penetrating and long lasting than low-frequency noises.
Compression as Boo Boo Foo explained is the best trick.
The difficulty in stopping it is the fact that it only sounds louder but isn’t really and not everyone can even perceive the difference,
So would it be possible to use this ‘compression’ difference between commercials and programs to identify the commercials?
I’m hoping that some electronics genius can build & sell a ‘smart’ remote control that can do things like automatically mute the commercials, and turn the sound back on when the program comes on again.
Close. I believe it was Magnavox who marketed a tv set a few years ago that would maintain the same average volume no matter what you watched.
Yeah, my friend had a TV set and when compressed commercials came on you would see “Smart Audio” in the bottom corner of her screen to let you know that the TV was adjusting the volume to compensate for the compression. (I think it was “smart audio” it might have said “smart sound”, it was quite awhile ago, I don’t remember the exact wording.)
Boo that was an excellent description of compression. golf clap
May I add: For another visual analogy – think of a black and white image for which the contrast is adjusted so that the blackest points and whitest points are shifted to shades of grey.
IIRC, someone tried just that a few years ago with a VCR. They claimed that you could set your VCR to record a show but skip the commercials.
You’ll notice the technology isn’t on every TV and VCR, so… why no success? Two things: it would record any commercial that didn’t use compressed soundtracks, and it would skip any desirable programming (a movie, for instance) that did use compression.
The TV set I mentioned on my earlier post is the Magnovox mentioned by Moo the Magic Cow. Reading from the owners manual it says:
.
You can turn this on or off. I always have it on and it seems to work pretty good.
AW C’mon guys!!!
Deep six all of the tech. crappola------the damned things are just louder!
No mumbo-no jumbo-------- just insultingly loud!
Thanks for the informative responses.
Look what I found… the “handy little device” I was looking for:
http://www.smarthome.com/7848.html
(The key was to put “Automatic Volume Leveler” into Google.)
Any opinions on that device?
BFS!!!
Some adds will blow me off the couch, even changing channels will result in huge differences in volume on Comcast Cable
Yeah, you have correctly identified that they sound louder. However, the loudest volume of a commercial is not any louder than the loudest on the TV show, this makes it dificult to get some kind of regulation into how commercial’s sound is processed.