No more LOUD commercials!!

[newfiend]

Thank God for this .. My Polk's Thank You!! http://www.techspot.com/news/51087-calm ... ffect.html
newfiend

Sent from my RM-820_nam_att_100 using Board Express

[foxwood]

I normally skip commercials, but our local ABC station is the most noticable culprit when it comes to loud ads, and they were still noticably loud on Monday. If they were deliberately keeping them as loud as legally possible until the law came into effect (rather than using the one year's grace to implement the necessary equipment changes) then I hope someone forgot to flip the switch, and they get smacked with a fine!

Personally, I'll believe it when I (don't) hear it!

[soccerdad]

Somewhere I read that the reason the commercials are louder for the local commercials is that the network feed is in a different audio type than the locals transmit in. If you keep the volume at around 50% in WMC (adjust as needed with your amp level) then the loudness is not as noticible. YMMV.
Still, fining them is good news.

[STC]

This brings up an oldie I think I have mentioned once before, but interesting none-the-less;

In the UK quite some years ago, I knew a VT editor who worked on a lot of prime time TV.
I visited him on a number of occasions at work which was interesting and kinda cool.

Our conversation moved on to the loudness of commercials, and he demoed a few to me and pointed to the oscilloscope whilst they were playing;
They were allowed to play no greater than X decibels (I forget the value) and the oscilloscope was marked with a loudness spectrum line.

The commercial folks were clever; they filled the spectrum with sound but never went over the allowed levels. The screen was full of jaggie green and the commercial sounded loud, yet it was because they filled the whole spectrum. All sounds are processed and given more base, more mid, more treble (if you will) up to the maximum they could go within permitted limits).

I don't know if they use (or will use) the same ploy in North America or anywhere else, but there you go. I thought it was extremely dodgy anyway

[bmblank]

I can see the lower volumes being both a blessing and a curse. Of course it'll be great to have lower volumes and Menards ads won't make me jump out of my socks when they run, but i believe one of comskips detection methods is volume changes. If the sound levels aren't that different it may be more difficult for comskip to decipher commercials.

[foxwood]

I don't know if they use (or will use) the same ploy in North America or anywhere else, but there you go. I thought it was extremely dodgy anyway

That's exactly what they've been doing in the US. The new "CALM Act" is supposed to address this anomaly, by requiring that the "subjective loudness" (what people hear) is what is actually regulated, not simply what the machine measures.