when I wrote it but liked the pun

Commercials' audio signals are often compressed, and their average level is higher than the show you were watching. Say you're watching the movie The Fugitive. Some scenes are very quiet, some are very very loud (like the train-wreck sequence). Now, imagine the whole film's volume was at the train-wreck level. That would be a commercial.

All a commercial has to do is scream at you for 30 seconds while the program audio has to convey everything from crickets chirping on a quiet night to explosions and everything in between.

When we get the commercials at the station, they are already compressed all to hell do there's really not anything we can do to change that, we just have to ingest them into the system as they are

a Radio/TV prof told our class that commercials were broadcast at the proper volume allowed by the FCC and that it was the programming volume that was intentionally reduced. And that would have the same effect.

Can't say I buy the explanation above in every case all the time, though the idea of "average volume" certainly has merit.

The dynamic range, (ratio between quietest and loudest sounds) on a program might be 30 or 40 dB while on a commercial it might be 6 dB or so, since decibels are logarithmic that's a greater difference than even those two numbers show..

The loudest sounds may not be any louder but the softest ones are far louder on commercials.

and I mentioned, this was a while ago.

Indeed, that's what happens in effect..

It's just not the whole story..

We ingest commercials at the same peak levels as we do programming, and we run our satellite feeds at the same peak levels at local inserts. It's the average rms levels that the commercials are compressed to that are to blame.

The real culprit is the ad agencies and the post houses they use, not the station.

To keep everything at the same level?

Is relative. Read the article again.

A commercial has a handful of seconds to grab your attention and get its message across thus the more audio and video the better. It's very different from program content which features mostly dialogue rather than music. Studies that show commercials are louder also show they have more color and movement simply cause of their limited time and need to draw attention.

Almost all broadcasters and major cablecasters have processors, compressors and limiters in line that even out the audio. The time I notice a volume difference is when the local cable company inserts its own commercials that aren't processed and can sound too loud or soft...usually due to poor playback equipment at the cable company.

Yes programming audio is low, and commercials blast at you. That is a fact.

It's very annoying. CBS is one of the worst, particularly in their online videos.
I really hate that.

So the commercial isn't REALLY louder, it just sounds that way. Riiiiiiiiiight.

They do sound louder. The reason they do is because they are designed to sound louder at the post production houses where the audio for the commercials is mixed, EQd and compressed.

The biggest problem we face in the broadcasting industry in regard to this decades old problem is, there is really not a good way to measure perceived loudness. We are controlling the level of an electrical signal, and that's what our loudness meters are measuring. Peak level certainly doesn't measure perceived loudness and RMS average doesn't either. The closest measurement we have IMO is A-weighted loudness and it doesn't even tell the whole story.

The sad fact is, at the post houses, they roll up the EQ in the 1-3khz range where human hearing is most sensitive then they brickwall limit the hell out of it to eye watering RMS levels before they send it out to us at the TV stations so when we get them, the levels are already blasting.

If you take two segments of audio with identical(or near identical) RMS average loudness measurements, the one with more low frequency content will sound quieter and usually return a much lower A-Weighted loudness measurement. Big explosions in a movie generally carry a lot of low frequency content, commercials, not so much. Their emphasis is on the midrange, where the bulk of the announcer's voice lies, so yes, they sound louder.

IMO, if the government ever really wanted to pass meaningful regulation to address the problem, the ONLY way to do it would be to go after the ad agencies and post production facilities that do their bidding. All the AGC (automatic gain control) in the world on our end at the broadcast facilities cannot overcome the problems that they send us on the commercials from the post houses.

They also are EQUALIZED to emphasize midrange sounds, which our ears are most attuned to.

For this reason, none of the "smart volume" devices work, and "Dolby Volume" isn't likely to work, either.

The trick will be to recognize when it's needed and not needed, you can pretty much eyeball a sound segment when it's put up on a visual display and tell whether it's compressed or not.. I can't see that the intelligence needed to recognized the compressed audio in commercials is all that high..

I've been using a piece of freeware for years to even out the audio levels of all my mp3 files so I don't have to keep turning up and down the volume control while I'm listening.

http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/

audio production workstation. Any expansion would have to be done in real time, on each set in America.

Which is why there is currently no product on the market that resolves this "simple" problem.

On my nothing-special PC with my usual crapload of stuff running it does a normal length song in less than ten seconds..

I've actually done a fair bit of digital audio restoration on tape and vinyl so I do have a modicum of knowledge of the requirements.

http://users.hal-pc.org/~clement/Restoring%20Old%20Recordings.htm

Good restoration software these days on even a medium computer runs at faster than real time, and often at several multiples.

Expansion is really just another form of encoding and decoders are fast enough to put a HDTV picture on your computer screen from a pathetic drizzle of bits coming down your DSL connection.

There is already software to detect and remove commercials from recordings on your home theater PC, it's even free.. I haven't watched a commercial in a very long time.

http://mcebuddy.com/

"Expansion is really just another form of encoding and decoders are fast enough to put a HDTV picture on your computer screen from a pathetic drizzle of bits coming down your DSL connection. "

It's all trivial, when one has a quad core 3 Ghz cpu, 8 GB ram, dedicated audio editing software (Protools, Cubase, Sonar e.g.), a dedicated audio interface, and a static file to process outside of real time. Introducing real time processing also introduces us to the wonderful world of latency and latency correction.

Of course, there's no reason all that audio equipment couldn't be built into a TV, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

And home theater PCs are pretty common these days..

You have latency issues with video processing too and it's common in even lower end TV's, not to mention things like SRS, MaxxBass and so on for audio..

The computing power to do it is in an iPhone these days..

I don't own an actual television but I have OTA HD with a tuner stick..

I even watch some shows with Ambiophonics, it gives an uncanny 3D effect to some recordings.

http://www.ambiophonics.org/index.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=210x42601

are still LOUD...

Perhaps there's little incentive to "fix" this, at the end of the day.

and MP4 movie files?

I notice the movies I have also have different sound levels depending how I copied it on 'cocktail'

Just point it at the directory you keep your iTunes songs in and it can do the whole thing, just let it run in the background.

Not for video though although some of the players probably have a function that will do something similar, ffdshow has so many settings and plugins I'd be a bit surprised if it doesn't do that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffdshow

at the volume of commercials (along with other annoying things, including sexist ads) that I just started DVR'ing everything. I used to mute everything - now I fast-forward through every commercial. Voila, problem solved. Everyone I know now does this. Those ad companies may yet shoot themselves in the foot - no one watches them anymore. When my babies were newborns and I was nursing them to sleep in the rocking chair, watching some quiet documentary and then the commercial came on, blaring, scaring the living poop out of of my JUST sleeping infant causing her to startle and scream, it was all I could do not to hurl a boulder at the tv.

I personally think there should be a regulation that states that a commercial cannot be louder than the AVERAGE volume of the program it is advertising on. At any rate, I don't care, as I don't watch commercials anymore. Hopefully tv ads will eventually be obsolete.

Sort of like movies in theaters - directly, rather than have it "for free" but being exposed to ads.

Listening to old radio lately, you can kind of get why when one company "brought you" one show, that it would stand out - but now I have to question whether it is worth it for any business to expose themselves to the broad audience rather than a targeted one. I hear many ads for things I'll never use, and probably most people do.

And there are ads all over cable and satellite TV for which people pay good money..

Or entertaining ourselves.

But you know, we've got to have the best.

I've seen movies on satellite channels without ads. They don't interrupt movies with ads on those channels.

The satellite and cable channels are for the most part just as crowded with ads as the over the air TV despite the fact that cable/satellite bills can run over $100/month in some cases.

Any time you see ads you aren't the customer, you're the product being sold to the customer.

Netlflix is pretty close to the model you're talking about and it's a fraction of the price of many cable and satellite packages.

:sarcasm intended:

Well, at least they USED to be. I don't know now because I quit watching TV in about 82.

Our politicians should force the FCC to force the god damned commercials to be 30-40 db below programing period. I remember the days we one could cat nap on the sofa on a rainy day with a boring golf match on and catch some good zzzzzzz's without have one hand on the mute button. (golf matches are like a sleeping pill to me)

The FCC would have to go after the ad agencies and post production houses to lower the RMS average levels on the commercials they send to us at the tv stations. I could tell the guys in master control to ingest the commercials into the system at a lower peak level, but the expander would just grab them and turn them up. The expander is the part of the loudness processing that helps bring up the lowest levels so you can hear them, such ad the golf swing and the club head hitting the ball.

No thanks. I like my audio signal dynamic.

mikey_the_rat