Relief from loud TV ads may be near

Relief from loud TV ads may be near

By Carrie Wells | McClatchy Newspapers


WASHINGTON — Congress soon might mute screaming TV-ad announcers who press viewers to "buy now!" — if broadcasters don't beat the lawmakers to the volume button.

Under a proposal to be taken up Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission would squelch ad volumes to the average decibels of the TV show during which they appear.

Currently, TV ads can't be louder than the loudest peak in a show, said David Perry, the chairman of the broadcast production committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in New York. Ads often seem louder to viewers, he added, because a program's volume peak rarely comes just before an ad.

"Every time the ads came on they blew me out of my seat," said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who introduced the bill last June. "It really turns you off, makes you think, 'I'll be damned if I give them any of my money.' "

She's a member of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, which will consider the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, aka CALM. It has 63 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate.

more...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/69822.html

(but I will be happy if they do, all the same.)

This should have been done a LONG time ago.

or some similar name. Yikes they're annoying.

each one and turn the volume down to zero. The guy drives me nuts.

May he Rot In Peace.

I and my neighbors are not. I'm sick of all the screeching and don't buy anything advertised that way.

I usually don't actually watch the TV, just have it on in the background while being on the computer doing something else, and so I usually just tune out the commercials. Last night, though, and I forget what the ad was for, there came a moment when I turned around at the TV in amazement and asked, "Why is this person yelling at me?" when some idiot was trying to sell something.

I'd be a happy camper.

and was talking to the engineer on duty in the control room. One wall was all these gauges showing the water pressure in the various mains in the city. As we were talking, all of a sudden, all the needles on all the gauges took a steep dive in unison. I thought it was some kind of emergency or natural disaster. I mentioned this to the engineer. He laughed and just said "Commercials." All these people were flushing their toilets at the same time.

Yep, that's the time to do it :rofl:

Advertisers want the ads synchronized because that way they can put the same message out on multiple channels at the same time, which vastly increases the chance of someone pausing long enough to actually watch the commercial. Advertisers do not care about the individual program you are watching, except for very specialized niche markets. If it's a mass-market brand, they think in terms of mass-channel coverage.

I've not seen a commercial in a long, long time and I plan on keeping it that way.

I simply record or let the TiVO buffer fill up before I start watching anything. When the commercial break begins a few taps on one key skips the recording ahead until the program resumes.

It's a fabulous method for watching the program you're interested in and not the damned commercials.

I went on a letter writing campaign to the networks, satellite providers, and advertisers about very loud commercials. The response from each one of them was the same, they claimed that some soundtracks contained compressed data that broadcasters couldn't control. I knew then that was complete bullshit. Direct TV is one of the worst offenders.

Compressed audio sounds louder because it contains more energy. The sound in commercials is often compressed on purpose to make it sound louder.
Am/FM & analog TV audio (also FM) is restricted by law and psychics from causing interference. I worked in the engineering dept of a broadcast company for 24 years and therefore know a bit about this.

"Am/FM & analog TV audio (also FM) is restricted by law and psychics from causing interference."

Your TV is getting louder... louder... LOUDER!!!

Program audio has highs and lows due to dialog and music, etc. If they're going to target commercials they need to address program audio. Half the time you have to turn up the volume to hear the dialog and then turn it down when the music comes up.

My new tv handles it much better than all my old tvs but I still have difficulty on some shows hearing what is being said if the volume control is down so the music & SFX don't blast.

Commercials just compress the audio in a smaller space (I know that's not the technical term) but the peaks aren't any higher than programs and promos.

I'm a sound engineer, and share your dislike of loud commercials. I also have experience of doing post-production work for both films/program material and commercials.

As mentioned in the OP, basically the rule is that the average loudness can not exceed the peak loudness of the program material. BUT in a film you normally have dialog and background effects and music at moderate volume, with the peak levels (typically 32x louder, because the decibel scale is logarithmic) reserved for important things like explosions, gunfire, dramatic music crescendos and so on.

However, by using a technique called compression, you can punch up the perceived volume of a sound without changing the actual peak loudness (in engineering terms, volume and loudness are notthe same thing, just like speed and velocity are not the same thing in physics). The net result of this is that when Billy Mays comes on he's not just loud when he says 'This is really AMAZING', he's loud all the time when he says 'THIS IS REALLY AMAZING'. If you see him in an interview or something he's still a fast talker but he doesn't sound like he's yelling all the time. The problem is that everything Billy Mays (or any other commercial) says is rendered out at the same volume reserved for explosions, gunfire, fat ladies singing, and so on.

Compressing the sound in this way results in some distortion, but not that much because the frequencies remain in the same relationship to each other, you're only making changes in the amplitude (it is a problem on some kinds of music - for example compression of a recording of a singer + an acoustic guitar will mess things up because the acoustic guitar well get louder every time the singer's voice pauses...but with multi-track recording, that easy to get around). The distortion on your TV speaker (which is OK for handling transient moments of loudness but not for extended excursions) is likely to be much worse.

The problem for the broadcaster is that it's very hard to take this back out. There is a technique called expansion which increases dynamic range, but using expansion on something that has been previously compressed sounds dreadful and doesn't remotely resemble natural dynamics. The real use of expanders is to reduce minor background noise on a normal recording to total silence - that's why you don't hear hums and fans and breathing in the background when a radio DJ pauses for breath, and why home videos usually sound like ass because all the ambient stuff is still there and you've become used to hearing it cleaned up for you in real movies...by people like me.

Now, the broadcaster could take all commercials and reduce them by 12 dB to get something approximately similar to the normal dialog level in a movie. but doing that will result in the advertisers kicking up a huge fuss (and pulling their commercials, which is what pays the TV station) because it won't just make Billy Mays quieter, it will kill the level of the sound effects or the background music, which were designed to work at a certain level. So they usually take the commercials as they are submitted by the advertiser, and the people who records the commercials for the advertisers are paid to deliver something that sounds punchy - ie, as loud as all the other commercials on all channels, because they don't know what they're going to be played next to - and won't get rehired if they submit an advert that plays politely with the program material (this has actually happened to me).

So the broadcasters are not lying to you. Trying to correct for the loudness of a commercial which is submitted already fully mixed is a real problem: the techniques of expanding or just turning the volume down are both going to result in calls from angry advertising producers demanding to know why the broadcaster butchered their commercial playback - this sometimes happens to actual shows as well, which results in even more calls from angry viewers and angry content producers (this has also happened to me, as I work for a TV show now). Since 99% of people just grumble and reach for the mute button, broadcasters long ago gave up trying to deal with this. They hate it just as much as consumers, but no broadcaster wants to be the one to try to change it and then lose all all their ad booking in retaliation as punishment.

This 'loudness war' is also an issue in music production If you look a recording made in the last 10 years (especially pop or dance music) you'll see a much higher average loudness than on an older song. But this is not just a nefarious plot on behalf of record companies. It's also got to do with the fact that FM radio broadcast pre-compresses the signal fed into the transmitter. In order to give a CD the same 'punch' as a song heard on the radio, both home and professional producers typically administer compression to the songs before they go to a record executive, who might otherwise dismiss it as not sounding punchy or exciting enough. Additionally, since FM radio compression distorts the original recording somewhat, the best way to keep it sounding the way you intended when it leaves the studio is to do your own compression first rather than leaving the sound of your recording up to the broadcast settings, which can vary.

Really, it should be the FCC mandating this instead of Congress. But the FCC in recent years has become much less about broadcast standards (apart from the occasional fuss over nipple and people saying Fuck) and much more about licensing and administering electromagnetic spectrum (which is Boring but Important). So I'll settle for congress handling it (by forcing the FCC to administer it). The language of the bill is short, to the point, and technically correct (ie it articulates the rules in a way that is meaningful to a broadcast or sound engineer). You should probably call your congressperson and ask them to support it, or better yet team up with 5-10 firends and make sure they get plenty calls, because the ad industry will complain about it and suggest that it forces them to make a different mix of every commercial for every different channel/program it is meant to be shown with - eg a louder version for a romantic comedy or an action movie than for a drama or suspense thriller. There is a marginal degree of truth to this argument, but in practice it's not going to have any real significance. So get your phone on and go all Billy Mays on your congressperson!

wins as the longest response for the day. :D

If you doze off you will be awakened by the wall of sound coming out of the tv when the action is going full bore.

if I rent a movie I have to now constantly monitor the mute button when I'm being alerted to "ACTION"

I need someone to LET ME KNOW because I JUST WON'T GET IT ON MY OWN! CUE THE "WOMEN TIME TO BE EMOTIONAL" MUSIC!:sarcasm: :cry:

In fact, that's one of the specific things that post-production engineers like myself do to make it exciting (try watching a movie or other high-value show with the sound totally off, and/or listening to same from the next room as a radio play). IT's hard to get you to jump in your seat by showing you a picture. But a nice BANG from the speakers will definitely work. I like to think I'm pretty good at this :-)

I don't mind it in a movie theatre at all. I even get a kick out of it because it does get your blood pumping. But I watch tv late at night and live in a condo with people in the next room and downstairs who I don't want to wake up because you've turned the volume up so high that it actually wakes me up if I've dozed.

There's a place for everything.

On a dance record (see my other posts), almost never because you want everything to sound huge and pumping. On an orchestral recording, only a very little amount is tolerable because you're messing up the conductor's work. On a movie it depends very much on how it's edited. Michael Bay films or war movies overdo it. A lot.

The thing is, we only make one version of the final soundtrack as far as music and effects are concerned (you make different versions to allow for foreign dialog, which is why if you flip the language track on a DVD you can end up with something totally unbalanced, as the dialog re-recording was done in an other country by someone you never met). But we have no way of knowing when the broadcaster is going to show the movie, so it's not like we make saturday-morning or sunday-afternoon or middle-of-the-night-kids-are-sleeping versions.

What you get on TV is essentially the theater version with a bit of added compression (due to the technology of the analog broadcast/digital streaming process). It may get tweaked a bit for DVD/TV release, but that's usually by a completely other engineer at the distributor who again, I never meet, and again, to do with technical standards rather than creative ones.

... this sort of thing for years. That and having the volume standard from one channel to the next.

To buy the equipment keep the sound level on each channel at the same level as all the others would cost more than it would be worth. You have a hundred and how many channels on your cable system? 200+?

... but I didn't realize the equipment would be particularly pricey.

This is about what a public access channel has.



This is what a mid-size production company (producing 3 broadcast shows) uses.



This is the control room at CBS (the national station in NY rather than a local affiliate). Imagine 3-4x as much gear as the photo above at the back end of this.



This is from an animation company (and the room lights are turned down to make it look cooler) but is similar to what's at my local cable provider.



The top picture is somewhere between $50 and $100k worth of gear. The bottom one (which you're only seeing a part of, remember) is a few million bucks.

Of course, one person can do absolutely amazing things nowadays with $5000 worth of computer + software. But for say a 1/2 hour cooking show (similar to what I work on), once you're happy with the edit and punch the button to output the final version, it still takes a couple of hours of computer time. Doing it all in real time with multiple cameras and audio feeds costs $$$$ though. Even those little broadcast TV vans you see at events or gathering local news are packing about $250,000 of A/V equipment. For big events like a Springsteen concert or Obama's next major public speech, the media bus runs a million, easy.

depending on how big it is and how many bells and whistles it comes with.

Broadcast equipment is VERY expensive.

The idea is not to make all the channels have the same level, it is to make each channel maintain a level from programming through the commercial portions. That is very different from what you are suggesting. The proposal is simply to stop the practice of commercial breaks being so much louder than the programs they are shown on, not to attempt an all channels universal level.

I see them over at friends houses who haven't yet learned to DVR a show and start it 15 mins after it begins airing to eliminate all commercials. :evilgrin:

It was a big issue back then, everyone wanted something 'dunaboutit' and for a while the ads were toned down. But just for a while.

Audio engineer don't manually ride the faders up and down to keep it all loud like that, that would take forever. Instead we tweak a few knobs on a device called a compressor and then re-record the results. It's all done with machines, wonderful machines.

They're not there just to annoy people viewing commercials, of course - there are lots of legitimate broadcast and music production uses for compression. Without them drums would sound like a horrible racket and slow jams would not feature such sexy, sexy voices that sound like they're right next to you.

around 1958 for my ham shack. It actually worked well. It was triple ugly but worked well. :D

The big bucks for broadcast equipment is because it has low levels of hysteresis and analog drift. Digital makes that all much cheaper of course but the big suppliers price according to their clients' ability to pay. The main plus of the modern age is that you can have a premium compression plugin but use it on 72 channels at once if you're so inclined.

and that is the problem. Hence the need for new law.

I killed my TV.

I refuse to buy anything from a place with noticeably loud commercials. You'd think they wouldn't wanna take that chance.

For ad haters everywhere! :D

BTW, you people might enjoy THIS: http://forums.commercialsihate.com/default.asp

First of all Congress has far better things to do, particularly considering that TV ads are rapidly dying. What's next, some pressing newspaper-related legislation?

But more importantly it won't do a damn thing and this representative clearly doesn't understand the issue technically. They're going to require the ads to equal the average level of the programming? All that means is that they're going to boost the average level of the shows by making sure there's an equal amount of quiet bits and loud bits. They can still catch your attention then by leading from a quiet part of the show into a heavily limited commercial that blasts out at you.