There's no need to give industry a year to find the technological means to accomplish the goal of bringing the annoying and excessive loudness of commercials into line with the volume level of the programming because they already own the equipment that will accomplish the task; Its called an audio compressor and has been around for decades.
Bill would lower volume of loud TV commercials
It's after dinner. You're tired. You ease yourself into a comfortable place to watch your favorite TV show. Suddenly you're jolted from your couch potato demeanor by a commercial break.
It's an ad for insurance or rum or a credit card -- and it's blaring, invading your calm and boosting your blood pressure.
Marketers want the loud commercials to grab viewers' attention.
A Democratic representative from California, however -- and her fellow politicians in the House -- find them more annoying than effective.
In her crusade to eliminate the nuisance, Rep. Anna Eshoo wrote the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM, which mandates that TV commercials be no louder than the programs in which they appear.
Representatives unanimously passed the bill last month and sent it to the Senate for consideration.
The brief measure directs the Federal Communications Commission to develop regulations preventing ads from being "excessively noisy or strident" or "having modulation levels substantially higher than the accompanying program." The bill also addresses "average maximum loudness."
The volume of television commercials is a common complaint among viewers. One man told CNN, "Every time you put on the TV and try and watch a show, the next thing you get are these really loud commercials."
A woman added, "I usually mute the television."
"This is a dumb bill but I love it. I really do," said media analyst Mark Hughes. He said that for irritated Americans it strikes a nerve, even though it's not a huge political issue.
"It's important to people. And it's important in my household that I don't wake up the kids when they're sleeping, and I don't tick off my wife when she tells me to turn it down" because of a commercial's high volume.
Eshoo said she's been swamped with mail, e-mail and phone calls from people who have thanked her for the bill.
Political strategist John Ashford said there is some attraction to an issue that is manageable, as opposed to the complex issues Congress often struggles with.
"Having worked on Capitol Hill and now working in public relations, I know that when Congress can't solve big problems like Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 percent unemployment and how to implement this health care bill they are trying to pass, they turn to small problems like blasting television commercials."
Under the measure, advertisers and production houses would have one year to adopt technology that modulates and sets sound levels -- and apply it to TV commercials.
The FCC will do its part, a source there said.
from wiki:
Dynamic Range Compression
The trend of increasing loudness as shown by waveform images of the same song mastered on CD four times since 1983.
With the advent of the CD and digital music, record companies, mixing engineers and mastering engineers have been gradually increasing the overall volume of commercial albums. Originally they would just push the volume up so that the single loudest point was at full volume, but more recently by using higher degrees of compression and limiting during mixing and mastering, compression algorithms have been engineered specifically to accomplish the task of maximizing audio level in the digital stream. Hard limiting or hard clipping can result, affecting the tone and timbre of the music in a way that one critic describes as "dogshit". [10] The effort to increase loudness has been referred to as the "loudness wars".
Most television commercials are compressed heavily[citation needed] (typically to a dynamic range of no more than 3dB) in order to achieve near-maximum perceived loudness while staying within permissible limits. This is the explanation for the chronic problem that TV viewers and listeners have noticed for years[citation needed]. While commercials receive heavy compression for the same reason that radio broadcasters have traditionally used it (to achieve a "loud" audio image), TV program material, particularly old movies with soft dialogue, is comparatively uncompressed by TV stations. This results in commercials much louder than the television programs, since users turn up the volume to hear soft program audio. This problem is a difficult one to solve because much TV program audio contains very little audio energy to be electronically "expanded" with a compressor in an attempt to even out the volume. Even across the cable TV dial with myriad audio program volume sources, there is a wide disparity of audio volume levels.
Leave a comment