Last Updated on April 28, 2018
Tired of those commercials that “scream” at you while you’re watching your favorite shows?
A House Subcommittee has approved a bill that would require the broadcast and cable industries to regularize the volume of advertisements and the programming surrounding them, Broadcasting & Cable reports.
California Democrat Rep. Anna Eshoo, whose state is facing major economic problems, says this bill is designed to keep the volume of commercials and programming uniform.
It’s a nice idea…on paper. Here’s why it’ll never work.
The problem, most of the time, isn’t the volume of the commercials, but the compression rate under which the audio is processed. Commercials are often processed at a higher rate to get what sounds like more volume, even when both the program and the commercial both peak at 100% on an audio meter.
Add to that the fact that the majority of the time, when a program goes to commercial, the audio level often drops a bit, so there’s almost no way that the majority of situations won’t appear to be a case of commercials being louder than the shows.
To better illustrate the point, I’d like to ask you to think of classical music.
If you’ve ever taken time to listen to an entire piece of classical music, you are well aware that by design, some parts are intentionally loud and thunderous, while others are intentionally soft and bare, depending on the composition.
Now imagine taking that piece of music and running it through compression software that takes the loudest parts, make them the norm, then boosts the lowest parts as much as it can to get them as close to the loudest parts as possible.  In terms of volume, measured in decibels, nothing has really changed in the overall composition, because the loudest parts are no louder than they ever were.  This kind of thing is often done in more expensively-produced commercials.  (And not nearly so often in locally-produced spots.)
Now let’s think about that television show you’re watching.  Let’s say it’s CSI, for example.  Catherine Willows picks up the critical clue at the crime scene.  The camera follows it as she raises it to her eyes for a closer look.  The dramatic music gets quiet, she whispers her comment to Gil Grissom, who cracks the required joke, and then they cut to a reaction shot of her.  The dialog at that moment might be peaking at 100% on an audio meter, but in a drama, that’s not automatic.  It could be peaking, depending on the mood, at 80 or 90%.
The show fades to black for the commercial break, then the commercial begins.  If the commercial has been designed to peak at 100% right off the top — a technique designed to get your attention — then it’s almost always going to sound louder, even when as a whole it isn’t.
So the question then becomes, What kind of nightmarish system of enforcement could possibly be conceived to make sure that this is actually being done?
