how can i stop commercials from being so loud?

[pwd72s]

Just wait for the hearing aid commercials to come on...they whisper through those.

[CJFusco]

As I have grown older, I have gotten sicker and sicker of television. So much of it really is just mindless crap... and the less I watch, when I finally do watch something it seems all that much more mindless and pointless. My mother is addicted to those CSI and LAW AND ORDER shows, but I don't know how she can stand them.

The number of shows I have liked over the past few years gets smaller and smaller. Season 1 of HEROES was great, but season 2 sucked. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT was fantastic, but was probably too smart for its own good and went the way of SPORTSNIGHT. THE OFFICE started out well enough, but slowly devolved into sappiness. I like Colbert and DAILY SHOW, but everything else on that network is remarkably puerile and tasteless. The original ADULT SWIM cartoons (AQUA TEEN, SEALAB, SPACEGHOST) were entertaining, but the new ones are awful. Once in awhile I will check out a new show that someone recommends, but I usually end up hating it.

I don't know, maybe I'm turning into a grumpy old man at 27 Or maybe I'm just slowly becoming a Luddite... but on 9 out of 10 nights at home I'd rather just open a book. No commercials there...

[TerryH]

Originally Posted by red911sc

Get Tivo (or any other DVR), pause show for a few minutes at the beginning and then just fast forward thru the commercials...... makes for an all around better viewing experience in my opinion.

+1... million

Funny how once a tivo/dvr user, you instantly wonder how you could have possibly watched tv all those years without one. Commercials now only mean I have to reach for the remote, but the show is back on in less than 10 seconds and the commercial was just a silent blur.

The downside is it's now torture to watch a sporting event at someone's home who is DVR ignorant.

[bell]

my marantz sr7000 reciever has a "nightime mode" which keeps the levels the same, works really well, also works in 5.1 mode so gun shots and explosions don't wake up the wifey

[450knotOffice]

Originally Posted by TerryH

Funny how once a tivo/dvr user, you instantly wonder how you could have possibly watched tv all those years without one. Commercials now only mean I have to reach for the remote, but the show is back on in less than 10 seconds and the commercial was just a silent blur.

+1,000,000! I don't think I can live without the TIVO anymore. Being able to pause, FF and RW is almost priceless. However, there are times when I'll be watching, say, a football game while I'm in the kitchen cooking dinner and I'll be back and forth, when suddenly I get blasted by the insanely loud commercial - and I'm still in the kitchen.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

TIVO is awesome. It's great as a time-management tool also. I can watch an entire 60 minute football game (that would be 2-2.5 hours with all the commercial breaks, endless yapping and other B.S.) in about 30 minutes by jumping from play to play. Don't miss a single play and I can comment just as well on the game the next day as some fool who wasted 3X as much time sitting there.

It's great.

But back to the original post, yes, I can't stand live TV either because of the different volume/modulation levels of the commercials too.

And no, I don't think going out and blowing $1500 on a new idiot box is the answer. I'll either watch in "non-real-time" mode (TIVO) or deal with turning the volume down, then back up. I have a bit of an issue with spending $$$ on idiot boxes and the vapid programming associated therewith. I'm not at the point of being able to justify rewarding the industry for its lousy product with my hard-earned $$$.

[Buckterrier]

Originally Posted by equality72521

Wasn't it illegal to do this in the past? I seem to remember that they weren't allowed to do this. Has the law changed or is it just not enforced?

I also thought the same thing. I guess the Fed would rather break Howard Sterns balls about saying vagina on the air, (something that Opra can say and not get fined), than enforce their own laws.
And you shouldn't have to BUY anything.

[DARISC]

A broadcast engineer once told me that the commercials are not in fact louder than the program audio at it's loudest.

Given the range from silent to loudest, most program audio averages in the middle of that range with momentary peaks of loudness when something explodes, crashes, screams etc., during which audio can jump to the full loudness end of the scale.

I believe the law is that a commercial's loudness cannot exceed that level. Of course advertisers want EVERYTHING in their commercial to be at full volume - and it sounds louder because everything in the commercial is always at maximum volume.

Or something like that.....

[Dantilla]

Originally Posted by DARISC

A broadcast engineer once told me that the commercials are not in fact louder than the program audio at it's loudest.

I asked a friend in the TV industry, and he said the same thing- the audio guy brings the slider up to Zero during a test tone, just like the show. Theoretically, the volume is the same. Most of a TV show is well below maximum volume, making the commercials seem louder than they actually are.

The bottom line- Whenever I watch TV (Rarely, only once every couple weeks), I mute during commercials.

[Drew001]

Originally Posted by DARISC

A broadcast engineer once told me that the commercials are not in fact louder than the program audio at it's loudest.

Each network has slightly different delivery specs - many don't really police those deliverables, but all broadcast stations have brick wall limiters containing the audio to a given level.

Often, during NFL broadcasts on FOX, I've heard added in voice overs much louder than the football game or any commercial. That is simply due to the engineers not caring that a 10 second VO is overly loud or no one monitoring it (which I find hard to believe).
The loud audio is likely tied to the video element that they're playing and no one has cared to correct it for future broadcasts since it only occurs once per game.

Commercials are often formatted into the programming.
A server is loaded with the given show or movie with the commercials embedded so that it plays off of the server from start to finish.
This saves money and time.
Live broadcasts are different, but the commercials are still played off of servers, but they're fired via timecode.

Many commercials won't match a show or film because of the era of creation or the territory where it was produced. New commercials are slammed (full-scale digital in level) and older films were mixed at more conservative (meaning analog) levels.

Loudness is definitely an issue but I'm more surprised that people aren't outraged by the horrible sync between picture and audio these days.
To me, that's much more of a problem than volume.

[DARISC]

Originally Posted by Drew001

I'm more surprised that people aren't outraged by the horrible sync between picture and audio these days.

Count me as one wno is outraged. I recently bought a flat screen and pay for digital/hdef. The sync truly is horrible. I was going to call Time Warner and ask if the problem was with their equipment. Apparently the source of the problem is not the local cable service?

It's amazing how little out of synch the two need to be before it is really obvious that speech and lip movement do not match up at all. I find it MUCH more annoying than the volume issue.

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by Drew001

Loudness is definitely an issue but I'm more surprised that people aren't outraged by the horrible sync between picture and audio these days.
To me, that's much more of a problem than volume.

Sync is bad and getting distracting, what's up with that?

Commercials at max loudness has been around for a long time, but getting much worse these past few years. Ten or fifteen years ago Magnavox and Panasonic had built-in software to make commercials not so loud. My 1995-ish 31" Panasonic used to be great but the past six years it has been out smarted by the bastards.

How about picture distortion? Every single house with a wide aspect screen I've visited has the images squished down so that everyone looks chubby. I've explained to several people that they can set this to the old 4:3 ratio, but they either don't care, don't want to do anything about it or don't want black bars each side. Of course they could get the proper digital signal in the wide aspect ratio and take advantage of their flat panel but are just too cheap.

I watch letterbox movies on my 4:3 aspect all the time, the black bars top and bottom just seem to go away quickly.

[Mule]

Originally Posted by Danny_Ocean

Know what you mean...everytime this obnoxious a-hole comes on, I have the urge to kick in the screen:

Dude, I could choke the life out of Billy Mays with a smile on my face. Ready for the bad new? He drives a Bentley.

[KaptKaos]

Originally Posted by nostatic

stop watching tv?

+1