how can i stop commercials from being so loud?
 

I just effing hate how commercials are so much louder than the preceding television show. I mean, I REALLY don't like it.

is there any way I can stop this from happening?

I don't want to have to go to the bloomberg terminal, get EVERY executive's name for the service i have and then bombard them with emails, daily, until they tell me how to stop this from happening. While a tad on the petulant side, this worked to perfection with Nokia on a different matter.

On higher-end televisions, there is an option in the set-up menu that automatically "levels" the sound so there are no surprises.

Didn't know about that function!

I have to watch TV where the English is on a different sound channel so the volume for some reason is louder than normal Japanese levels. So, the dam commercials are even louder.

The networks want to get your attention to help their sponsors.
Ain't much to do ....

stop watching tv?

This function doesn't work very well for me... :mad:

You know Nostatic, that's about what it is coming down to these days. After football is over I probably won't turn on the sound (we have CNBC on all day at work with no sound) until baseball season starts again...

They want to make sure that when you get in the kitchen after the show, you can still hear their damn add. Personally, I think that one of the reasons adds are so loud these days is because of the feature that most TV's have nowadays that automatically turns down the volume for adds. The network's answer? Turn up the volume even more!

I know what you mean. One of these commercails by Aarons Rentals has caused me problems for the past four years or so...

I used to have little problem getting to sleep.
One night, as I was watching TV and drifting off to sleep, an Aaron's commercial came on.

It stats out with a woman screaming at the top of her lung in song "AAaaAArrrOOONS! We make dreAAMS!" very loudy. easly twice as loud as the TV show that was airing.
It woke me up. Fast.

Evr since that one night, I have had a terrible time geting to sleep. Sometimes it'll take me an hour or two.

wow, I smell an emotional distress lawsuit cooking :D

hmmm, what did the neighbors think/say? ;)

I've switched to cable. Now, I just keep Discovery on. Not that much of a problem with volume differences.

Buy a 2 Channel Stereo Audio Compressor (assuming that you dont currently have a 5.1 or 7.1 setup)...

Find a way to patch it in between your TV speakers out put... which actually could easily be done if you are using out board speakers.. and then set your threshold, ratio attack and release accordingly....

the compressor will limit the audio from going over the particular threshold by the amount of ratio that you set... then everything will be squashed to about the same level when it hits your speakers.

...

well you wanted to know how to do it? :):p:cool:

Use a brick for volume control...problem solved :)

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?

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.

I never watch live TV anymore. Even Football games. If I start watching a football game an hour or so after it starts, I'll never have to watch commercials.

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

http://www.princeroy.org/Billy_Mays.jpg

That's what I thought too. The other thing that's starting to piss me off is the show advertising graphics they are putting on at the bottom of the screen during the show you are watching. They are getting bigger and bigger too.

Wha? I thought everyone loved Billy Mays!:eek:;)

Anyone notice everything like this has only gotten worse since Fox was introduced (many years ago now)? The 'big three' didn't do any of this, or I certainly don't remember it. If they had, I would have been getting up to adjust the volume for my Mom and Dad when I was a kid...:D

[QUOTE=Moses;3715183]I never watch live TV anymore. Even Football games.../QUOTE]

That's what I do too. On "regular shows" that I record, I know (at least on my DVR), at which points and how many times to hit the 30 sec FF button. At ten minutes, hit it 4 times (skipping two minutes of yacking), at the next break, hit it 6 times, etc. Football games take significantly less "real time" to watch if you delay the start just a bit :)

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

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...

+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. :D

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 :D

+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. :eek::mad:

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 $$$ on idiot boxes and the vapid programming associated therewith. I'm not at the point of being able to justify rewarding the industry for its lousy product with my hard-earned $$$.

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.

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.....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

+1