WASHINGTON — Legislation to turn down the volume on those loud TV commercials that send couch potatoes diving for their remote controls looks like it'll soon become law.
The Senate unanimously passed a bill late Wednesday to require television stations and cable companies to keep commercials at the same volume as the programs they interrupt.
The House has passed similar legislation. Before it can become law, minor differences between the two versions have to be worked out when Congress returns to Washington after the Nov. 2 election.
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Ever since television caught on in the 1950s, the Federal Communication Commission has been getting complaints about blaring commercials. But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials. So it hasn't been regulating them.
Correcting sound levels is more complicated than using the remote control. The television shows and ads come from a variety of sources, from local businesses to syndicators.
Managing the transition between programs and ads without spoiling the artistic intent of the producers poses technical challenges and may require TV broadcasters to purchase new equipment. To address the issue, an industry organization recently produced guidelines on how to process, measure and transmit audio in a uniform way.
I don't think they are going to get much accomplished with this new bill and are just wasting time and money on it. The TV stations already use audio limiters. So it's not that the commercials are louder than TV shows but instead that most TV shows have a lot of ambiance and volume dynamics to them making them sound softer.
If they were to compress their audio on TV shows it would cause all the dynamics do disappear and that is the only way I see them fixing the problem much like radio engineers have had to do over time.
After all if watching a spooky TV show where there is the slow buildup of special effects and background music to the big part that makes you jump a little is part of the fun. If they start compressing all the audio like most current radio stations do it will loose that effect only because they will be forced to keep all the audio levels the same so commercials are no louder/softer than the TV shows, much like radio stations do so that they sound as loud as the next guy on the dial.
Besides I don't see this helping for some advertisements that use special effects to make them sound louder than they are. Like the all too common effect they use now to reverse phase of one audio channel to make the advert pop out of the audio because of weird phase effects, and others that use really fast reverberation to sound as if they are in a bathroom. Volume limiting/compressing would do nothing to help that annoyance.