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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

I think that is exactly the motivation: avoiding the random shifts in volume between videos. Pushing back against the loudness war was probably just a bonus.

It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

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> It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

Call me cynical, but I immediately thought that formed part of YouTube's motivation for this.

I must be the opposite of cynical, because I assumed they were doing it to combat that. The FCC already acted against the practice on TV. http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/loud-commercials

If France, the network cant increase the loudness during the ads. Instead, the sound is (sometimes, heavily) compressed. Annoying as hell.

That's what this article means by "loudness". They're talking about compressing the dynamic range so that the average power is higher, not increasing the peak power.

Loudness of course isn't new to commercials, but recently I noticed that some TV shows are also compressed into oblivion, resulting in a very noticeable pumping effect between dialogue and the ambient noise in-between.

Re the commercials, over here in NL they (finally!) introduced a law that prohibits that behaviour.

In the US, Congress passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act in 2010 and the FCC began enforcement in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...

Related to the sibling comment here on the CALM act - who thinks up these names? Is there a committee in some basement somewhere that gets told the gist of each act, and has to think up a suitable acronym for them?

Underpaid legislative aides, generally. Occasionally with the help of overpaid lobbyists.

They passed a similar law here in the US (http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/loud-commercials) but unfortunately, it did not help very much because sound engineers use tricks that make the commercials meet the technical requirements while still being loud to the human ear. For example, they mix a loud opening and a quieter closing so the overall decibel level averages out but you still get startled when the commercial starts.

Just one more reason not to watch normal television.

Definitely. It allows people to discover more videos without creating the annoyance of having to change volume for every video.

While it has a degree of intent, it is also because music is louder than dialogue.

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