Why Are TV Ads So Danged Loud? | Hacker News Reader

Why Are TV Ads So Danged Loud?

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54 pointstomkwok51 comments

I get just annoyed when I watch a movie. I raise up the volume to hear the actors talking, next thing you know they play really loud music for a scene, I do mean 2x louder than the actors are talking. I have to watch movies fiddling with the volume, it's a nuisance. I don't watch TV as much as I used to, but yeah there's definitely some commercials that are on their highest volume possible, it's really absurd!

You need to increase the volume just on your centre channel. That's where the dialog is.

That's the result of a 5.1 mix improperly downmixed to stereo.

I never thought about this, you may very well be right. Maybe as people above have said VLC could be used to fix this.

Yeah but why is my TV not able to recognize manually that I use the TV's default speakers and therefore only have stereo? Would there be a way if I watch over a Linux under my control, like on a Rasperry?

We had the same issue. Added a center channel (5.1 down mixed to 3 channels) and the problem has largely been resolved.

The loudness issue with movie dialog/action is a common annoying problem. Some home hi-fi amps have compression and dynamic effects to deal with the problem. VLC for PC has an audio compression feature which helps a lot. Or.. sit there with remote in hand the whole movie.

Its not just VLC for PC, VLC for Linux has it as well and my bet is that so does the Mac version.

It can be a bit tricky to get it configured correctly but there are tutorials and blog posts about how to do it and it is very much worth it once you do get it setup. Save it as a default and be done with it.

Its so effective that I only watch movies from VLC now, which means most commercials are stripped out already anyway as an added bonus.

PC (Personal Computer) does not mean just Windows. There is also VLC for Android and iOS.

I thought the FCC /does/ regulate the loudness of TV commercials, for a few years now.

https://www.fcc.gov/guides/program-background-noise-and-loud...

Yeah, article from ~2008, FCC regulated loud commercials ~2012: http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/loud-commercials

I like that HN isn't afraid of older content, but you know, caveat lector.

Ahh, thanks for pointing that out; I didn't notice it was an old post. Usually those have the date (2008) at the end of the title.

Would be nice to have it added. Mods?

Maybe it's me, but it seems like commercials have gotten louder again lately—like within the last few months. Maybe broadcasters are testing the FCC to see what they're willing to enforce?

I've noticed the same thing. It seems like it did get better for a while (around the time the FCC mandated the volume restrictions), but now it seems just as bad as it ever was. I wonder what the text of the regulation states. I wonder if it says something about how they can't boost the volume for commercials compared to the show/program. If so, I wonder if they just now play the show/program at a much lower volume, thus giving the effect that the commercial is louder (thus, complying with the regulation and not boosting the volume of the ads). Now, if the regulation stated something about the relative volumes of the shows vs. the ads, then it might be harder to "cheat".

We had this all figured out here in the Netherlands, a law prevented this behavior (which in turn prevents muting during commercial so why the hell they kept raising the volume no one knows) and it seemed to work. But now we have made the switch to digital and we are back where we started (I really wonder why)... Back to hands on the mute button as soon as the logo disappears (which signals incoming commercial break.)

(If you know what the difference is between an amplifier and an attenuator, you should probably skip this comment.)

The point that the article tries to establish (and, IMHO, fails) is that there are two things going on:

S: The signal that comes in.

V: The perceived volume that reaches your ear after the signal is decoded, amplified, and transduced by speakers.

S influences V, but so does the volume control on your TV or receiver, the efficiency of your speakers, and how far away you are. The fact that S and V are different is what allows your TV station to claim with a straight face that the perception of sound is not under their control. But they're also lying, because...

TV stations take content from many sources (local commercials, network commercials, local programming, network programming) and while they probably pass the network stuff straight through, they still have to adjust the level of everything else so that it is not too distractingly different from what the network feed. Local advertisers will complain vociferously if Billy Bob Auto's 35 seconds of dancing cheerleaders clustered up around old Billy Bob himself is a smidge quieter than Jesse Ventura's minigun chopping down trees in the edited-for-TV rerun of Predator that just went to commercial break.

So they run all the sources through compressors, expanders and limiters to get a more or less equalized top output volume. The sources have all been produced with this expectation, so we have the exact same loudness war that has been mentioned on HN recently, only on TV instead of on CD and FM and MP3.

In the end, you get problems at every commercial break where the program has lots of dynamics and ends on a quiet bit. The "normal" Billy Bob Auto ad wouldn't sound so loud if it had happened right after the car chase.

My cynical and most likely incorrect theory is that a lot of people use commercials as an excuse to get up from the couch and go to the kitchen, bathroom, etc. and the advertisers still want them to be able to hear the commercial. :P

Actually, that makes sense. This and waking you up so you focus your attention on the ads.

You are right. That is the reason why it's done this way.

TV advertising is about hammering a memory into your brain through repetition. A significant portion of their audience does exactly what you say (go to the fridge or bathroom). Making the ads as loud as possible helps to compensate for some of that.

The general idea is that next time you're in the shop and forced to choose between 30 detergent brands you will intuitively pick the one brand that you've at least heard of.

Interesting, and fucking sad. You go with whatever brand you brought the last time, or whatever is cheapest.

I think that's a good start, and that we can go further if we get more cynical.

From the advertiser's perspective, the main point of a TV commercial is to manipulate you into buying stuff; the show is just bait. We all know from personal experience that people pay more attention if we suddenly get louder. Presumably the people who make commercials know that, too. I'm sure some people even resisted, but once other commercials are loud, you sure don't want to be the quiet one that people can more easily talk over.

Presumably volume levels will go up until more likely purchasers are put off by the level than are influenced by the now-heard message; it's only at that point they'd see a dip in the numbers.

Advertising is the main reason I don't watch TV anymore. It just irritates me too much. (Also, if a website pops up an add, I immediately close the page.)

Same, especially the repetition of pretty cringe-worthy content (stupid jokes and skits seem to be a mainstay of TV advertising). Many TV ads are just about bearable the first time, but I cannot stand to see them 5 or 10 or 50 times, which means that I can't watch TV regularly without becoming irritated about it.

The same reason why music on the radio is so dang loud– excessive compression. See: The Loudness War (just 1:54 mins long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

Serious people avoid this shit-show by simply not watching commercial television, except through DVDs or subscription downloads.

Many DVDs still have ads, unskippable "look, here is this super loud 20 second fade in of the distributor logo" sections and very loud menus. They also have mandatory unskippable "warnings" about how evil you are and how you are forbidden from watching the film on an oil platform. The only effective way around those is ripping and re-recording if you want to play it on anything but a computer with non-crippled software.

I've only just subscribed to Netflix (just arrived in Australia), and I'm finding the dynamic range on movies to be a far bigger problem. On commercial TV here the sound range is compressed/normalized enough during the shows & ads that I never have to tweak the volume. But Netflix movies seem to have 4x the dynamic range - I have to turn the volume up twice as loud to hear whispered dialog, and turn it down to 1/4 the volume for a car crash / fight scene. I've had to resort to using headphones when watching at night instead.

This. I refuse to watch commercials that interrupt me in any way or where I cannot pause rewind or otherwise control the content around them (this rules out broadcast tv and radio). It makes we irrationally angry and that is just not worth it. Even muting the tv isn't good enough, because the ads still interrupt the experience of watching.

I read earlier today google congratulating themselves on people having watch 100 million video ads on youtube and how this proved that people are willing to watch ads that interest them. Thats a load of bullshit, because you can't actually skip the ads until they have played for some time, and if you do the next video is going to have another ad (usually worse). Everybody I talked with hates those ads with a passion - usually youtube is the reason they finally install an adblocker.

Of course if you go the illegal route you get 1080p with no ads and super high quality.

One of the reasons I like old recordings is because they still cared about the dynamic range. Accent is a core component of music and is completely lost in the compressor/expander wars of today. Try listening to something like Patsy Cline or John Coltrane and then contrast it with something newer and heavily compressed, like White Zombie. The accents in the older music give it an extra dimension comparatively.

I've noticed TV ads also becoming visually "louder." Not just in the number and quickness of cuts, but in the deliberate "strobing" of their visual effects.

Cuts switch between dark and light scenes. Within cuts, there are often effects that "flash" the screen repeatedly. They are effects that are ostensibly part of the scene -- not just inserted white frames or the like. But they are composited to create this very attention-grabbing "strobing".

I started noticing this because I would have the TV on in the background, e.g. with the mid-day news on while I was at the computer. It was in my peripheral vision, and I noticed it increasingly grabbing my attention when I was not interested in the content. Even when muted.

Even when muted.

This, I think, is a key point.

People are, when not fast forwarding through, at least muting the commercials. So... no longer to they "shout" at us; they flash and flicker in attempts to make sure that we are still -- willingly or not -- paying attention to the screen.

I've moved on largely to streamed content. Nonetheless, a "mute" feature I would like would be one that also sets the screen brightness, intensity, and/or dynamicism to e.g. 50% or somesuch of normal. Enough to see what is on screen, but to make this "strobing" much less intrusive.

Of course, business models will suppress this ever happening, in the mainstream commercial sphere. But from a technical perspective, it would be a nice, simple addition to the product features.

P.S. Once you are aware it is occurring, have a look for this visual gaming. It then quite stands out.

They're also fibbing about not having a way to objectively measure and meter loudness.

It's existed for years as ITU-R BS.1770 in the U.S. (there a very, very similar recommendation called EBU R128 in the EU).

There are standard methods to meter percieved loudness and output energy, there is widely available hardware to implement this.

My solution is to not watch live television. Every once in a while I'll buy a boxed set of a show, or a backup of such a boxed set. I listen to it at the level of my music, metered with the recommended method from EBU R128.

In addition to the benefit of not being jarred by the loudness contrast, I get the benefit of being able to actually experience the whole movie or television show as one continuous feed, usually the way it was intended to be watched. The audio is also often lossless or close to it, the movies not cut awkwardly, my audio equipment is better on my personal computer than it is on anyone's living room.

Don't watch live television; it's expensive, offensively formatted, and usually not really that good.

It's not just the ads. The shows are louder too. This is in large part due to the poor quality of speakers in many modern TVs. Same reason for the loudness war in music. The audio is mastered to sound good on bad speakers. It's more dramatic / noticeable in ads because you're watching a bunch of spots run back-to-back in a a relatively short period of time. The content of the ads are produced to be more attention grabbing and clearly define the start/end of each spot. IMO trying to regulate something like this is pointless. They'll just find new ways to be irritating until that model stops working for them.

In Germany we're adopting the EBU Recommendation R 128 and don't have the problem that much anymore.

I have watched very few TV ads in the last 10 years or so thanks to the SageTV DVR software and the Comskip commercial detection and skipping plugin. It isn't perfect, but it is pretty close.

Despite being acquired by Google, the founder of SageTV recently announced that SageTV source will be released as open source soon, so we can expect a healthy future for this great DVR platform!

Have anyone tried to completely avoid TV ads...I mean, just turn the damn thing off when the ad starts.

Thinking about that, could we make a thing, which can receive start frames of commonly appearing ads from a server, which will be dynamically updated, and when the frames in the transmission match, do a user defined action. Either turn the TV off or switch channels...

I mute the TV when ads are playing.

Commercial skipping is very doable from a tech perspective, the challenge is with the business implementation. Some background links:

http://www.cnet.com/news/directv-sitting-on-tv-commercial-sk... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/business/media/dish-networ...

Many cable set-top boxes have "Dolby Volume" as a feature in a hidden sub menu. It's off by default, as is the feature that prevents your TV from stretching 4:3 channels across your 16:9 screen.

So this 2008 post is timely for me; just last night I spotted that menu item, and wondered what it was.

I wonder if this could be solved with two volume knobs - one to raise low volumes higher, and the other to lower high volumes.

This way the user can change the overall volume and dynamic range, instead of just the overall volume. The greater the delta between the two, the greater the dynamic range.

Perhaps you jest, but if not, what you've described here the general function of an audio compressor. Compressors are repsonsible for a lot of the lack of dynamics in modern recorded (and some live) music.

A compressor has a setpoint above which it will only allow volume to increase at a set ratio (1 dB for every X dB over the threshold), effectively curving off the peaks. It also usually has a setting for "makeup" gain to raise the volume floor. There's a lot more to it (knee, attack, release, etc.), but that's the general gist - they're designed to manage the dynamic range of a given channel.

True, it is audio compression (or expansion, depending on the settings).

If the audio signal dictates the balance, why have a left and right balance knob? We have a volume knob, but no way to adjust the compression. We are letting the audio signal dictate the compression. It should be set by the user, just like the balance. It could also be a compressor/expander setting, but IMO musical accent is so core to music that it should be a part of the volume control.

I doubt any of this would work as the original range is lost after it is compressed.

What I wonder more is why voice consistently is more silent than action. I am just watching Avengers 1, and I have to scale the sound every two minutes, because action scenes are too loud and dialogue scenes are too silent. I have no 5-1 sound system, but I think my modern TV has a Linux inside. It should have the power to scale accordingly!

*edit: Sorry I haven't read the other comments before. Thus, this is merely a +1 to them. If you want to comment about this topic look at the other discussions. Thanks.

I lived with some guys who had a TV that would mute automatically during commercials. This was about 5 years ago, but I think the TV was older than that (it wasn't a flat screen).

I assume it took advantage of the fact that commercials have different audio signal properties (which we perceive as loudness) than regular programming.

I haven't seen a TV that can do this since, although the fact that I only use my TVs now for streaming and gaming means it's not exactly a feature that I'm on the lookout for.

"Published 7 years ago by Bruce Simmons , Updated February 15th, 2014"

Well, today it should be practical to have something that does that, and it doesn't need to bee too expensive. But you need a way to tap into the audio channels (so for example, between TV and a cable box)

But it's doable

Or just don't watch TV.

It still blows my mind when I hear about or remember that people still watch Television. Not just the furniture its self, but the scheduled programming its self. Whaaa? Do they have no autonomy? Do they have no desire to follow their own interests?

The only exception I can think of is sports. Cable channels seem to have a pretty tight reign on live coverage.

There is a lot of crap out there but on the other hand many consider it to be a new Golden Age of Television. Granted I think the sans-advertisements HBO has as much to do with this as its ad-driven counterparts.

Breaking Bad and Mad Men? I think those are examples of great commercial television.

I think one could easily go without though and probably live a richer life if you choose a more productive alternate activity in its place. But sometimes you just want to zone out on some pop drama for an hour.

I think you and the parent are subtly not talking about quite the same thing. You advocate good television shows, he is talking about watching television in front of a television, as controlled by a television station, at their schedule.

It is quite possible to watch the shows on your terms, when it fits into your schedule - who is to say that you need to zone out at same time your favourite show in on air?

Because they know you are off to the bathroom.

Idea: BlockAds/MuteAds for TV.

Idea 2: A DVR like device that delays your entire programming by 5 minutes so that it automatically wipes out ads.

You know what doesn't have loud ads? Good, old-fashioned print books.

I've been meaning to go back to them over a lot of other entertainment media consumption.

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