Then comes a commercial break and all hell breaks loose with the sound levels.
What are commercial breaks?.. I stopped watching TV many moons ago. I stream and sail the seven seas.
Ads are making a comeback on streaming services. Not only Youtube, which is now getting more serious about blocking ad-blockers, but even on paid streaming. Netflix has an ad supported tier, Amazon runs ads for its own stuff (so far)…
Came here to say this. I HATE it when I set a reasonable volume level for the show, and all the commercials are twice as loud. Grrr!
It’s 2023 why are you seeing commercials 🏴☠️
The commercials on B104 in the lehigh valley of PA in the morning are so loud it’s distorted.
Hello Lehigh Valley resident. I’ve formerly lived there.
Please accept my condolences.
I was watching a “free” movie on Tubi the other day, when a commercial came on and blasted my eardrums. It really took me back.
For it was my late childhood and early adolescence that our family finally achieved cable television. If you fell asleep with the TV on, god help you when it woke you up at 2 AM with a commercial louder than an atomic blast playing Enya and Enigma in Pure Moods.
Glory to Cable Networks and bless the FCC for the awakenings. For even though everyone hated the constant volume change, the FCC was powerless to stop it against the might of The Telecommunications act of 1994, which they themselves crafted with the wisdom of the telecom industry. Specifically these glorious sentences:
Title III: Regulatory Reform - Bars any State or local statute, regulation, or legal requirement from prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide interstate or intrastate telecommunications services.
and
Title VII: Media Diversity - Requires the FCC to complete a proceeding to: (1) modify or remove national and local ownership rules on radio and television broadcast stations to ensure that broadcasters are able to compete fairly with other media providers and that the public receives information from a diversity of media sources; (2) review a certain ownership restriction with respect to cable operators and report to the Congress on whether such restriction serves the public interest; and (3) consider the applicability of the FCC’s rules regarding network non-duplication protection, syndicated exclusivity protection, and sports programming exclusivity to programmers whose programs are transmitted on common carrier video platforms.
Which, among other things, allowed monopolies in media including ClearChannel which quickly ruined radio for everyone. Bless us all.
I honestly believe this crap should be illegal. The visual equivalent is GoT’s level of just blackness. I can’t afford a damn OLED TV you fools. And besides Lord of the Rings had the perfect solution to show darkness two decades ago.
Old movies have a constant level of audio. Current movies audio levels are like a sine wave.
The main reason why I bought an Appletv. Its “reduce loud sounds” feature is amazing
I never knew I needed this
I was gripping about this last night. Actors practically whispering. Had to move to headphones. Many times i wonder why the industry can’t seem to properly mic the scene or pick a decent cohesive/compatible decimal range.
The Nvidia Shield TV (small Android media player) has a built-in way to normalize audio in all apps running on it. It works great!
We used to call it “compression” and itwas an essential part of the recording process. It seems TV shows don’t do that anymore.
It’s still called that way: Dynamic range compression
I know, but do TV shows to it?
I understand that it dynamic range is necessary and having none is terrible (look up “loudness wars” in the recording industry), but it seems TV shows are no longer mastered for a actual home consumption.
Back in the day, we would work on our nice studio monitors, switch to a pair of NS10s to make sure it would sound good on a cheap Hifi, but we would also make it sound good on something garbage. Sometimes (always in fact) this was to the detriment of how sound on good gear, but 99% of people use garbage.
In my experience, this is intentional. You’re watching a thing with full dynamic range sound. Honestly, the intention is for you to have a decent speaker system and to turn it up so you can hear the dialog comfortably. The loud parts will be loud and that is the intent. Why would they make the loud parts quiet? An explosion isn’t supposed to be quiet. They shouldn’t make it quiet for the sake of you listening to it through your TV’s built in speakers at 2 in the morning while the rest of the house is asleep. If you need the dynamic range to be compressed for your purposes you can do that yourself. Many devices have this option these days. My Roku has “leveling” and “night” modes which compress the dynamic range so there’s not such a difference between the quiet parts and the loud parts.
A lot of us live in apartments and choose not to be obnoxious assholes to our neighbors. Wheres the sound mix for us?
If you have to keep changing the volume throughout the movie, the audio engineer did a bad job, period.
Dude you can just turn on the “night” mode on whatever device you’re using and completely solve your problem. You don’t blame the sun for being too bright, you just put on sun glasses.
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Blame your TV, not the content. Or, blame yourself if you like for not buying a soundbar or soundsystem.
A lot of TVs these days have Night Mode or the like. That’s the fix!
PS Downvoting me for… What exactly? Because I told you two solutions and neither of them are what you prefer? TVs are literally paper thin and physically can’t have good speakers except for special cases in the high end. Buy a soundbar, even though they suck and apparently people these days are scared of plugging one more cable into something, or get a stereo system for the same price and plug in two more things (speakers) that can fit anywhere on your wall or whatever.
