Quiet Victories Won In the Loudness Wars 251
Stowie101 writes with a few pieces from an article on what's been happening in the fight against over-compressed radio music and deafening tv commercials: "The first major step towards the elimination of heavily-compressed music could be the International Telecommunications Union's ... measurement of loudness that was ... revised in 2011. ... Acting to rectify the problem on the broadcast side of the issue, many European and Asian broadcasters are adopting loudness standards that are based on the criteria first introduced by the ITU. Here in the U.S., the federal government has also been proactive to improve the quality of broadcast television. By the end of 2012, the broadcast community will have to follow the CALM Act that requires commercials to be played at the same volume as broadcast television. In terms of music and recording, these broadcast standards do not apply. But Shepherd theorizes the measurement standards will be applied to the production of music. 'Measuring loudness, in general, isn't easy. Now the ITU has agreed on a new "loudness unit:" the LU. You can measure short- and longer-term loudness over a whole song. They've also agreed on guidelines for broadcast; what the average loudness should be and how much you can vary it. The recommendation has been made law in the U.S. for advertisements and is also being adopted in the U.K. and all over the world. All the major broadcasters here — Sky, the BBC, ITV — have agreed to follow the standard.'"
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, are naive, idiot or just a kid?
Re:too much regulation! (Score:3, Insightful)
We really don't need all this extra layer of oversight here, the industry is capable of regulating itself once people have had more time to make their opinions known and choose stations whose practices they agree with.
Because that worked so well in the past. This "Self Regulation" is what caused the problem in the first place.
Re:Horrible use of laws (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
The public's airwaves, the public's rules.
Don't like it? Don't use public resources to distribute your speech.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:0, Insightful)
Your measurements are useless without a control because we have no idea what your TV volume was set at. Besides you were probably not doing an actual average volume (RMS) measurement.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:4, Insightful)
More significant is that CALM is based on a model of accoustic perception which is much more complex than peak/RMS amplitude. For one, human hearing is more sensitive at specific frequencies (e.g. speech and crying babies, and probably any resonant frequencies of our skull). For another, sharp/percussive peaks tend to be perceived as quieter (or at least less annoying!) than equal-volume sustained tones. So compressing a drumset beat and some attorney's voice [youtube.com] to the same "average" range means that the music will sound quieter than the advertisement. So whether CALM normalizes at the broadcaster or at the end-user, it should be strictly better because its measurement more accurately models perception and should have less error inherently.
Also, piling in against the free-market spin doctor: broadcasters are granted a form of monopoly due to limited resources for transmission. They should be regulated and hand-slapped for what appears to be blatant disregard for their government-granted customer base.
Loudness, Compression, Dynamic Range, oh, My! (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary is conflating so many issues.
Yes, loud commercials are obnoxious.
Yes, overly compressed music diminishes it. In a good listening environment a nice dynamic range is good.
But compression isn't inherently bad. Large dynamic range stinks in my car, which is loud (I need to do something about the gasket by the driver's window). It stinks on the crappy speakers on my netbook and the built-in speakers on this display I'm using now.
It can help (with a limiter) in having to keep going to the volume bar too, or for watching a movie at night when you don't want to wake the kids.
If anybody wants some automatic control for PulseAudio I hacked up a workable solution [youtube.com] last summer, just 'cause I got annoyed one day. PA makes it a bitch to install these things, but I've got an SRPM at least for the library. Need to write a short doc and send the patches upstream still, but drop me a line if you want it anyway.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, the public has been ignored, research even ordered destroyed when it didn't support the pre-determined outcome.
The story
http://web.archive.org/web/20090123153744/http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/09/18/senator_says_media_study_suppressed/ [archive.org]
The suppressed report
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-267448A1.pdf [fcc.gov]
Some PBS coverage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEoKXKUnLsY [youtube.com]
PBS transcript
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/transcript5.html?print [pbs.org]
more PBS info
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/profile2.html [pbs.org]
Info related to Providence Equity (where a former FCC chair went)
www.sungarddx.com/pdf/Data_Exchange_Fundraising.pdf
Loud commercials have been addressed before. If the ad agency has used aggressive audio processing, and uses less energy at bass frequencies, the station actually needs special equipment to sense the higher average energy and compensate. The peak voltage value can be the same with a large difference in loudness.
To those that think so-called market forces make things good, explain why we've now got those half-hour infomercials, 18+ minutes of ads an hour instead of 9 to 11, and far less depth and diversity in news coverage. The same former FCC chair that Bill Moyers talks about taking a job at a major communications-oriented venture capital group has since become head of the cable-tv industry group that pushed for the Comcast/NBC/Universal merger. Cable companies don't want broadcast tv to be excellent.
Re:Horrible use of laws (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to turn this into a free speech issue, you have the right to speak about whatever you want, but you don't have the right to grab someone by the ear and then scream into it.
Re:The what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh ho ho, aren't you clever? Some of us still like watching sports, or the first runs of shows that we can enjoy with friends. Getting high def on a big screen without needing half a dozen different solutions to pipe it over from the PC is also quite nice. "It just works", you know? No need to worry about blockiness or buffering or the audio being out of sync.
Seriously though, what point are you trying to make? That the law is unnecessary because "nobody" watches TV? If so, I posit that you don't know very many people.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about debt or anything that complicated. Just restoring regulations THAT WE HAD YEARS AGO would help immensely. Same story as with banking. Those regulated pushed to do away with the regulations and then really bad things happened. It's all about greed.
A fair amount of freedom in running businesses and healthy competition is usually good. But the changes made in broadcast ownership REDUCED competition. And if investment bankers want to be involved in high risk investments it should be only with fund owned by those willing to take the risks, not with taxpayer insured depositors money from traditional savings/checking banking.
Broadcasters traditionally have an important role to serve the public interest. If we did away with PAID radio/tv political ads, using only fairly doled out community service time, there'd be far less money inviting corruption in campaigns. Obviously limiting fund-raising has failed. But doing away with a major part of the spending would really help.
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago? Blame the FCC rule change on ads. Stations used to voluntarily pick a limit on how many minutes an hour of ads they run, and could exceed that two weeks a year. So ads would go nuts before Christmas (and elections when held). Now that insanely heavy level of ads has become the norm.
Re:Horrible use of laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Gain is a meaningless term in the context you're using it
Not in the chosen context: a humorous bad pun.
But if you want to be a stereotypical humorless pedantic nerd, I also happen to be an electrical engineer. I'll define the reference as the output level of the musicians' microphones. The overall signal gain of the music industry system between the musicians' microphones and the consumers' DACs has been set too high.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago?
Mostly I've been noticing people saying that. Every year. For the 20+ years i"ve been paying attention.
Maybe 30 or 35 years past it was that way - and it would be great if it were that way again - but that wasnow literally more than a generation ago.
Re:The what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Insightful)
But, being a Hatch bill, it also increased the penalty for noncommercial copyright infringement with a three year jail sentence if the work infringed was not yet published for public distribution. Ten years for repeat infringement... and that in addition to all of the already-existing civil and criminal penalties.
Just a little harsher, and they can start on the executions.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really the fault of the medium. It is much easier to avoid hitting the limits by accident on the CD.
If you leave, say, 20 dB of headroom for really loud peaks, you still have a signal to noise ratio better than 70 dB. That is more than the entire dynamic range for vinyl.
The problem is (again) with the loudness wars. If you don't leave headroom, but master a CDs as loud as possible, you get indeed more nasty clipping than with analog equipment. Producers and sound engineers abusing the CD give it a bad name
Re:Public Streaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Taking off my trainee broadcast engineer hat now, and making this argument only as an individual here: Don't forget that much like a free press benefits a society whether or not you read the papers, the value delivered to society by media independent of commercial interests goes far beyond whether or not you actually watch it yourself.
The nature of publically licensed media is diametrically opposed to the nature of advertisement-funded ones. With ad-funded TV, the viewer is not the customer, but the product. The repercussions this fact has in every aspect of content productions are difficult to overstate.
Since the commercial pressure is alleviated, the networks also tend to be more informative and less tabloid. Which in turn means that voters are better informed about which representatives serve their interests - which means that everyone is more likely to get a fair shake in life.
The proportion of the cost to television networks of distribution versus production has been steadily declining ever since television began. Largely the cost now lies in content production. But I certainly agree: The definition of what constitutes a television will become irrelevant in a surprisingly short amount of time, so it's also a significant political challenge.
Putting on my Labour Youth member hat now to view this from a political angle: NRK needs to be completely independent from short-term political fluctuations, and must never be afraid to challenge the powers that be. The license has proven to be an excellent way of doing this, and folding it into the state budget has not. The solution is not obvious, but we need one. I've wondered that perhaps a constitutional amendment might be a good way to go about this. A free press bound to its stock holders' interests is not free. The country needs a press outlet which isn't so obsessed about ratings that they're afraid to discuss boring but important news.
Re:The Old People's Box (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 60 and I stopped paying for cable a long time ago. I have an antenna for local news, the bar down the street for sports, and the internet for everything else.
Thirty years ago cable made sense. Ten bucks a month of ad-free watching (except local shows) including HBO, and it was long before Discovery and History and other such "educational" channels stopped educating and started sucking.
If they would offer networks by the channel (I refuse to pay for the Golf channel and the cooking channel and BET and LifeTime) for two bucks a channel, they might get ten or fifteen bucks a month from me again. But fifty bucks for a hundred channels of pure crap when I might watch five or ten once in a great while? I'd be a fool.
The end of the loudness wars (if this is accurate) came way too little and way too late for me.