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.'"
The what? (Score:5, Funny)
"By the end of 2012, broadcast televisionâ¦"
Broadcast what?
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
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.
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The Old People's Box (Score:2)
That's a very fitting description; "the old and the dull". I could not agree more, that's exactly how I view people that watch TV these days. My parents generation still watches TV, but everyone else I know and my siblings stream/torrent their content.
I remember reading this article about an ABC executive and her daughter, it described the new reality very well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/media/04hulu.html?_r=1&ref=global [nytimes.com]
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.
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He's right. TV is really just for the old and the dull, now. I mean, really... paying out the ass to be force fed advertisements?
I pay may for my internet than I do for my cable... My internet forces me to watch way more ads than my tv does. At least i can fast forward through the tv commercials (if I wasn't so lazy)
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Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
Don't worry, YouTube are working on that last one.
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Yep. I'm always horrified when I have to watch youtube on other people's computers. You have to close a popup window for every single video....and people still go there? This is really the level people have come to expect from their media? Idiocracy here we come...
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Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
And there's no comments section to concentrate the collective stupidity of mankind.
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>And there's no comments section to concentrate the collective stupidity of mankind.
I thought that was what Fox News was for ?
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.
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Yeah, but the point is that the signal should arrive at your playback system in a neutral fashion, and then you can set your car stereo to compress the signal (nearly all stereos made after about 1995 will have a loudness option).
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and then you can set your car stereo to compress the signal (nearly all stereos made after about 1995 will have a loudness option).
The "loudness" control on all the stereos I have has nothing to do with compression, it deals with changing the eq so that the volume of each frequency band is increased proportionately to the human ear's interpretation of "loud". I don't recall the specifics, but it has to do with low frequencies either being emphasized or deemphasized as the "loudness" goes up.
One of them has both a volume and loudness control. You change the loudness when you want to make the sound louder and properly reproduced and do
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The European Broadcast Union already did it. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a broadcast tech at a license-funded TV station in Norway, so we don't have to deal with advertising volume jumps, but in general, we aim to follow the already-established EBU recommendation 128, which specifies loudness.
Indeed, the spec is publically available: http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf [tech.ebu.ch]
Public Streaming (Score:2)
As a fellow Norwegian I wonder how long it will matter? While your employer, Norwegian Public Television and Radio (NRK) is very innovative with its open source, free BitTorrent and multi-platform content streaming I foresee a bleak future. I imagine the costs are simply going to skyrocket with the future demands for streaming and development.
Small European public broadcasters like ours are bound to either lose their access to license funding, have to accept commercials or must ask parliament to introduce n
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I don't see that happening in Norway at the moment due to public opposition to such "unfair" taxes. It would be far better if it was done over the national budget without the extra cost of invoicing students, families and the elderly. As one of the many that don't have a TV, don't pay the TV license and rarely watch your content, I strongly oppose more licenses. I would not mind paying a fee if I actually watched your content.
Well I do have a TV, I do pay the license because I have a subscription to other channels but I rarely if ever watch NRK and wouldn't pay for it if I had the choice. And despite you not paying, you can watch pretty much anything you want at nrk.no/nett-tv [nrk.no]. It is just not fair at all. I think it's long overdue that the NRK license either moved to either being a subscription service or a public service, tying it to whether you have a TV receiver or not was probably a good idea in 1960s when they had a monopol
Service vs Tax (Score:2)
Yes, that was my point as well, I am very aware of their excellent streaming and the NRK Beta bittorrent offers. If I were interested in using them I would not mind paying, as I mentioned in my first comment.
NRK has in fact asked for a license fee on all PCs, capable smartphones and TVs for this very reason. I understand the logic behind that request. It was denied and for good reasons. It is not "fair" to require non-users to pay for a service they don't want. The current license is tied to the ownership o
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.
Underage loudness wars (Score:3)
Great. Now what are they gonna do about the loudness wars being waged every day by the children in my neighborhood? I finally got the brats off my lawn, now can they get 'em to STFU? It's like living in the Amazon basin next to a colony of howler monkeys.
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Where I live, we solved that problem over a decade ago. Police officers carry V.U. meters and will issue citations for being too loud. We have ordinances that dictate that your music can't be heard from a certain distance from your car and we have noise ordinances that go into effect after 10pm. It worked surprising well. I live in the second largest city in my state, so it's not a small town with a friendly sheriff named Andy (Andy Griffin Show reference).
There was only one instance (that I remember) wher
Compression vs Compression (Score:2)
Lets not forget we are NOT talking about file compression here but audio Compression that adjusts the gain on an audio analogue input.
Leaving out the discussion of Ad loudness, I always marvel at the many different ways that compression can be used in audio production. It's so easy to get it wrong and I always give it a lot of attention when I produce audio. There is aart in it :-) and the thing about using compression right is not to crush the transients that give music dynamic range. It terms of an emot
Measuring loudness isn't easy?! wtf? Replaygain. (Score:3)
Everything should just be produced/engineered/mastered with the Replaygain 89 dB target in mind. All albums should come out needing zero correction to meet that, leaving all the more dynamic range intact. All TV soundtracks should be that loud, too. Movies used to follow a similar standard, and should again.
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Movies have started to improve with THX certification. Over compressed crud doesn't pass muster. Now if we can get THX certified CD recordings to match.
An explosion sounds impressive in the movies due to the dynamic range. An explosion on McGuyver does not rattle anything because it is compressed so talking is loud enough. If TV didn't compress programs, the commercials would be at explosion levels.
Compression is good in some cases (Score:3, Interesting)
Music is compressed because it's played in crappy environments: low end players, cars, etc. These days, cars come with compression features in their sound systems so that you can listen to something more high-end such as classical without breaking your ear drums in the loud sections in order to hear the quiet sections at all. Back in the day there was an astute observation that rock should sound great on a crappy radio.
Previous /. article on same topic (Score:2)
The other side of the coin (Score:5, Interesting)
People need to remember that one of the reasons the "loudness wars" started in the first place was producer/label/artist A wanted his song/album to sound "louder" than producer/label/artist B. The question is, why?
A very simple answer: "louder" is almost always perceived as better. It's about standing out above the rest.
Take for example - given a set of 20 songs played in a club, all at roughly the same "loudness". Along comes one track which is "louder" than the rest. Chances are very high that more people in the club will take notice of this track. We're predispositioned to perceiving anomalies in our everyday lives, so something that is out of the ordinary (e.g. the louder track in this example) grabs our attention more than the other tracks. And at that point, the crowd would go "man, that track is really pumping".
The other issue is that the mastering engineer (who makes these kinds of calls about how "loud" or "hot" a track is before getting burnt to the master) is being paid to do something according to his client's needs. So if the producer wants the track louder, and is the one footing the bill, then there's not much the mastering engineer can do. So if the paymaster wants a loud track, that's what he will get. If mastering engineer A sticks to his guns, the producer's just going to go to another mastering house, which will mean revenue lost.
Another way to put it - if the customer wants to buy Windows NT and is dead set on this, no amount of enlightening by the consultant about the benefits of a Unix-based platform is going to change what the customer wants.
So yeah, these two factors combine and the result: the loudness wars.
Vinyl leads the way (Score:3)
"Some people are actually ripping vinyl because some labels are releasing vinyl with more dynamic mastering."
I've seen this. The last few Rush CDs were sonically crushed. I just got their latest (Clockwork Angels) on vinyl, and the dynamic range is practically back to 1980s levels. I also got The Cult's Choice of Weapon (a nifty set with one full LP plus a 12-inch 45-RPM EP on white vinyl) which is a bit compressed, but definitely not crushed. It's faintly ridiculous that LPs are becoming the premium format, even though I'm quite sure that CDs can sound better when mastered properly -- but okay, at least it's possible to get my hands on a non-crushed version of the recording. I'll take it.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, are naive, idiot or just a kid?
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There's always competition with radio even if all the radio stations are owned by the same parent company: you
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What is needed is the capacity to run custom software on our hardware. let me explain.
Why not make it easy to run software developed to control the loudness of audio? A dynamic volume button if you will.
This can be useful in other domains, like censoring explicit content from my children from an otherwise good movie by using software to identify and black out screens, mute, etc, on criteria I supply to my personal censor tool.
The point. Put the free market at w
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.
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I remember some case against a company which edited movies themselves. That is clearly infringement. But automating my mute button?
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I agree. A regulation is not what is needed.
What is needed is the capacity to run custom software on our hardware. let me explain.
Why not make it easy to run software developed to control the loudness of audio? A dynamic volume button if you will.
You want them to broadcast some sort of signal that lets you know when the adverts are on?
So...DVRs can automatically cut out the adverts by looking for the special signal?
Good luck with that.
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As far as detecting advertisements, nudity, explicit language, well there may be a number of ways to do so. Pattern recognition, speech recognition algorithms, reading the closed caption text, etc.
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Loudness is not one control. It is many. With compression and limiting you can make something sound much louder even if the peak volume is not that high. There are parameters for compression and they don't automatically, universally restrict volume to a desired dynamic level . . . or if you try, you'll get a lot of unlistenable noise.
Better to enact standards for broadcast dynamics. As ot
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I'm going to be outweighed by people who don't care.
These are the same people who don't seem to mind closing a popup window for every single youtube video they watch.
I'm always horrified when I see Youtube without adblock. It's one of the most popular sites on the 'net and it can put a popup advert across every video without losing any viewers? Idiocracy isn't far away.
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:too much regulation! (Score:5, Informative)
A section of historic FCC rules for radio is here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sbw8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=steps+shall+be+taken+to+preserve+dynamic+characteristics+of+music&source=bl&ots=B2uXF56uEj&sig=K4gC8p4b1LaXyTTt6VsgnNFpdO4&hl=en [google.com]
The phrase "However, precautions shall be taken so as not to substantially alter the dynamic characteristics of musical programs" was removed after being in the rules only a short time. Many broadcasters protested, wanting to use very aggressive audio processing. Sometime it was to sound loud than the competition (doesn't work when everyone does it), sometimes it was to help hide the noises present with a marginal signal.
There were past loudness rules for ads. Here are the full details of what's being proposed for DTV now. DTV audio has generally been better and more dynamic. However when programs are dynamic, the average loudness is lower, making commercials stand out even more.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/06/03/2011-13822/implementation-of-the-commercial-advertisement-loudness-mitigation-calm-act [federalregister.gov]
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Interesting)
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:too much regulation! (Score:5, Funny)
Worse than that. (Score:3)
Hobby Lobby started putting out Christmas decorations this month. In June. I've decided not to shop there until they take them down.
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It's not about debt or anything that complicated. Just restoring regulations THAT WE HAD YEARS AGO would help immensely
Yeah, the Government should decide how we listen to music. They sure have had some great ideas about Internet privacy. Power to the government! Sorry I couldn't resist a little snark :P
I'm unconvinced. Myself, I'd rather not have regulation that says we need to regulate the Internet like a series of tubes. How about, we all just listen/buy the stuff we like, and ignore the lame? It's not like we don't have literally millions of entertainment sources. When you involve regulation and Government you get the
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About 60% of the US gets radio stations owned by only three companies (and maybe a religious station or two, which is also owned by one of those companies in many cases). Five years ago, it was four companies, but two of them merged.
Yes, you must be a kid. Probably an undergrad who's just read Atlas Shrugged and thinks he's got it all figu
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it's true! once we get rid of invasive state copyright protection, we'd be one step closer to true competition among broadcasters.
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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:too much regulation! (Score:5, Informative)
more a matter of "no regulation". just a medium with a defined peak and no consequences in hardware for driving the average too high.
vinyl had physical limits that would make the music sound like shit if they were exceeded, and in extreme cases would cause the disc to be unplayable. CDs don't have that problem. they can be 16khz, fullscale, 100% of the time and pass verification, but will pass the hardware problems down the line (to your tweeters in this case - they'll burn even if the speaker is running well below it's rated max power).
things were made worse considering people in the pop music target audience would often brag about blowing their speakers up...
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more a matter of "no regulation". just a medium with a defined peak and no consequences in hardware for driving the average too high.
There have been consequences in software though.
MythTV has been using the difference in loudness/dynamic range to identify and skip commercials. I hope these measures don't compromise that, I'd hate to have to start watching adverts again...
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Interesting)
Untrue. Vinyl imposes lots of additional limitations, and is much more complicated than a binary "too loud" "not too loud". The louder you cut a record, the wider the groove is. The wider the groove is, the fewer grooves you can physically fit on the record, and thus the less music you can fit per side. If you cut an LP as hot as a typical modern CD (And I'm not even talking a LOUD modern CD, just an average one), you could only fit 12-14 minutes per side. A hot track, and that number will be more like 10 minutes. Whereas with the (sane) mastering common 40 years ago, 20-21 minutes per side was typical, although there were some compromises there too...optimal quality peaks at about 17 minutes per side or so. A recording without a lot of dynamic range, with the loudness turned down a bit (like a live album), and 25 minutes per side isn't at all unreasonable.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:4, Interesting)
"If you cut an LP as hot as a typical modern CD (And I'm not even talking a LOUD modern CD, just an average one), you could only fit 12-14 minutes per side."
Nope. Got Alice in Chains 'Sap' and 'Jar of Flies' dual vinyl demo. LOUD AS FUCK. 26 minutes per side.
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"CDs don't have that problem"
Digital has physical limits that make music sound like shit too, CD's are not any different they just sound like different, worse shit than vinyl when the limits are exceeded.
Sorry but I greatly prefer lack of dynamics and distortion to the *BANG* *SCREECH* *WOBBLE* and suddenly you're listening to a different part of the song than you were because your needle jumped from the groove.
Vinyl had limits. It also had very serious consequences when the limits were exceeded such as tracks hitting each other on the discs and needles skating across the surface of the disk.
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
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Well, by all means, enjoy the smug self-satisfaction you seem to derive from a personal taste in music with no room for pop, but - what if you're an audio engineer with a well-developed ear rendering over-compression as very jarring, but you still like pop music?
I loves me some ABBA, and not only does the technical production not get in the way of my enjoying their stuff, but it's pulled off so well that it's a not-insignificant part of my enjoyment.
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Thing is...they ALL do it. The media is controlled by very few players and if they all have a mandate to broadcast adverts with compressed sound then you're stuck, there's nowhere to go.
Radio, too. People don't sit down in special quiet rooms to listen to broadcast radio. People mostly listen to the radio in their cars or use it as a background noise (eg. at work). The difference between compressed/uncompressed in a car on the highway is massive so they compress the hell out of it. Even in a world of over c
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry I ran out of breath to laugh any longer.
I have a decibel meter app on my phone and I've seen levels go from the middle 50s during the program to the upper 60s during the ads.
The app isn't probably that accurate but that is a really big jump, enough to cause me pain sometimes. There is one ad from a local lawyer that jumps up to 70 at one point.
Guess who I won't be calling for legal services.
The industry has listened to and ignored citizen complaints for 50 years. What makes you think they will change now?
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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:/ [pbs.org]
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Sure, but have you called them up and told them that. It's much more fun to go out of your way to say that you'll never contemplate using them because of their obnoxious advert.
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Yes, I did.
On more than one of the most egregious of them I called their 888 or 800 number and complained to the poor powerless little girl that answered the phone. One insurance company called me back, some VP and asked what the problem was and I told him. About a week later all of a sudden the ads got quieter.
Before my complaint I had to come in from the other room to mute their ad because it was too loud. The lawyer never bothered to call me back.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Informative)
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Wrong on all counts. A 12dB increase is not "8x as loud." It's not even 8x the power, but 16x the power (power doubles with every increase of 3dB). Either you don't understand what you're going on about, or you're just wrong and don't realize it (because any answer resulting in the number 8 is always wrong in this particular scenario).
Loudness, as perceived by humans, is generally considered to double with every 10dB of increase. Hence, the convenient unit that is the Bel: 1 Bel == double the volume ==
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His data may not be perfect but it is good enough for relative measures. You'd have to be living under a rock with your head in the sand (or profoundly deaf) to not notice the way the volume jumps at each commercial break.
And that's even discounting the dirty tricks like compressing the commercials to the point of terrible sound quality to squeeze a bit more loudness out and other dirty tricks with the audio to fool TVs with 'smart volume' type systems meant to limit the loudness jumps.
.
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Re:too much regulation! (Score:4, Funny)
because 70dB is well below the threshold of pain.
He mentioned a "local" ad from a lawyer. I would imagine even at 1db it would cause pain. Possibly even with mute on.
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Yes, but you know the name "Go Compare", right? You probably even know the URL....
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The broadcasters have a state-given license to use a scarce resource (certain frequencies). Damn right citizens are entitled to put conditions on that. If the broadcaster doesn't like them he can transmit inside his own property.
too much stupidity (Score:2)
Yeah, we do. There are a lot of really stupid people out there that will fuck everything up for everybody if they think they can make a quick buck doing it. I like having as much freedom as possible, but this is yet another case that has already proven to to require the government to step in and tell the retarded children to quit playing with the gain knob and just focus on hawking their crap.
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.
Re:too much regulation! (Score:5, Interesting)
Awesome post... but I have a nitpick, sorry::
For one, human hearing is more sensitive at specific frequencies
yes, this is absolutely true
(e.g. speech and crying babies, and probably any resonant frequencies of our skull).
no, I don't think any of these are examples.
Human speech ranges from 300 Hz to as high as 3.4 kHz, but most commonly and generally hover between 800 Hz and 1200 Hz. Humans don't perceive 1kHz as being louder, but 4kHz always sounds louder and sounds at this frequency tend to cause the listener ear fatigue.
A baby's cry is closer to that 4kHz loudly percieved and tiring frequency, but at around 3.4 kHz at its highest, it's below it enough that I'm nearly certain that's not the reason a baby's cry sounds louder. I believe the reason we hear a baby's cry as louder has more to do with the evolution of the hypothalamus and less to do with the actual frequency of a normal baby's cry. If we pitch shift the frequency of a baby's cry, or even reduce the sound pressure, it still stands out against a background of random noise, such as sounds of lots of people talking or a cacophony of wild animal sounds, because we have evolved to recognize the timbre of this sound, which is more distinct than its natural frequency range. The hypothalmus allows us to filter perceptions... but filtering out a baby's cry is universally accepted as being nearly impossible (I'm sure it can be done, but the mere fact that most find it unsettling or irritating and before long will seak to quell it speaks volumes).
The human skull has been shown to resonate at frequencies between 500Hz and 7.5kHz... so that's pretty much where we hear everything... we certainly hear below 500Hz and above 7.5kHz, but that's such a huge chunk of our normal hearing spectrum that it's unlikely there is any particular frequency we hear louder because of skull resonance.
Regardless of this, again, nice post.
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a baby's cry can be ignored... but the baby will just try again, and louder (MUCH louder).
i'm so glad my 13 month old is so well behaved.
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i'm aware of these things.
but even a dumb, unweighted RMS over 200ms measured _at the output_ would be more useful than -20 EBU-R128 LUFS measured on the tape before it goes to the broadcaster. get my point? in the latter scenario, the broadcaster has free reign to turn the volume up as much as they want. in the former, that's taken into account, because they're measuring the loudness that goes into the viewer's TV.
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It never would work that way. Basic game theory always predicts that rational agents engage in a 'race to the bottom.' Just like how the Prisoner's Dilemma puts both players in prison, if some underhanded technique even has the potential to make one firm more competitive, it is guaranteed to become an industry standard. "Voting with your dollars" doesn't work. It can't work.
Economics 101 should be mandatory.
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.
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This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
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This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
Yep and those laws are pretty well established.
I'd prefer a system that didn't reserve airwaves for big spenders making the airwaves more democratic, but until that happens, here we are.
Re:Horrible use of laws (Score:5, Informative)
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
The FCC exists because 100+ years ago, assclowns with radios were making false distress calls, cursing at people on the airwaves, and faking naval messages.
In 1912, power to regulate the airwaves was given to the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor
In 1927 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Radio Commission and
in 1934 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Communications Commission
/Early regulation of the airwaves is a textbook example of regulatory capture.
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Maybe the AC is not aware that the Supreme Court has only ever recognized limited constitutional protection for commercial speech.
I wonder if AC is signed up for the National Do Not Call Registry [donotcall.gov].
Re:Horrible use of laws (Score:5, Informative)
> And no real gain.
Except pre-recorded music that doesn't sound like shit on quality stereo gear.
This is actually an example of *good* legislation. The whole reason the "loudness war" happened in the first place was pressure from upper management on recording engineers (who, by and large, knew why doing it was bad, and who were mostly forced to go along with it if they wanted to remain employed) to make their next CD a little louder than everybody else's, until we got to the point where a 2004 pop CD was quantized to levels once exclusively the realm of a Telarc *DIGITAL CANON* in a recording of 1812 Overture whose main purpose was to show off your kilowatt-RMS amp and array of subwoofers. What the government did in this case was let the engineers off the hook. When management asks them to "pump up the volume", they can say, "Sure, I can do that. But no radio station in the country will play it, and all the money we're spending to promote the artist will be for naught. Do you still want me to do it, or would you like me to master a recording that sounds good and that radio stations will be able to play?"
I want immersive, clipping-free digital audio back like we had when I was in college. If it literally takes an act of Congress to ensure that 95% of the audio on a 16-bit CD quantizes to an absolute value of 0x3FFF or less, so be it. Now get off my lawn, or I'll have to remind your parents what digital canons sound like when you have a kilowatt (RMS) amp and a pair of 18-inch JL Audio subs in the trunk...
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Although I agree with your main point, I gotta ask: WTF are you going on about? What is a "*DIGITAL CANON*"?
They were real cannons, recorded separately and mixed in later. Indeed, the original Telarc recording shattered some of the windows of a nearby building, as discussed in the liner notes. Telarc h
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:Horrible use of laws (Score:5, Funny)
And no real gain.
Less gain is the whole point.
The law was passed because too many audio sources had excessive gain.
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Less gain is the whole point.
The law was passed because too many audio sources had excessive gain.
Gain is a meaningless term in the context you're using it - gain specifies a signal amplitude relative to a reference. In amplifying circuits, gain relative to the source signal - and when used to measure amplitude, the gain is relative to either a set voltage (dBm or dBu) or in the digital world, relative to full amplitude (dBFS).
The problem is amplitude. At what stages any gain was applied is not the issue.
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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.
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I bet you're a hit at parties.
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I'm sorry. It was 6AM here at work and when I read the comment it had not yet been moderated as funny. I simply didn't perceive it as being intended humorously.
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Carry on then.
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free speech? what are you smoking?
i'm sure police will arrest anyone who takes a marshall stack out on the street, maxes it out, and exercises "free speech" through a microphone...
the act simply says you have free speech, not free shout.
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If you want music, you're pretty much restricted to getting it from one of three big companies. All three companies have already demonstrated a concerted "need" to make their music louder than everyone else's, even if it's not "top-40 crap". And there's little point saying "Get it in CD form, rather than a DRM'd MP3 download, then", because they're using brick-wall filters on CDs too ("Metallica - Death Magnetic", anyone?)
The Loudness war, in both music and TV/Radio ads, has been brought up before. The cons
Re:why is that needed? (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't like compressed music (I don't either) then do what I did: stop listening to it. You'll find much better music, made by real artists not "produced acts" with autotune and the like.
Autotune has nothing to do with compressed music. It hasn't even much to do with the quality of music. It is just a way to manipulate the human voice.
Sure, it is often abused to 'fix' bad singers and similar, but it can do so much more. I've heard it being used to transform voice samples into musical notes. Sure you could sample the artist singing every single possible note and harmony, but you can also just do a subset and use autotune to fill the gaps. The singer in question has a almost 4 octave range (operatic), as well as perfect pitch, so it is certainly not to fix a bad singer. It was to achieve an effect where you can produce a song with full musical backing and yet it's still basically acapella because it's all just the singers voice in various forms. No instruments.
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^^^Agreed. Some of my favorite bands are big label bands. Other favorites are indie label bands...
Why limit your musical taste based on the frickin record label? Seems retarded if you ask me...
Re:Not likely. (Score:4, Informative)
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> This already exists, it's called RMS (Root mean square).
The problem is, a given amount of power doesn't produce the same perceived loudness across the entire audio spectrum. The LU calculation deprives the music industry of its former ability to game the system by focusing the most energy on the narrow band of frequencies that are perceived as being the loudest.
RMS is a nice, simple concept that works well for measuring amplifier power of a 1KHz sine wave at a given max percentage THD, but it's too eas
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Why go for the symptoms if you can also go for the root (or at least closer to it) of the problem.