Oooooookay. So...yeah. There seems to be a
lot of misinformation and confusion in this thread. I say "misinformation" because it's more polite than "ignorant belligerence."
First of all...TV stations (aka affiliates) aren't the issue. TV stations don't
make commercials (well, they do, but not usually the ones that warrant these "loudness" complaints). Those come from third-party vendors (advertisers). Those advertisers control the content of their advertisements. Many of them (particularly direct response and per inquiry spots [the "But wait...there's more!"-type junk]) utilize compression to make everything seem louder, hoping to get your attention, make you come back in from the kitchen to turn down the TV...whatever they can do to grab your attention. The old saying about there not being any bad publicity holds true; so long as they get your attention, they've got a chance at a sale.
Occasionally you'll get a loud spot from locally-produced stuff (i.e. spots created by the station or by a local-to-the-area production house)...but that's a matter of production incompetence, not any particular desire to jolt people awake.
Television stations are run with absolutely no overriding workflow. Each station has its own way of doing things, and correspondingly, some stations are better (that is, they put out a better quality product) than others. Note that I'm talking about television
stations, not television networks. Networks assemble content and centralcast it from one point. Television stations are the businesses in your local area that take in that content and rebrand and rebroadcast it ("ABC 32," for instance, or "Fox 13," or "News Channel 9" or whatever your local stations call themselves).
These local affiliates, being the endpoint of the broadcast chain, take in several different kinds of content: they take the network feed (which includes all of the commercials sold and run by the network), their own local or regional commercials (spots sold and run by the affiliate itself), its own syndicated programming (each affiliate has its own agreements for this, which is why one of your local channels runs something like
Everybody Loves Raymond or some other bullshit you can watch reruns of on TBS 24/7) and the bartered commercials that come built into those syndicated show feeds, and local programming (if any). That is a great number of disparate sources to manage, and local affiliates, with the exception of
the largest markets, generally aren't making anyone rich. They live in a constant state of break-even (for the most part), and don't put a high priority on master control or creative/production staffing.
Depending on the workflow of the station itself, a master control technician or a production person will take in the content and level the audio. This is easier said than done; there is no standard level to which content is created, the content comes in on a bajillion different forms of media (digital file FTP, Betacam, DVD, DVCPro, miniDV, DG Fastchannel...the list goes ever on), and the producers of the content often don't know what they're doing (even if you know nothing of audio editing, you should be able to tell simply by looking that there's no saving a waveform like
this). Loud files occasionally slip through.
Going back to the issue of compression (refer to the video Müs linked), there are two "kinds" of volume: actual decibels measured, and what the human ear
feels like it's hearing. Compressed audio
sounds louder than it "technically" is. I hate to link anyone to TVTropes because goodbye evening, but read up on the
Loudness War. It's both illuminating and depressing.
The root problem with legislation of this type is that it hits the networks and affiliates, not the content creators (who are left unscathed), and thus it's the TV stations and networks that bear the culpability (and cost) of compliance. The seven networks I oversee now just had over $25,000 in equipment outlay alone
only for compliance. That's not even effecting any change; that's just so that we can be "certified" compliant with the CALM Act. And that's not including the countless man-hours already spent on the initial attempts, as well as time that's going to be spent having to re-transcode every piece of content through a new process in order to come out with the exact same result we
currently have.
The solution to this issue is purely free market: if a TV station is playing a loud commercial (be it truly loud or simply perceived as loud), call and complain. Enough complaints, and it'll be fixed (reprocessed with the station lowering the audio). Legislating against this is ridiculous and detrimental to everyone.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
