A Collection of Short Letters

[seal_clubber]

Dear God,

Please make my father stop clicking on "Okay" when he doesn't fully understand what the pop-up window is telling him. That, or let him find some other IT support person than me.

Amen,
  Murray

♣     ♣     ♣
Dear Ann Boleyn,

I don't think it's going to go so well for you in this season's The Tudors. I'm just sayin

Comments

[seal_clubber]

Did you know that commercials aren't technically louder than the shows they accompany (and that legally they cannot be)? The maximum volume is the same for commercials and normal programming. If you watch the audio levels on a VU meter you will see that they peak at around the same level.

Ad-makers use something called "inconsistent loudness" to make the ads seem louder. Audio compression shrinks the range of sound in a commercial, boosting softer sounds to the level of louder ones. Measured on a VU meter, it means that a commercial can have a higher and louder average sound level than a program while not exceeding the show's peak loudness (and thus remaining nicely within the legislated parameters). Inconsistent loudness is typically more pronounced with local ads and when switching between cable channels, which have a wide disparity of volume levels.

Of course, saying that it is only "perceived loudness" is like ignoring windchill. Hey it's only -5 degrees... it only feels like -20, so stop shivering.

And here's the good news: there's apparently an even greater "loudness gap" with high definition broadcasts, meaning they can crank the commercial's perceived loudness even further. Yay!

I wonder if the whole point of the "AI sound feature" is to try and mitigate the problem, and that it is somehow just not working properly...

[wraithgirl]

Back when we had cable, you could tell the AI sound was working. When you shut the feature off, it made a huge difference. I don't know about now though, since we haven't watched regular TV in a while.

Didn't know about the legals of it; very interesting stuff.