Dolby Wants To Make Sure That Commercial Doesn't Go To 11
from the been-there,-heard-that dept
Among the many things to be unveiled at this week's Consumer Electronics Show is a new sound-leveling technology from Dolby Laboratories that goes into a TV that ensures that loud announcers and commercials won't leave you scrambling for the volume control on your remote. Of course, this really isn't that new. In the early 90s Magnavox tried pitching this feature, running commercials that featured John Cleese yelling back at the TV to quiet down. Dolby thinks that now that the technology's been perfected, consumers will want to pay more for it, but that seems unlikely. For one thing, it's really not that much of a problem. Commercials, typically, aren't much louder than the actual program, and screaming announcers tend to be blissfully rare. Furthermore, volume range is a good thing when it's an intended part of a program's sound editing. The few people that really care about this, and want everything to be leveled off probably won't constitute a big enough population for any manufacturer to justify adding the technology in, unless it's very cheap. Of course, if some TV manufacturer wanted to bring in John Cleese to do some spots, we'd have no problem with that.
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Skip the noise
Anyway, this auto-volume-adjustment tech seems like it's a day late and a dollar short. The kind of customer who would have paid extra for this in the past is now the kind of customer who will buy/rent a DVR and just skip the entire commercial.
So, blare that commercial all you want! Go crazy and increase the pitch and the volume. I'll be fast-forwarding through it anyway!
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Do it.
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I don't buy it
I have a TV on 12-14 hours a day and commercials on average are noticably louder than shows - often times to the point of causing discomfort. I have to set the volume on my television to level 8 to follow typical conversation in a show. I have to turn it to 10 to hear quiet dialog like whispers. I have to turn it down to 4 to not be annoyed by the loudness of most commericals.
That varies by network of course, with some of the cable channels that are too full of advertising being the worse, but networks very often suck too. It also varies by station.
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Thank you
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yea right
I don't believe this. They seem louder and thus they are louder. And the problem is getting worse. And I recall reading about one country recently taking action against broadcasters over the issue.
My stereo already ahs the technology built in. I can turn it on and off. If it is a movie where I want the dynamics, it is off. If it is annoying TV, then it is on. All TVs should offer it since it is cheap to offer today. It isn't worth huge bucks because it is simple to implement and costs a few lines of code in the DSP chip already in use. And if the chip needs added, that can be had for less then $10 in qty.
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Other, Better stuff
NOTE to anyone going to CES in the coming days:
Check out Chimei (Theyre over in the Sands/Venetian).
They make some of the best looking LCD monitors and televisions in the show. Plus they got a Monitor that actually translates the 3d vectors that your graphics card uses to produces the picture to instead crate a stereoscopic image that ACTUALLY LOOKS GOOD! No joke, they were running Unreal Tournament and LotR:RotK on these things and it was BEAUTIFUL! I actually thought that Orc I threw was gonna hit me in the face! This, my friends, is how 3d pictures are supposed to look!
Not bad for some unheard of Asian company.
Also be sure to take a look at the AMD/ATI booth over in the South hall (right across from Dell). Nothing particularly new, but they had some really nice looking PC builds out there worth drooling over for a few minutes.
Well, lots of cool stuff this year and, as usual, plenty of good swag.
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By the way, what they do is compress the dynamic range. Essentially boost low volume sounds to volume of the highest volume sounds. So instead of being, for example, 10dB peak with the rest much quieter you would have a constant 10 dB signal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_level_compression
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Ears are hurting...
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Huh? Misleading story altogether?
Hell, everyone I know that rips dvds even normalizes their audio streams. Even the quality nuts. (and in case you didnt know, most dvd players also normalize the audio stream as well)
Yes, I think it owuld be quite nice to have that built right into the tv. Now if it only kicked on for commercials, then no.. that would be stupid. but thats not whats really going on.
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let's adopt a standard
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Why Bother?
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Wow
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Nothing new
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Will it work with EAS?
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Well I'd like one...
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Out Of Touch
It's dribble like this that seriously undermines Techdirt's credibility. I still subscribe because occasionally there's some good nugget of true news, but the signal-to-noise ratio I'm noticing is falling increasingly higher on the NOISE side.
By the way, in case it really matters to anyone at Techdirt, I'd be happy to see Techdirt fall back to one WEEKLY email of REAL ISSUES rather than to see it go downhill as Techdirt tries to backfill a slow news day with junk like this.
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Re: Out Of Touch
Optimal audio volume is a complex issue. As I pointed out, one can't even define loudness in common sense physics terms.
The previous post to this correctly explains dynamic range. Try watching a film like "Saving Private Ryan" on maximum compression, say -6dB threshold with a 20:1 ratio, or with a spectral maximiser. The artistic nuance of the film is completely lost - the really quiet bits lose their suspense and emotion and the really loud bits that should be shocking are emasculated.
So, whacking a great big compresser/limiter on there spoils the show. The advertiser on the other hand just wants to blast his product into your ears as loud as possible.
Two entirely incompatible agendas.
So the Dolby adaptive normaliser is actually a nice bit of progress, it adapts to the dynamics of the audio as a bigger picture (look ahead and look back with a sophisticated averaging window that weights the audio density, frequency, peak amplitude and RMS amplitude).
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loudness vs amplitude
So yes. If it seems like it's louder, it is louder, loudness is defined perceptually, amplitude is not.
Many TVs already contain a compresser/limiter before the output stage. It is rare that the user can control the threshold and ratio values though. If they could it would be a very desirable control feature.
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Re: loudness vs amplitude
The perception of sound loudness changes over frequency - human ears are most sensitive around the 12Khz frequency which is roughly where the s, k , t sounds in speech lie. There are even theories that the brain changes this further and hones in more on specific frequencies depending on the language you were brought up with but this is digressing
I'd be really interested to see how dolby are going to achieve this without compressing if anyone knows, as to really drop volume without any perceptible compression you would surely have to know what is coming next? Either that or have a reference line which states "this is supposed to be 20db" so the telly knows where to put it
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Paramount UK
This wasn't an increase in density as you might see with compression but an actual increase in amplitude... It was simply twice as loud.
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Dolby
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FX
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I'd buy that for a dollar
This is something i would buy
We watch the television late at night with the kids in bed and the constant loud adverts are a constant annoyance, rushing to the telly or to find the remote to turn down the volume before the kids wake up
Barry Scott from Cilliut bang is the worst offender in the UK "Hi - I'm Barry Scott- it's 11pm and I just woke your kids up to try to sell you toilet bleach..." bastard!
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I'm really surprised
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Storm in a Teacup
I have a TiVo and a Mute button.
Works for me.
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Actually
(true story - happened to me over the holidays. Don't let grandma run your AV system without supervision!)
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http://publications.mediapost.com/ index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=46656
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Been Done
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Or you can get an open box one for 47.99. Classic.
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Constantine
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Commercials aren't louder? You're kidding, right?
In our market, the car dealers advertise during the 10PM news, on all three local network affiliates. My wife and I have been wishing for years for something to keep them from blasting us out of our seats.
But the commenters who have observed that this is a day late and a dollar short are absolutely right. For most TV programs, we pre-record on the DVR and skip commercials entirely.
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long (delay) window
"I'd be really interested to see how dolby are going to achieve this without compressing if anyone knows, as to really drop volume without any perceptible compression you would surely have to know what is coming next?"
Easy :) Theres a delay buffer of about a second or two, so it does know whats coming next (you see the picture and hear the sound post processing). It's probably symmetrical either way so the averaging/interpolation happens over a 4 second window or more - plenty of time to make quite drastic byt graceful dynamics changes without the "pumping" you get from a real-time maximiser.
(actually I've no idea if that's how they do it, that's how I would do it)
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Accidents happen
All the sudden the "local" ad-minute on one particular channel was REALLY REALLY LOUD.
Several weeks later it was back to normal. Somebody must've complained.
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Clearly you don't watch the Sci-Fi channel
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Not all is quiet
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tv ad volume
Regards, Lindsay
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Loud Commercials
But we REALLY NEED this technology, at least for poor people and cheapskates that won't get with the DVR revolution. Governments should increase the taxes on ALL advertising because it is annoying and takes very little effort to advertise nowaday.
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Simple [NO}
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I hate commercials
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commercial sound increase
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