Loud TV Commercials: Say Bye Bye

[dr sound]

Here you go:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/...ntent=My+Yahoo

[acmost]

Heh...I want that gig monitoring the levels.

for a little while.

[Postman]

This they can pass! I feel so warm and fuzzy now.

[Craig F]

so who do we complain to if someone is out of compliance?

[audiobob]

ah man...I like loud commercials. they wake me up from the coma induced by lousy network tv.

[tamasdragon]

Oh, I wish this would be happening worldwide. The advertisement market fights the biggest loudness war on earth.

[DarylG]

The funny thing is that it will probably mean that the commercials are actually quieter than the programmes, because as it's measured on the average "loudness", a regular program will have a much wider dynamic range than most heavily compressed commercials, so I suspect that the advertisers will have to find a way of introducing more dynamic range to try to overcome this issue.

D

[JC925602]

Originally Posted by DarylG

...so I suspect that the advertisers will have to find a way of introducing more dynamic range to try to overcome this issue.

D

So they will have to get creative instead of just shouting?

JC

[lexaudio]

Well here is the big problem.

Some of the broadcasters aren't making the commercials come in at spec. They are smashing them at the box, which in turn destroys the audio for the series they broadcast.

Look at Breaking Bad. Great mix on the stage. Horrible sounding broadcast. ITs not the mixers. Its the channel.

So if more adopt this, then we are going to have crappy sounding TV shows. What's the point of HD if the sound is crap.

They might as well just broadcast HD commercials, and black and white mono sound tv series.

[froyo]

Hello. It's official now. If I'm not mistaken, the CALM act goes into effect today. Also if I'm not mistaken, broadcasters have one year to make sure they comply, after that they can start to get fines if they don't.

For what it's worth, I have been mixing commercials (to the ITU-R BS. 1770-2 specification with the Nugen Vis-LM meter) and I am very happy with the results. So far my experience has been very positive, very much a change for the better. Mixes have dynamics now. Imagine that.