Commercial Loudness Bill in Congress

[Nathan W.]

Slightly off topic for this forum but interesting for audio post professionals nevertheless.

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...tv-commercials

[tonepad]

Good to know about...last year we thought we had this licked...while being probably the loudest show on the air, but this year we feel that our same mix is being blown away again by some of the spots, and I even notice it on other nets where shows louder than ours are losing the loudness wars. The nets def have 2 standards for program v ad levels.

[thierryd]

with all these constant loudness wars going on, here's the recipes for the 2 loudest 30sec commercials on air:
1. 30 seconds of total silence. Of course only for the really big budget commercials as the sound design and music composition for this type of commercials is not easy. If a big company is interested I've researched this over the last few years and composed, what I think is the perfect soundtrack for this; a John Cage influenced piece titled "Comcon Dither". But as I said the copyright is very expensive, only serious canditates should contact me.
The big advantage of this soundtrack is that it attracts all audiences. Guaranteed heads will turn, when this commercial is on television!

2. 30 seconds of maximum allowed broadcast scale 1kHz. Also only for big budget commercials as this type of soundtrack needs to be adapted to the targeted audience: research needs to be done into age group and sex (male or female audience targeted). It's best to invite a big enough test audience of said targeted group and experiment with the biggest annoyance creating frequency and waveform (variations of sine wave to square wave come to mind).
Interesting side affect: probably there will be a bump in LED/LCD television sales while this commercial runs on air, as people will be throwing their remotes at the television, smashing a CRT or two. So products interested in this soundtrack could strike a deal with a big TV production plant.



All kidding aside, I really hope that P/Loud, ATSC and ITU will be successful with their efforts of getting some dynamics back into the sound world!
Rant mode off

Greetings,

Thierry

[EarHole]

As an Ad Mixer... I'm all for it. Mixers used to have standards and it required skill and experience to work within those parameters. Not any kid with an L1 can spit something out of FCP and go. It also levels the playing field a bit so I don't have clients telling me that the spot them mixed at the other place was louder than mine. This comment is usually based on the QT that gets posted for at the end of the session BTW. The more complicated the better as far as I'm concerned.

[Kuba Pietrzak]

It is not exactly, that everyone wants to have the loudest commercial. No one wants to have quieter commercial than others. THIS trend caused the situation we have now.
Radio stations solved the problem years ago - there are talks, there are radio shows, there is music from '50s, there is "modern mastered" music from 2000s, there are radio spots - with properly tuned broadcast processor the whole program content (commercials too) have continuous loudness and you do not have to adjust volume, when you drive a car for example.

regards,
Kuba

[Magnetic]

Originally Posted by Kuba Pietrzak

with properly tuned broadcast processor the whole program content (commercials too) have continuous loudness and you do not have to adjust volume, when you drive a car for example.

regards,
Kuba

Agreed, but do we really want TV to sound like AM radio?

[Postman]

Our high tech broadcast industry should be embarrassed to be so helpless at controlling their own product that Congress should even be tempted to regulate it. The problem exists because, honestly, the industry has not REALLY tried to fix it. Pathetic.They've had years to do what they promised to do and reign in on an all too obvious problem.

Having said all that, the idea of formal governmental control of this rubs me equally badly. Good grief we're a country of babies.

[hef]

I heard the big networks were going with -22 to -24 measured on Dolby Media Meter or Lm100 with Dialogue Intell. off. using LKFS.

I find the major 4 (cbs, nbc, fox and abc) to be much better these days. Its the cable networks that seem to be all over the place. Ie. AMC

[Postman]

Yes the "big 4" have gotten better, as long as you don't count what their local affiliates do when they insert their own commercials and promos.

[Kuba Pietrzak]

Originally Posted by Magnetic

Agreed, but do we really want TV to sound like AM radio?

No, absolutely not. But here in Europe there is also FM radio, which is not that bad. It is really comparable to nicam stereo analog Tv broadcast.

I used this example only to show, that the problem can be solved on broadcasters' side.

best,
Kuba