{"id":710,"date":"2010-12-08T02:52:02","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T00:52:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=710"},"modified":"2015-04-21T12:09:44","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T10:09:44","slug":"turn-it-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/turn-it-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Turn it down!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been said that every American trend arrives in Germany about five years later. But there’s at least one that’s gone in the opposite direction: digital television. While Europeans are already used to its advantages and disadvantages, Americans are still coming to terms with<\/span> them. Analog reception<\/span> didn’t end until June 12, 2009<\/a>.<\/p>\n

TV is not important, you say?<\/b> Try telling that to 292 million US residents over the age of 2 who watch an average of nearly six hours of video a day<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Their representatives in Congress took a break last week from talking about federal<\/span> revenue<\/span> to vote on a most urgent<\/span> matter: loud TV commercials<\/b>. Complaints about these in just the first quarter<\/span> of 2010 numbered 132,416 \u2014 ten times as many as in the last quarter of 2009. The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television in the US, will now be told to require that commercials be played at a volume<\/span> similar to the speech in the programs they’re interrupting.<\/p>\n

Americans have complained<\/b> about loud commercials since the 1960s, but the arrival of digital television has made them worse. Digital signals have a wider dynamic range \u2014 quiet sounds no longer get lost in the static<\/span> \u2014 so loud sounds seem louder. <\/p>\n

Until now, the maximum volume of a commercial was determined by the maximum volume of normal TV programs. If a program was mostly dialogue with occasional<\/span> gunshots or explosions, the commercial \u2014 every second of it \u2014 was permitted to be as loud as those explosions<\/b>.<\/p>\n

The new Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation<\/span>, or CALM<\/b>, Act<\/span>, will require that commercials be calibrated acoustically according to their perceived<\/span> loudness, not their absolute volume. Loudness, as researchers have shown, is subjective: the brain pays more attention to speech than to other sounds.<\/p>\n

That’s why that guy screaming<\/span> about his phone bill<\/span> in the commercial with Heino seems so much louder than the car chases<\/span> in the movie he so rudely<\/span> interrupted.<\/p>\n