Volume Louder On Locals

[juliana541]

Anyone Know why the volume is significantly louder on the local channels? So much so that i am constantly having to lower it.

[rbtravis]

Anyone Know why the volume is significantly louder on the local channels? So much so that i am constantly having to lower it.
Call your local station and complain. They (i.e. most locals) have been raising the volume on commercials since the sixties. It is meant to wake you up so you don't sleep through the sponsors message.

[phox_mulder]

Call your local station and complain. They (i.e. most locals) have been raising the volume on commercials since the sixties. It is meant to wake you up so you don't sleep through the sponsors message.

Volume is not louder during commercials.
Commercials are "sweetened" so they sound louder, that is, they contain sound at frequencies the human ear hears better.

That wasn't the question though, the question was why are local channels through DirecTV louder than the other networks.

Are they through DirecTV or do you have an HR10-250 with an antenna providing the local chanenls?

If the latter, that's because you are getting them directly from the source, they aren't going through all the processing required to get them to DirecTV, then back to satellite and finally to you.

If the former, then it's a DirecTV problem and they would be the ones to call and complain.


phox

[juliana541]

Volume is not louder during commercials.
Commercials are "sweetened" so they sound louder, that is, they contain sound at frequencies the human ear hears better.

That wasn't the question though, the question was why are local channels through DirecTV louder than the other networks.

Are they through DirecTV or do you have an HR10-250 with an antenna providing the local chanenls?

If the latter, that's because you are getting them directly from the source, they aren't going through all the processing required to get them to DirecTV, then back to satellite and finally to you.

If the former, then it's a DirecTV problem and they would be the ones to call and complain.


phox well its not so bad to warrant a call. And yes they are through D* Its a SD unit. The only time it is a problem is watching my cops season pass I record on court tv and a local channel so watching one after the other requires some adjusting. No big deal. I just thought there was a tech reason

[JimSpence]

It's not just locals, I've been hearing this problem when switching between quite a few channels. This may be an HD channel problem. There is quite a bit of difference between recordings of Jay Leno and Dave Letterman on ch 82 and ch 80.

[Dawny]

Some TV units have a "sound normalize" function hidden in the menu choices--this really helps. My stereo has a one--i run my TV through it.

[Pt121]

I get the same thing through DirecTv. My locals are always higher in volume then the other channels. However, it is not worth the trouble to complain about, I have more problems to deal with then this. Its been like this since I got DirecTv.

Patrick

[bnm81002]

I've seen those so called "volume regulators/controllers" that reduced the volume during commercials, do those products actually worked as advertised?

[hiker]

I had same problem with the audio level and gave up on digital audio and went with analog audio for normal TV watching and got the Terk VR-1 volume regulator. This is an amazing little device that I have been very happy with. You can get on eBay or online stores like Crutchfield.

[robpickles]

God! This annoys the hell out of me all the time!

I have to blast my tv to hear shows at a decent volume and then when the commercials come on I get blown out of the house by the 'sweetened' levels.

Thanks Hiker! I am going to look into getting one of those devices.

Rob :)

[rminsk]

Volume is not louder during commercials.
Commercials are "sweetened" so they sound louder, that is, they contain sound at frequencies the human ear hears better.All audio coming from post production is "sweetened" and some way or another. This is to account more for the low end speakers in most viewing environments and not to do with the "loudness"

What they do on commercials is call companding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding) and compression (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression) which effectively removes all dynamic range from the signal and just makes it loud.

Modern recordings suffer from companding and compression by hitting the "normalize signal" button. They no longer have any dynamic range making extremely hard to listen too. Radio stations often have there compandors turned all the way up and also over modulate. The attitude now is louder is better.

From the wikipedia article above:
In recent years (as of 2006), record companies have been increasing the overall volume of commercial albums (particularly rock music and pop music) by using higher and higher degrees of compression during mastering, sometimes impacting sound quality (this may even include "hard clipping").[2] This phenomenon has been referred to as the "loudness war".

Most television commercials are compressed heavily (typically to a dynamic range of no more than 3dB) in order to achieve near-maximum perceived loudness while staying within permissible limits.