This could be a really big deal
This is a problem as old as Radio – and the FCC has tried a couple times to rein this in.
We have all experienced this – you are listening to some nice soft music at 2 AM, and suddenly the radio is blaring at you about your erectile dysfunction at maximum volume, loud enough for your next door neighbors to giggle. This is not an accident or inattentive engineering. The volume of the programming is deliberately turned down, so that you will turn up the volume on your receiver. Then the advertisements are blasted at maximum volume to make sure that you hear them.
The problem is regulating loudness is easier said than done. Your ears do not hear all frequencies the same – if you have ever played with an equalizer, you get some of this. If you make a rule that advertisements can be no louder than the programming, if you make a rule that advertisements can be no louder than the programming, you create incentives to “game” the audio to meet the standard, for instance emphasizing the part of the music that you can’t hear well, but contains sound energy to make it measure louder than it really is.
In a perfect world, radio stations would use restraint, but we do not live in a perfect world.
Anyone have good examples of this problem? Note that this proposal is specifically targeted at streaming – digital is harder to tweak than analog as the loudness is encoded in the digital stream.
I have run across one or two of these streams. I don’t listen to ads, so I generally pay no attention to the volume although I will be aware if I have headphones on. I smiled at the “if you have ever played with an equalizer” comment. I used to do a “frequency sweep” with a signal generator while watching on an oscilloscope. Always fun – if you are a geek like me, anyway 🙂
It turns out human hearing is extremely consistent unless there has been damage. The frequencies we can hear and how that fades with age are so consistent there is an ISO standard describing it.
yeah I have had that happen, I have quit listening to stations because of that crap.
I have moved around over the years from station to station. Generally stations have driven me away, they would play some goober PSA’s at break, that is the surest way to drive away listeners ! Or requiring that Microsoft audio app ‘Silverlight’ ( I think it was called) is another way.
Yeah I hated those that play loud commercials
parrott
Silverlight was Microsoft’s proprietary alternative to Quicktime. Microsoft has officially dropped it as a product, but one of the major streaming companies still demands it. Silverlight was designed to keep video and audio synchronized (harder than you might think) – it has no place on audio streams… Unless of course you wanted to force feed prestream video ads