I had no idea they were turning up the volume

WHAT? adjusts my hearing aid

I especially hate this with music streaming services. They tryna blow out my speakers!!

To compensate, they'll be turning it up by twice as much in all other states starting today.

I wish a federal law would pass, but we all know that’ll never happen! So, argggghhhhh

Jeez, this has been going on for so long that parodies of these sorts of malicious practices are nearly a decade old. It’s about time. As usual, California has to be the voice of reason.

The first thing my wife and I did this morning when we woke up was turn on streaming shit and check to see if they actually did this...

We of course live in California and I am happy to report that the first commercial that played was loud as hell. My wife immediately started trying to find the phone numbers so that we could call and complain lol

Okay, so I have no idea about streaming services, but commercials on broadcast TV never had the volume increased but the compression.

(I love getting lost in details so apologies if any of this comes off condescending.) Compression works by making the quieter parts louder, without distorting the louder parts.

THINK of a SENTENCE where SOME of the WORDS are LOUD and OTHER words are QUIETER.

compression works by squishing down all the loud parts, then bringing everything back up to full volume, so the previous sentence would become:

THINK OF A SENTENCE WHERE SOME OF THE WORDS ARE LOUD AND OTHER WORDS ARE QUIETER.

Now, the loud parts didn’t become louder. What happened is that the quieter parts got louder. You lose the dynamic, but gain volume. If you think it would just be exhausting, you’re correct - even at low volumes, you can get a sense of ear fatigue when audio is heavily compressed.

Now, if you want to know why movies have quiet parts where you can’t hear shit and loud parts that are way louder, this is called dynamics. Artistically, you very much want this for the same reason you want quiet parts and loud parts in classical music. If everything is constantly loud, the dramatic moments won’t feel as impactful.

“But wait, I don’t enjoy that, I like having my TV at a reasonable volume!” Yup, me too. It’s fucking annoying. Mixing is done often on high quality speakers, loud volume, so you can get every detail. Most home setups dont have that nuance, and most people don’t care. Until execs can actually get proven that they’ll make more money by having consistent compression, you’re shit out of luck. You’ll probably have to get your own compression, either through software or hardware.

Source: used to work in sound engineering.

This isn't even the first time they have been ordered to cut that shit out.

Half of lemmy who have either been pirating or freebooting since the mid 90's:

My parents forced us to mute TV commercials as a kid and I'm so thankful they did.

Think yer link's broken.

When you use so much ad blocking that you didnt even realize these things had commercial breaks

I notice the sports betting commercials they engineer the sound to project the voices in loud environments like a bar. Its annoying as hell at home.

It's missing the https:// at the beginning of the URL.

Only a decade? I recall legal action surrounding this shit in the '90s.

I love this idea but nowadays I’m actively looking for commercials in many shows—watching Sealab or Family Guy or Space Ghost or super old Pokémon and the like is infinitely better with original commercials from the late 90s or early 2000s, ripped in mediocre quality from an SP VHS.

And somehow that leads it to an internal link. Noted and fix’d

That was for tv and also maybe radio? Technically, this is different. Also, I don’t know of any parodies of tv broadcasts with malicious audio ads.

People want Christopher Nolan films to sound like compressed commercials. 🤭

Also, I don’t know of any parodies of tv broadcasts with malicious audio ads.

That's because no one watches broadcast tv anymore.

What is the billionaire pocket lining scheme here? There's no way the politicians that want magical gun scanning in 3d printers and illegal minecraft servers made a sensible decision

I have managed to cut ads out of my life so completely that I am legitimately offended by ads

This is literally the same thing. Some small technical details regarding the delivery method are wholly immaterial, and any arguments asserting that it is are fully disingenuous.

When I go to the office instead of being on my home network with a pihole, and I go to show a website in a meeting, I'm just embarrassed by what shows up because the site didn't look anything like that when I was looking at it previously at home. I legitimately don't know how people actually use websites that are 80% ads

I'm doing my part.

Ya, I get that. I have to stop myself from being weird and overly aggressive about it when watching tv at a friend's house.

I was fortunate enough to have some creative input into our browser policies at work. Needless to say, Adnauseum ublock origin and some password safe extensions got added to the allow list

My jellyfin does this too. I find the commercials are about 2x louder than the content

Thank you for giving the explanation so I didn’t have to (used to work in broadcast TV including sound and station engineer)

Hulu used to do it. idk if or when they stopped. But it was the primary motivator for me to buy the no-, commercial package.

(That was till I swore off and went full pirate a few years ago.)

But honesty, I never put two and two together.

They almost certainly were doing it to ramp up the unpleasantness of the commercials to push people to pay more to avoid them.

Fuckers

Every time I go to my moms place and see what they put up with on a fire stick, it makes me fucking sick.

BUY KOOLAID, BUY TOYS R US TOYS, BUY VIDEO GAMES.

They're ya go, champ.

How did that slavery vote go?

They even figured out a way to get around decibel laws.

Human hearing is most sensitive within a certain range where we disproportionately hear those sounds louder than other frequencies. Advertisers would boost that range up and cut frequencies elsewhere to lower the average energy in the audio wave to be compliant with advertisement decibel ratings. The perceived sound could be multiple times louder than the intended limit.

I thought you were going to get into lossy audio compression codecs. I don’t see ads but when I do my ears are like “what in the 128 Kbps MP3 is going on here?”

Weird. I usually find Netflix quiet compared to other services. I don’t know why.

we’re literally in the comments of an article indicating that this is legally distinct deafening, and I’m pretty obviously joking about the distinction being time alone

Your Jellyfin has ads? Why did you put them in your library?

Go cannibalize some oligarchs instead of diving into unproductive pessimism. I’ll provide you an alibi and a palate cleanser

Back in ye'old days when you paid for a streaming service and you didn't have a bunch of commercials...

Now that you mention it, I actually see 4x ads now

As a Californian, fuck Newsom.

We do have common sense laws that lead the nation in a lot of areas, but especially automobile safety and pollution. Manufacturers don't want to make a California specific version of their product, so it becomes the de facto standard for cars in the US.

Compression is the way this happened. Commercials are HEAVILY compressed, and shows aren't. It's not volume...it's compression ratios.

This.

Source: i still work in sound engineering. This is all about compression. Commercials are brickwalled to shit.

Audio compression is very different than file compression.

I remember TV had something like this, maybe a couple decades ago. I feel like it wasn't adhered to at that time. I wonder if they'll just ignore it again this time.

And Christopher Nolan wants his movies to sound good in theatres, not on TV's.

There was a voice of reason in Nazi Germany. They wanted to send them to Madagascar instead of the crematoria.