Interesting turn of events concerning loudness of advertisements on TV
The C.A.L.M. act sounds great… though I was recently hearing from a TV/film mixer who was concerned with how this might pan out.
This mixer was saying that the reason commercials are so loud is that there is no onus on them being artful and so they do not need any sort of dynamic range. The opposite is true of movies, who use creative sound design and tasteful mixing to elevate the story being told - how much of an impact would an explosion in the context of a movie have if it was only the same volume as a whisper or a drink being poured? Quality programming needs that exploitation of headroom and possible changes in order to make drama dramatic. Commercials can operate successfully in only the top 3dB of dynamic range available, thus sounding comparatively much louder than movies or programmes.
In his speech, the mixer made a reference to a similar bill to this one which was addressing the apparent volume leap between programming and commercial breaks from a different perspective: makers of commercials are always going to make loud, dynamic-less adverts, so why not reduce the dynamic range of the programming so that it doesn’t sound “quieter” by contrast? The bill was going to use some sort of intelligent compander (compressor/expander) to boost a programme or film’s quieter sections and reduce the peaks of the louder sections. With a narrower dynamic range, the volume difference between programming and commercials would be much less perceptible, or at least not as substantial. The trouble with this strategy, obviously, is that decisions made by the mixer employed to make the tv programme/film sound as good as it possibly can be are being negated by a weird little gizmo that just needs the product to be as loud as the adverts for other products. Kinda makes you feel nauseous, right?
I pray that the C.A.L.M act goes through smoothly and takes its toll on commercials, not quality films or programmes. It would be awful for television and film to suffer the same “loudness wars” as popular music, and worse still if said war was instigated through the passing of some weird bureaucratic law.
