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US Bans Loud Commercials
bs0d3 writes "On Tuesday, the FCC passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM. It's a law that states all commercials must run at the same volume as network newscasts. The same applies to network promos. The responsibility falls on cable providers like Comcast or charter. The law will not take effect until next year which leaves it plenty of time to be challenged in court by cable providers or advertisers."
Great. If only it was 20 years ago and the Internet didn't exist.
there's standards for loudness in most countries, but they're completely ignored by the broadcasters. they take an ad that's the correct standard volume and go ahead and turn it up anyway.
Now, if they'll also ban quiet and medium-loud ones, we'll really be getting somewhere.
The problem with ads is that they, like top 40 music, are much more heavily compressed than movies or newstalk. The maximum amplitude isn't any higher though. So what measure of "loudness" is it going to be? Because if it's amplitude, then this law will do precisely nothing.
Here is a link to the FCC website for the actual text of the Report and Order regarding implementation of the CALM Act.
Because sometimes, especially while listening to a quiet movie, you PREFER NOT TO BE SUDDENLY BLASTED WITH NOISE!!
It's annoying as hell. I do kind of agree with you though that it doesn't seem like something the government needs to regulate. But, hey, at least it isn't something actually evil (*ahem* SOPA). And yes, it's a bit sad that I'm glad just because something the government does isn't completely wrong.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
We need the "Caps Lock Annhilation Program" to stop loud posters.
Well, you're welcome to it, but *I* certainly don't need the CLAP.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The FCC is implementing a law passed by Congress. The FCC did not "pass" anything.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Because sometimes, especially while listening to a quiet movie, you PREFER NOT TO BE SUDDENLY BLASTED WITH NOISE!!
It's annoying as hell. I do kind of agree with you though that it doesn't seem like something the government needs to regulate. But, hey, at least it isn't something actually evil (*ahem* SOPA). And yes, it's a bit sad that I'm glad just because something the government does isn't completely wrong.
What's so amazing about this is I have a MAD Magazine reprint parodying thise from about 1960 - Someone's watching a late night feature and can hardly hear the sound 'ah help your killing me. aaagh.' suddenly, TICK TOCK TICK TOCK ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE GETTING TO SLEEP!! and neighbors all yelling out their windows to turn the noise down. Wow. About 51 years since that bit in the magazine. Glaciers move faster.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wrong. Congress passed the 2010 Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act and it was signed by the President on December 15, 2010, a year ago tomorrow.
What the FCC did yesterday was to adopt rules restricting loud commercials, as it was required to under the CALM Act, which will become effective one year after adoption, on December 13, 2012.
The rule is based on ATSC A/85 RP (70 page PDF), which most definitely is not just a simple amplitude definition.
Because if I have to mute or change the channel at every commercial:
1) It's highly obnoxious
2) I'm likely to miss parts of what I was trying to watch
3) It defeats the purpose of advertising
It's not like they're spending a trillion dollars to do this. It's just a nice simple curb on the advertisers' bad behavior. I know some people think the government should be basically comatose, and complain whenever they do anything. But most of us like when our representatives represent us.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll share some details on the problem of measuring loudness.
Loudness is difficult to measure objectively, because loudness is what a human experiences when listening to audio. Intensity, on the other hand, is easy to measure; just get a sound level meter.
Why is loudness different than intensity? Because the human auditory system contains a natural filterbank that divides incoming audio up into multiple bands, and then applies an exponential scaling function to each band. Old books and papers call these bands critical bands; I think the more modern concept is ERBs.
For sounds that hit only one band, such as a pure sine tone, the intensity of the sound is a good approximation of loudness. But sounds that hit multiple bands scale roughly linearly in the number of bands hit. I'll give an example.
If you generate a pure sine tone at power level X, and then generate two sine tones each at power level X/2, then the measured intensity will be identical. However, if the two sine tones are in different bands, the loudness will be nearly double.
So, as a rule of thumb, the more frequency bands a given sound hits, the louder it is at any given power level. Something that sounds like white noise will be louder than something that sounds like a clear bell tone or a single flute note.
The people who make commercials know how to game the system. I'm pretty sure that there were already limits on measured intensity of commercials, but that wasn't enough to solve the problem.
Imagine you are driving along, listening to a radio show. Maybe talk radio, maybe NPR, whatever. You have the "volume control" knob on your car radio set to a comfortable listening level. The radio show only has audio at typical human speech frequencies, and isn't trying to sound loud. Now comes the commercial, which smears its audio all over the spectrum; it puts processing on the voice, with reverb and stuff. "Sunday Sunday Sunday-y-y-y!!!! M-m-monster truck demolition derby!!!" or whatever. It's not your imagination, it really is louder. But a sound level meter might say it's the same as the radio show content, or only slightly higher intensity level.
The company for which I work (DTS) has a solution to the problem called "Neural Loudness Control", and there is a white paper available that really goes into detail about this stuff, so you don't need to stop with my lame explanation. NLC has a full "loudness model" that approximates the human auditory system when computing a loudness metric; but it also can operate in a mode that follows the new standard.
Also, here's a PowerPoint presentation by JJ Johnston about loudness vs. intensity.
So the new standard, 1770, is a pretty easy-to-calculate approximation of loudness. You apply two filters: one that simulates the transfer function of an average human head, and the "RLB weighting curve"; then compute mean-square energy on the result. This is simple enough that nobody really has an excuse in the 21st Century that it would be hard to comply.
I'm a little worried that it is too simple, and there might be ways to trick it. For example, it doesn't seem to handle audio that is smeared across multiple bands to make it sound louder. But I'm not actually working in the area of loudness measurement, and from what I've heard, 1770 works okay for most stuff. It's better than no standard.
And on the gripping hand, 1770 is the law now.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
From our perspective, because we agree with what they're trying to accomplish. I don't agree with the means, though, which makes it very bad legislation.
Just because YOU do not agree with the means does not make it bad legislation.
We have government for precisely this reason, to restore some semblance of a balance of power between the individual consumer and the corporate giants who feel free to subject you to anything they think they can make you swallow. They are using our airwaves, and our TV sets, to say nothing about our eyeballs, they should follow our rules.
Your position seems to be you always have the right to turn it off, and any abuse you get is of your own choice. I'm not willing to make that choice. Why should I? What kind of freedom is that? The choice to take it or leave it? Screw that. They can operate by our rules, or operate not at all. Let them take it or leave it for a while. They've had their way for 30 years.
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Two news anchors sitting at the news desk, one male one female, smiling in a news anchor kind of way cameras running:
--------------
Male Anchor yelling at the top of his lungs: So Jane, what do you think about our new theme music on the intro?
Female Anchor yelling back: Whaaat?
Male Anchor yelling louder: I said, what * do * you * think * of * our * new * theme * music? It's * by * Motorhead!
Female Anchor nods as if she heard him but really she didn't, starts yelling herself: It sure is Bob. In our first story...
--------------
They'll find a way around this.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
There already was a standard requiring commercials to limit loudness. A commercial could not be louder than the program it was accompanying, which meant it could not be louder than the loudest point in the programming. What that meant is if there was a single gunshot in an hour, your commercials in that hour could be very, very loud. Also, loudness was not weighted. High-pitched ringing and speaking at the same level were considered equally loud, even though human hearing is skewed (A-weighting) to perceive speech as inherently louder.
So what this really does is 1) re-define what constitutes "loud", and 2) give the process some teeth.
Not really. It keys on the average volume of a commercial needing to be the average volume of the show. We don't want averages, we want ReplayGain.
Averages can be gamed quite trivially. Think of a thirty second ad in which the first 25 seconds contain very soft speaking with bits of silence between lines. The CALM Act affords the rest of the ad the luxury of BLASTING the product's tag line at well over the current maximum volume level.
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