Slashdot Mirror
Quiet Victories Won In the Loudness Wars
Stowie101 writes with a few pieces from an article on what's been happening in the fight against over-compressed radio music and deafening tv commercials: "The first major step towards the elimination of heavily-compressed music could be the International Telecommunications Union's ... measurement of loudness that was ... revised in 2011. ... Acting to rectify the problem on the broadcast side of the issue, many European and Asian broadcasters are adopting loudness standards that are based on the criteria first introduced by the ITU. Here in the U.S., the federal government has also been proactive to improve the quality of broadcast television. By the end of 2012, the broadcast community will have to follow the CALM Act that requires commercials to be played at the same volume as broadcast television. In terms of music and recording, these broadcast standards do not apply. But Shepherd theorizes the measurement standards will be applied to the production of music. 'Measuring loudness, in general, isn't easy. Now the ITU has agreed on a new "loudness unit:" the LU. You can measure short- and longer-term loudness over a whole song. They've also agreed on guidelines for broadcast; what the average loudness should be and how much you can vary it. The recommendation has been made law in the U.S. for advertisements and is also being adopted in the U.K. and all over the world. All the major broadcasters here — Sky, the BBC, ITV — have agreed to follow the standard.'"
You mean, by making choice between Company A, Station 1 and Company A, Station 2?
Man, are naive, idiot or just a kid?
We really don't need all this extra layer of oversight here, the industry is capable of regulating itself once people have had more time to make their opinions known and choose stations whose practices they agree with.
Because that worked so well in the past. This "Self Regulation" is what caused the problem in the first place.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry I ran out of breath to laugh any longer.
I have a decibel meter app on my phone and I've seen levels go from the middle 50s during the program to the upper 60s during the ads.
The app isn't probably that accurate but that is a really big jump, enough to cause me pain sometimes. There is one ad from a local lawyer that jumps up to 70 at one point.
Guess who I won't be calling for legal services.
The industry has listened to and ignored citizen complaints for 50 years. What makes you think they will change now?
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
The public's airwaves, the public's rules.
Don't like it? Don't use public resources to distribute your speech.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And no real gain.
Less gain is the whole point.
The law was passed because too many audio sources had excessive gain.
If you want music, you're pretty much restricted to getting it from one of three big companies. All three companies have already demonstrated a concerted "need" to make their music louder than everyone else's, even if it's not "top-40 crap". And there's little point saying "Get it in CD form, rather than a DRM'd MP3 download, then", because they're using brick-wall filters on CDs too ("Metallica - Death Magnetic", anyone?)
The Loudness war, in both music and TV/Radio ads, has been brought up before. The consensus then seemed to be "If you don't buy the compressed crap and they'll stop compressing it". That hasn't worked at all, which means it's time to legislate. Remember, they had to legislate to get seatbelts and airbags in cars.
"By the end of 2012, broadcast televisionâ¦"
Broadcast what?
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
more a matter of "no regulation". just a medium with a defined peak and no consequences in hardware for driving the average too high.
vinyl had physical limits that would make the music sound like shit if they were exceeded, and in extreme cases would cause the disc to be unplayable. CDs don't have that problem. they can be 16khz, fullscale, 100% of the time and pass verification, but will pass the hardware problems down the line (to your tweeters in this case - they'll burn even if the speaker is running well below it's rated max power).
things were made worse considering people in the pop music target audience would often brag about blowing their speakers up...
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
More significant is that CALM is based on a model of accoustic perception which is much more complex than peak/RMS amplitude. For one, human hearing is more sensitive at specific frequencies (e.g. speech and crying babies, and probably any resonant frequencies of our skull). For another, sharp/percussive peaks tend to be perceived as quieter (or at least less annoying!) than equal-volume sustained tones. So compressing a drumset beat and some attorney's voice to the same "average" range means that the music will sound quieter than the advertisement. So whether CALM normalizes at the broadcaster or at the end-user, it should be strictly better because its measurement more accurately models perception and should have less error inherently.
Also, piling in against the free-market spin doctor: broadcasters are granted a form of monopoly due to limited resources for transmission. They should be regulated and hand-slapped for what appears to be blatant disregard for their government-granted customer base.
more a matter of "no regulation". just a medium with a defined peak and no consequences in hardware for driving the average too high.
There have been consequences in software though.
MythTV has been using the difference in loudness/dynamic range to identify and skip commercials. I hope these measures don't compromise that, I'd hate to have to start watching adverts again...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The summary is conflating so many issues.
Yes, loud commercials are obnoxious.
Yes, overly compressed music diminishes it. In a good listening environment a nice dynamic range is good.
But compression isn't inherently bad. Large dynamic range stinks in my car, which is loud (I need to do something about the gasket by the driver's window). It stinks on the crappy speakers on my netbook and the built-in speakers on this display I'm using now.
It can help (with a limiter) in having to keep going to the volume bar too, or for watching a movie at night when you don't want to wake the kids.
If anybody wants some automatic control for PulseAudio I hacked up a workable solution last summer, just 'cause I got annoyed one day. PA makes it a bitch to install these things, but I've got an SRPM at least for the library. Need to write a short doc and send the patches upstream still, but drop me a line if you want it anyway.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes, the public has been ignored, research even ordered destroyed when it didn't support the pre-determined outcome.
The story
http://web.archive.org/web/20090123153744/http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/09/18/senator_says_media_study_suppressed/
The suppressed report
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-267448A1.pdf
Some PBS coverage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEoKXKUnLsY
PBS transcript
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/transcript5.html?print
more PBS info
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/profile2.html
Info related to Providence Equity (where a former FCC chair went)
www.sungarddx.com/pdf/Data_Exchange_Fundraising.pdf
Loud commercials have been addressed before. If the ad agency has used aggressive audio processing, and uses less energy at bass frequencies, the station actually needs special equipment to sense the higher average energy and compensate. The peak voltage value can be the same with a large difference in loudness.
To those that think so-called market forces make things good, explain why we've now got those half-hour infomercials, 18+ minutes of ads an hour instead of 9 to 11, and far less depth and diversity in news coverage. The same former FCC chair that Bill Moyers talks about taking a job at a major communications-oriented venture capital group has since become head of the cable-tv industry group that pushed for the Comcast/NBC/Universal merger. Cable companies don't want broadcast tv to be excellent.
I'm a broadcast tech at a license-funded TV station in Norway, so we don't have to deal with advertising volume jumps, but in general, we aim to follow the already-established EBU recommendation 128, which specifies loudness.
Indeed, the spec is publically available: http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf
toresbe
If you had read the article or the title, or summary, you'd have read that the article is about the volume of commercials, not the content or material being sold.
If you want to turn this into a free speech issue, you have the right to speak about whatever you want, but you don't have the right to grab someone by the ear and then scream into it.
My kingdom for a donkey!
Great. Now what are they gonna do about the loudness wars being waged every day by the children in my neighborhood? I finally got the brats off my lawn, now can they get 'em to STFU? It's like living in the Amazon basin next to a colony of howler monkeys.
dB needs no baseline. from mid 50s to upper 60s is 12 dB (just to assign a number to it). That difference is 8x as loud. Absent any other information, it's not unreasonable to assume that to be correct, and there's no need to know what the TV was set at, the 8x difference would likely remain the same, unless it was reaching the mechanical limits of the system on either end.
Learn to love Alaska
^^^Agreed. Some of my favorite bands are big label bands. Other favorites are indie label bands...
Why limit your musical taste based on the frickin record label? Seems retarded if you ask me...
It's not about debt or anything that complicated. Just restoring regulations THAT WE HAD YEARS AGO would help immensely. Same story as with banking. Those regulated pushed to do away with the regulations and then really bad things happened. It's all about greed.
A fair amount of freedom in running businesses and healthy competition is usually good. But the changes made in broadcast ownership REDUCED competition. And if investment bankers want to be involved in high risk investments it should be only with fund owned by those willing to take the risks, not with taxpayer insured depositors money from traditional savings/checking banking.
Broadcasters traditionally have an important role to serve the public interest. If we did away with PAID radio/tv political ads, using only fairly doled out community service time, there'd be far less money inviting corruption in campaigns. Obviously limiting fund-raising has failed. But doing away with a major part of the spending would really help.
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago? Blame the FCC rule change on ads. Stations used to voluntarily pick a limit on how many minutes an hour of ads they run, and could exceed that two weeks a year. So ads would go nuts before Christmas (and elections when held). Now that insanely heavy level of ads has become the norm.
The issue is that human hearing is more sensitive at certain frequencies, and a mechanical sum of loud doesn't properly represent the perception of loud.
Learn to love Alaska
Everything should just be produced/engineered/mastered with the Replaygain 89 dB target in mind. All albums should come out needing zero correction to meet that, leaving all the more dynamic range intact. All TV soundtracks should be that loud, too. Movies used to follow a similar standard, and should again.
Gain is a meaningless term in the context you're using it
Not in the chosen context: a humorous bad pun.
But if you want to be a stereotypical humorless pedantic nerd, I also happen to be an electrical engineer. I'll define the reference as the output level of the musicians' microphones. The overall signal gain of the music industry system between the musicians' microphones and the consumers' DACs has been set too high.
Awesome post... but I have a nitpick, sorry::
For one, human hearing is more sensitive at specific frequencies
yes, this is absolutely true
(e.g. speech and crying babies, and probably any resonant frequencies of our skull).
no, I don't think any of these are examples.
Human speech ranges from 300 Hz to as high as 3.4 kHz, but most commonly and generally hover between 800 Hz and 1200 Hz. Humans don't perceive 1kHz as being louder, but 4kHz always sounds louder and sounds at this frequency tend to cause the listener ear fatigue.
A baby's cry is closer to that 4kHz loudly percieved and tiring frequency, but at around 3.4 kHz at its highest, it's below it enough that I'm nearly certain that's not the reason a baby's cry sounds louder. I believe the reason we hear a baby's cry as louder has more to do with the evolution of the hypothalamus and less to do with the actual frequency of a normal baby's cry. If we pitch shift the frequency of a baby's cry, or even reduce the sound pressure, it still stands out against a background of random noise, such as sounds of lots of people talking or a cacophony of wild animal sounds, because we have evolved to recognize the timbre of this sound, which is more distinct than its natural frequency range. The hypothalmus allows us to filter perceptions... but filtering out a baby's cry is universally accepted as being nearly impossible (I'm sure it can be done, but the mere fact that most find it unsettling or irritating and before long will seak to quell it speaks volumes).
The human skull has been shown to resonate at frequencies between 500Hz and 7.5kHz... so that's pretty much where we hear everything... we certainly hear below 500Hz and above 7.5kHz, but that's such a huge chunk of our normal hearing spectrum that it's unlikely there is any particular frequency we hear louder because of skull resonance.
Regardless of this, again, nice post.
The Admin and the Engineer
Untrue. Vinyl imposes lots of additional limitations, and is much more complicated than a binary "too loud" "not too loud". The louder you cut a record, the wider the groove is. The wider the groove is, the fewer grooves you can physically fit on the record, and thus the less music you can fit per side. If you cut an LP as hot as a typical modern CD (And I'm not even talking a LOUD modern CD, just an average one), you could only fit 12-14 minutes per side. A hot track, and that number will be more like 10 minutes. Whereas with the (sane) mastering common 40 years ago, 20-21 minutes per side was typical, although there were some compromises there too...optimal quality peaks at about 17 minutes per side or so. A recording without a lot of dynamic range, with the loudness turned down a bit (like a live album), and 25 minutes per side isn't at all unreasonable.
TODO: Something witty here...
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
The FCC exists because 100+ years ago, assclowns with radios were making false distress calls, cursing at people on the airwaves, and faking naval messages.
In 1912, power to regulate the airwaves was given to the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor
In 1927 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Radio Commission and
in 1934 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Communications Commission
/Early regulation of the airwaves is a textbook example of regulatory capture.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
because 70dB is well below the threshold of pain.
He mentioned a "local" ad from a lawyer. I would imagine even at 1db it would cause pain. Possibly even with mute on.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
A section of historic FCC rules for radio is here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sbw8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=steps+shall+be+taken+to+preserve+dynamic+characteristics+of+music&source=bl&ots=B2uXF56uEj&sig=K4gC8p4b1LaXyTTt6VsgnNFpdO4&hl=en
The phrase "However, precautions shall be taken so as not to substantially alter the dynamic characteristics of musical programs" was removed after being in the rules only a short time. Many broadcasters protested, wanting to use very aggressive audio processing. Sometime it was to sound loud than the competition (doesn't work when everyone does it), sometimes it was to help hide the noises present with a marginal signal.
There were past loudness rules for ads. Here are the full details of what's being proposed for DTV now. DTV audio has generally been better and more dynamic. However when programs are dynamic, the average loudness is lower, making commercials stand out even more.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/06/03/2011-13822/implementation-of-the-commercial-advertisement-loudness-mitigation-calm-act
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago?
Mostly I've been noticing people saying that. Every year. For the 20+ years i"ve been paying attention.
Maybe 30 or 35 years past it was that way - and it would be great if it were that way again - but that wasnow literally more than a generation ago.
Music is compressed because it's played in crappy environments: low end players, cars, etc. These days, cars come with compression features in their sound systems so that you can listen to something more high-end such as classical without breaking your ear drums in the loud sections in order to hear the quiet sections at all. Back in the day there was an astute observation that rock should sound great on a crappy radio.
Maybe the AC is not aware that the Supreme Court has only ever recognized limited constitutional protection for commercial speech.
I wonder if AC is signed up for the National Do Not Call Registry.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
> And no real gain.
Except pre-recorded music that doesn't sound like shit on quality stereo gear.
This is actually an example of *good* legislation. The whole reason the "loudness war" happened in the first place was pressure from upper management on recording engineers (who, by and large, knew why doing it was bad, and who were mostly forced to go along with it if they wanted to remain employed) to make their next CD a little louder than everybody else's, until we got to the point where a 2004 pop CD was quantized to levels once exclusively the realm of a Telarc *DIGITAL CANON* in a recording of 1812 Overture whose main purpose was to show off your kilowatt-RMS amp and array of subwoofers. What the government did in this case was let the engineers off the hook. When management asks them to "pump up the volume", they can say, "Sure, I can do that. But no radio station in the country will play it, and all the money we're spending to promote the artist will be for naught. Do you still want me to do it, or would you like me to master a recording that sounds good and that radio stations will be able to play?"
I want immersive, clipping-free digital audio back like we had when I was in college. If it literally takes an act of Congress to ensure that 95% of the audio on a 16-bit CD quantizes to an absolute value of 0x3FFF or less, so be it. Now get off my lawn, or I'll have to remind your parents what digital canons sound like when you have a kilowatt (RMS) amp and a pair of 18-inch JL Audio subs in the trunk...
It never would work that way. Basic game theory always predicts that rational agents engage in a 'race to the bottom.' Just like how the Prisoner's Dilemma puts both players in prison, if some underhanded technique even has the potential to make one firm more competitive, it is guaranteed to become an industry standard. "Voting with your dollars" doesn't work. It can't work.
Economics 101 should be mandatory.
What is needed is the capacity to run custom software on our hardware. let me explain.
Why not make it easy to run software developed to control the loudness of audio? A dynamic volume button if you will.
This can be useful in other domains, like censoring explicit content from my children from an otherwise good movie by using software to identify and black out screens, mute, etc, on criteria I supply to my personal censor tool.
The point. Put the free market at work by opening hardware.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
People need to remember that one of the reasons the "loudness wars" started in the first place was producer/label/artist A wanted his song/album to sound "louder" than producer/label/artist B. The question is, why?
A very simple answer: "louder" is almost always perceived as better. It's about standing out above the rest.
Take for example - given a set of 20 songs played in a club, all at roughly the same "loudness". Along comes one track which is "louder" than the rest. Chances are very high that more people in the club will take notice of this track. We're predispositioned to perceiving anomalies in our everyday lives, so something that is out of the ordinary (e.g. the louder track in this example) grabs our attention more than the other tracks. And at that point, the crowd would go "man, that track is really pumping".
The other issue is that the mastering engineer (who makes these kinds of calls about how "loud" or "hot" a track is before getting burnt to the master) is being paid to do something according to his client's needs. So if the producer wants the track louder, and is the one footing the bill, then there's not much the mastering engineer can do. So if the paymaster wants a loud track, that's what he will get. If mastering engineer A sticks to his guns, the producer's just going to go to another mastering house, which will mean revenue lost.
Another way to put it - if the customer wants to buy Windows NT and is dead set on this, no amount of enlightening by the consultant about the benefits of a Unix-based platform is going to change what the customer wants.
So yeah, these two factors combine and the result: the loudness wars.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
There's an old quote from the late 1800s where someone grumbled that Christmas seemed to start earlier every year - so early, they said, that barely has december started than Christmas takes over. Christmas today starts at the beginning of October, when the first advertising starts. So that's an advancement of two months per century. Extrapolating wildly, that means by the year 2500 Christmas will be in effect continually.
Such a tool was actually ruled illegal in the US, prior to 2005. Then congress passed a law, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, to overturn the court decision and thus make 'parential controls' legal, under pressure from the pro-family crowd and a sympathetic group of republicans. Including Hatch.
But, being a Hatch bill, it also increased the penalty for noncommercial copyright infringement with a three year jail sentence if the work infringed was not yet published for public distribution. Ten years for repeat infringement... and that in addition to all of the already-existing civil and criminal penalties.
Just a little harsher, and they can start on the executions.
The broadcasters have a state-given license to use a scarce resource (certain frequencies). Damn right citizens are entitled to put conditions on that. If the broadcaster doesn't like them he can transmit inside his own property.
Dilbert RSS feed
There's an advert for Go Compare, a car insurance comparison site in the UK, which has people across the nation running for the remote and the mute button. The person who sings in it has received death threats. Even has his own hate page on facebook.
If you don't like compressed music (I don't either) then do what I did: stop listening to it. You'll find much better music, made by real artists not "produced acts" with autotune and the like.
Autotune has nothing to do with compressed music. It hasn't even much to do with the quality of music. It is just a way to manipulate the human voice.
Sure, it is often abused to 'fix' bad singers and similar, but it can do so much more. I've heard it being used to transform voice samples into musical notes. Sure you could sample the artist singing every single possible note and harmony, but you can also just do a subset and use autotune to fill the gaps. The singer in question has a almost 4 octave range (operatic), as well as perfect pitch, so it is certainly not to fix a bad singer. It was to achieve an effect where you can produce a song with full musical backing and yet it's still basically acapella because it's all just the singers voice in various forms. No instruments.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
I agree. A regulation is not what is needed.
What is needed is the capacity to run custom software on our hardware. let me explain.
Why not make it easy to run software developed to control the loudness of audio? A dynamic volume button if you will.
You want them to broadcast some sort of signal that lets you know when the adverts are on?
So...DVRs can automatically cut out the adverts by looking for the special signal?
Good luck with that.
No sig today...
Replaygain isn't RMS. It uses RMS as a starting point for its calculations - but it also takes psychoacoustics into account. One thing it does is use sort of an equalization curve while measuring the loudness, that compensates for how humans perceive different frequencies. We perceive a tone measuring x dB at 1 kHz as being louder than a tone of x dB at 15 kHz. Just as 1 example. It also takes into account variations in loudness (aka dynamics) within a track - louder and quieter segments of music. I'm not sure of everything the algorithm takes into account, but it's way more intricate than a simple RMS measurement. Feel free to look up the spec for yourself if you want the specifics.
I also find that it's generally very good. I have a large collection of music (180 GB) that's all RG scanned. Everything from ambient music, to classic rock, to metal, to hip-hop, to Britney Spears. ReplayGain does an amazingly accurate calculation, so good that I can put my player on shuffle and not run into loudness problems.
I also frequently make "mixtape"-type playlists for people and like to put all tracks to the same volume. I use ReplayGain's data for this. Very rarely do I need to make any manual adjustments - never any more than 2 or 3 dB on a track. Without RG, you're talking about variations of up to 12 or 14 dB between tracks from different albums.
"Some people are actually ripping vinyl because some labels are releasing vinyl with more dynamic mastering."
I've seen this. The last few Rush CDs were sonically crushed. I just got their latest (Clockwork Angels) on vinyl, and the dynamic range is practically back to 1980s levels. I also got The Cult's Choice of Weapon (a nifty set with one full LP plus a 12-inch 45-RPM EP on white vinyl) which is a bit compressed, but definitely not crushed. It's faintly ridiculous that LPs are becoming the premium format, even though I'm quite sure that CDs can sound better when mastered properly -- but okay, at least it's possible to get my hands on a non-crushed version of the recording. I'll take it.
We ran a TV ad for our company 12 years ago. Instead of screaming at our customers, we went the exact opposite way, and had dead silence for 30 seconds, with a bit of simple text on the screen. It was amazing the reaction we got. I guess on TV, silence is deafening.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Wrong on all counts. A 12dB increase is not "8x as loud." It's not even 8x the power, but 16x the power (power doubles with every increase of 3dB). Either you don't understand what you're going on about, or you're just wrong and don't realize it (because any answer resulting in the number 8 is always wrong in this particular scenario).
Loudness, as perceived by humans, is generally considered to double with every 10dB of increase. Hence, the convenient unit that is the Bel: 1 Bel == double the volume == 10 deciBels. (And also conveniently, a 10dB increase requires 10x the power.)
So, more properly: A 12dB increase might be appropriately described as being "a little more than twice as loud," once it's all said and done.
And IMHO "a little more than twice is loud" is still waaaay too much difference between program material and advertising material. There's no need to exaggerate what the numbers mean.
Kid-proof tablet..
"CDs don't have that problem"
Digital has physical limits that make music sound like shit too, CD's are not any different they just sound like different, worse shit than vinyl when the limits are exceeded.
Sorry but I greatly prefer lack of dynamics and distortion to the *BANG* *SCREECH* *WOBBLE* and suddenly you're listening to a different part of the song than you were because your needle jumped from the groove.
Vinyl had limits. It also had very serious consequences when the limits were exceeded such as tracks hitting each other on the discs and needles skating across the surface of the disk.
Not really the fault of the medium. It is much easier to avoid hitting the limits by accident on the CD.
If you leave, say, 20 dB of headroom for really loud peaks, you still have a signal to noise ratio better than 70 dB. That is more than the entire dynamic range for vinyl.
The problem is (again) with the loudness wars. If you don't leave headroom, but master a CDs as loud as possible, you get indeed more nasty clipping than with analog equipment. Producers and sound engineers abusing the CD give it a bad name
C - the footgun of programming languages
Although I agree with your main point, I gotta ask: WTF are you going on about? What is a "*DIGITAL CANON*"?
They were real cannons, recorded separately and mixed in later. Indeed, the original Telarc recording shattered some of the windows of a nearby building, as discussed in the liner notes. Telarc has historically been very open very open about explaining their recording processes...especially when they're particularly unusual or amusing.
I own this CD, and if I could be bothered to find it I'd post the verbiage verbatim.
That all said: I once heard a Telarc recording of the 1812 played over a reasonable PA system at a 4th of July fireworks show at a campground. Things were good until the first cannon shot audibly mangled the woofers, and the second disabled most of them (subsequent blasts took the rest of 'em down).
It was the grand finale, though, so I guess it was all in good fun.
Kid-proof tablet..
Taking off my trainee broadcast engineer hat now, and making this argument only as an individual here: Don't forget that much like a free press benefits a society whether or not you read the papers, the value delivered to society by media independent of commercial interests goes far beyond whether or not you actually watch it yourself.
The nature of publically licensed media is diametrically opposed to the nature of advertisement-funded ones. With ad-funded TV, the viewer is not the customer, but the product. The repercussions this fact has in every aspect of content productions are difficult to overstate.
Since the commercial pressure is alleviated, the networks also tend to be more informative and less tabloid. Which in turn means that voters are better informed about which representatives serve their interests - which means that everyone is more likely to get a fair shake in life.
The proportion of the cost to television networks of distribution versus production has been steadily declining ever since television began. Largely the cost now lies in content production. But I certainly agree: The definition of what constitutes a television will become irrelevant in a surprisingly short amount of time, so it's also a significant political challenge.
Putting on my Labour Youth member hat now to view this from a political angle: NRK needs to be completely independent from short-term political fluctuations, and must never be afraid to challenge the powers that be. The license has proven to be an excellent way of doing this, and folding it into the state budget has not. The solution is not obvious, but we need one. I've wondered that perhaps a constitutional amendment might be a good way to go about this. A free press bound to its stock holders' interests is not free. The country needs a press outlet which isn't so obsessed about ratings that they're afraid to discuss boring but important news.
toresbe
"If you cut an LP as hot as a typical modern CD (And I'm not even talking a LOUD modern CD, just an average one), you could only fit 12-14 minutes per side."
Nope. Got Alice in Chains 'Sap' and 'Jar of Flies' dual vinyl demo. LOUD AS FUCK. 26 minutes per side.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
About 60% of the US gets radio stations owned by only three companies (and maybe a religious station or two, which is also owned by one of those companies in many cases). Five years ago, it was four companies, but two of them merged.
Yes, you must be a kid. Probably an undergrad who's just read Atlas Shrugged and thinks he's got it all figured out.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, the industry will choke itself to death. I quit FM radio years ago b/c I got tired of the screaming car commercials... and all the stations timed their commercials so you couldn't change stations. I started listening to XM, which in turn added commercials to their premium channels. So now I simply listen to music from my mp3 player or audio books on my drive to work. If everyone did this, the industry would slowly die... and perhaps on their way down, they fix what caused their market to shift away from them. We don't need government oversight b/c the industry will eventually regulate itself even if it kills itself.
Hobby Lobby started putting out Christmas decorations this month. In June. I've decided not to shop there until they take them down.
I'm 60 and I stopped paying for cable a long time ago. I have an antenna for local news, the bar down the street for sports, and the internet for everything else.
Thirty years ago cable made sense. Ten bucks a month of ad-free watching (except local shows) including HBO, and it was long before Discovery and History and other such "educational" channels stopped educating and started sucking.
If they would offer networks by the channel (I refuse to pay for the Golf channel and the cooking channel and BET and LifeTime) for two bucks a channel, they might get ten or fifteen bucks a month from me again. But fifty bucks for a hundred channels of pure crap when I might watch five or ten once in a great while? I'd be a fool.
The end of the loudness wars (if this is accurate) came way too little and way too late for me.
Free Martian Whores!
Loudness is not one control. It is many. With compression and limiting you can make something sound much louder even if the peak volume is not that high. There are parameters for compression and they don't automatically, universally restrict volume to a desired dynamic level . . . or if you try, you'll get a lot of unlistenable noise.
Better to enact standards for broadcast dynamics. As others have noted, the industry sure doesn't have a problem passing laws to make their lives easier. Why is that not an option for the consumer?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on