Roku's New Wireless Speakers Automatically Turn Loud Commercials Down, Turn Show Audio Up (arstechnica.com)

Roku announced today that it's getting into the audio business with the launch of its in-house Roku TV Wireless Speakers. The two HomePod-esque speakers work exclusively (and wirelessly) with Roku TVs, and feature software that will optimize audio from anything connected to the pair Roku TV, including cable boxes, antennas, and Bluetooth devices. The company also announced a new Roku Touch tabletop remote that's similar to Amazon's Alexa. Ars Technica reports: "Optimized" in this sense refers to the software-improved audio quality: automatic volume leveling will boost lower audio in quiet scenes and lower audio in loud scenes (and in booming commercials), and dialogue enhancement will improve speech intelligibility. Accompanying the Wireless Speakers is the Roku Touch remote, a unique addition to Roku's remote family. The company has a standard remote that controls its set-top boxes and smart TVs, and it also has a voice remote that processes voice commands to search for and play specific types of content. The Touch remote is most like the voice remote, but it can be used almost anywhere in your home because it's wireless and runs on batteries. It has a number of buttons on its top that can play, pause, and skip content playing from your Roku TV, and some of those buttons are customizable so you can program your favorite presets to them. There's also a press-and-hold talk button that lets you speak commands to your TV, even if you're not in front of it. Roku's Wireless Speakers and Touch remote will begin shipping this October, and the company is running a deal leading up to the release. For the first week of presales (July 16 through July 23), a bundle consisting of two Wireless Speakers, a Touch remote, and a Roku voice remote will be available for $149. From the end of that week until October, the price will be $179. When the new devices finally come out, the bundle price will be $199.

Comments

Ups and Downs

[Mr D from 63]

They could just turn commercials down, or shows up, but this does BOTH!

Re:Ups and Downs

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

They could just turn commercials down, or shows up, but this does BOTH!

If it could automatically MUTE commercials, and moreover replace the screen image with something soothing and attractive, a nice graphic showing how many seconds, updated each second, with how long until the commercial ends, I'd consider buying one. But only if they could guarantee that they'll never water the feature down, or remove it, like you know they're going to once it makes economic sense to them, i.e., once their devices reach sufficient market penetration. Or they get sued by ad makers, or whoever is responsible for them. I really hate ads.

Re:Ups and Downs

[Falos]

Industry lobbyists insisting that Roku is invading the consumer's right to choose their own viewing material.

By offering an opt-in choice.

For now

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Speakers Automatically Turn Loud Commercials Down, Turn Show Audio Up

For now. Once there are enough of these trinkets in the market, an upgrade will switch this around.

Re:For now

[skegg]

I sincerely hope not. It's frustrating how much LOUDER commercials are than the actual show.

And this despite regulations prohibiting this practice: Australian Communications and Media Authority (PDF, section 1.13 on page 3)

I understand their need for commercials; I'd rather not lose any of our free-to-air stations. But they've become so aggressive with ads that I can no longer tolerate watching television without a PVR.

At least the taxpayer funded stations display a modicum of decency around commercials. Unfortunately they're slowly being starved of cash by successive governments, so I don't know how long this will last.

Now the commercial stations embed short ads in the lower third of the screen during the regular programme. For $10 / month Netflix is starting to look really good. Just a shame we don't have the full catalogue here in Australia. (I don't care enough to bother with VPN's, etc.)

Great deal!

[110010001000]

I am going to order one now. It is only $149, but the price will get as high as $199. I better get it now so I can save $50! This is what I come to Slashdot for, not people complaining about Elon Musk.

commercials?

[MyrddinBach]

Who watches TV with commercial anymore?

Re:commercials?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really old people. Like 60+.

Re:commercials?

[DontBeAMoran]

"Who watches TV anymore?"

Fixed that for you.

Re:commercials?

[AHuxley]

The people paid to work out who is watching their ads.

Re:I am God's gift to you rotten bastards... apk

[Gravis Zero]

Malware for free? You've got to be kidding, right?! :)

It's the modern pop musicification of movies

[Fly Swatter]

From the roku website:

consistent volume across loud and quiet portions of movies

So much for dynamic range, isn't that what good speakers are supposed to provide?

With no messy audio cables to connect, you can have your Roku TV Wireless Speakers up and running in minutes. Just plug each speaker into a power outlet

So instead of having to connect two speaker cables, you get to connect not just one, but two power cables, oh which will require two outlets? Haha the jokes just write themselves. I bet it will soon be energy star approved as well :P

So all that money goes into components for two power supplies, two amplifiers, two remote controls, four bluetooth radios, and two microphones, what's left for the speakers?

Re:It's the modern pop musicification of movies

[Anonymous Coward]

So all that money goes into components for two power supplies, two amplifiers, two remote controls, four bluetooth radios, and two microphones, what's left for the speakers?

Oh, I'm sure there's some profit left from the $800 "optional" Roku TV you have to buy in order to get those speakers to work...

Re:It's the modern pop musicification of movies

[TurboStar]

So much for dynamic range, isn't that what good speakers are supposed to provide?

Louder speakers or a quieter room allow for more dynamic range. Airport speakers are super loud with heaps of dynamic range. Would you consider those good speakers? Good for airports, yeah.

Re: It's the modern pop musicification of movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! The commercials thing is fine, but if the movie directors wanted it to be intelligible, they would have compressed the dynamic range themselves (even easier than at the speaker level)

Re:It's the modern pop musicification of movies

[cascadingstylesheet]

From the roku website:

consistent volume across loud and quiet portions of movies

So much for dynamic range, isn't that what good speakers are supposed to provide?

Maybe, but I would love this feature.

I hate turning it up so that I can hear whispered dialog, only to have music and explosions blast my ears off the next second.

Unrealistic? Maybe, but it's unrealistic that I could hear someone's whispered conversation in any case. (Not to mention there's scarcely a movie where this would make the top 500 unrealistic things ...)

Re:It's the modern pop musicification of movies

[Quirkz]

Agreed. A lot of movies are really imbalanced between their quiet and loud moments, and I hate fiddling with the controls to keep it reasonable. I want to hear it. I don't want to wake the kids or annoy the neighbors.

Congress and FCC are worthless.

[geekmux]

"Roku's New Wireless Speakers Automatically Turn Loud Commercials Down"

How is it that Roku managed to do something that the entire US Congress and the FCC cannot do?

Congress passed the CALM Act almost a decade ago. It was supported by every member. They put the FCC in charge of enforcement (because it's their damn job), and allowed citizens to police and report violations. And the purpose of the law could not have been any more black and white.

And yet here we are, several years later, STILL bitching about loud TV commercials and not a damn thing any lawmaker wasted their time on did anything to curb or prevent that.

Are there bigger fish to fry? Yeah. Always. Shut the hell up with that bullshit excuse already unless you're only going to allow Congress to work on "important things". If Congress can't even get something as simple as this right, then we sure as shit shouldn't entrust them with anything that's critical.

No wonder Drain the Swamp was so popular this time around.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[TheSync]

Major network broadcasters do a great job of managing consistent commercial/program loudness.

Non-network broadcasters, small cable channels, and OTT services do not.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you will find that Congress and the FCC will want to regulate the behavior of this device in the next few weeks. There will be a "concerned" citizens group that worries the wrong programming might be affected. We can't take that kind of risk with the only information delivery mechanism some people have.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[ezelkow1]

They managed it because now the functionality is easily built in to basically all decoder/encoder firmware. Previously I know Dish had this on their set top boxes using SRS algorithms, but with the advent of MS11/MS12 that brough in dolby digital plus support basically everything, those firmwares contain auto volume leveling and compensation on a mass scale. All roku had to do was pay to enable the support, flip the bits in the settings of the firmware, and it was done

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[ArchieBunker]

I mean how hard would it be for providers to run an audio compressor? Set a hard limit for loudness and then some make up gain for super quiet things. I run a similar set up at home.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder Drain the Swamp was so popular this time around.

I'm no apologist for Donald Trump, but the concept of drain the swamp is an interesting one. Simply put if your electing a senator, representative, or president to Drain the Swamp your likely to be dissapointed, well unless you believe lies easily I guess.

Actually really draining the swamp requires a lot more work than that.

1. Make political parties less powerful. Make primaries just reduce the set of candidates without regard to party. Normal elections do the same and you get another election if the first two aren't conclusive. Probably need an amendment to pull it off in general.

2. Need a constitutional amendment making illegals any scheme algorithm or similar that uses political inputs to redistrict. The electoral-college is arguably an old scheme that does this.

3. Need a massive investment in a free and independent press that checks each other continually for distortion, inaccuracy or lies. Seriously, we spend a crap load on defence, but nothing on this? This is the battle of this time.

4. Need to cut down on the ability of bots to post and accurately get basic info about posters that is verified, such as city/state.

Of course if you just want to save the republic, you could consider voting democrat a couple times. They are hardly perfect, but compared t what we have now they are a vastly better choice.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[AmiMoJo]

Have you tried complaining? What was the process like?

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[tlhIngan]

I mean how hard would it be for providers to run an audio compressor? Set a hard limit for loudness and then some make up gain for super quiet things. I run a similar set up at home.

It's the compressor that's the problem. To make commercials "loud" without "being loud", they do dynamic range compression. It's the same trick they use on CDs during the loudness wars. DRC lets you push the average volume up because you reduce the difference between the loudest and quietest part, and then you just push that volume all the way to just below clipping.

TV programming has more dynamic range, so it appears quieter - if you have 20dB of dynamic range, then if you put it so the peak is at 0dB, most of the audio will be blow -10dB or lower.

I suspect the Roku devices simply capture this - it's easy to get the average volume level during playback and reduce it, especially if it's something with no dynamic range at all. Then you just reduce the volume to the average level and you're done. I've had compilation CDs that were equalized, and some songs were full dynamic range, while others were affected by the loudness wars. You can easily tell because the ones with the loudness wars were one big block on the audio graph and to avoid being too loud, they were normalized and thus were only really using half the resolution avialable because it was halved by 50%.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

The citizen group will be congress itself, the concern will be that their political messages will also be categorised under commercials.

Re: Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

No need for regs - the concerned are free to use non-roku components.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried complaining? What was the process like?

In a word? Pointless.

Not that we often find efficient processes in government, but all the efficiency in the world is lost if your message is sent to a group who doesn't give a shit enough to take your complaint and enforce the law.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it that Roku managed to do something that the entire US Congress and the FCC cannot do?

They don't. They re-invented audio compression. Turning loud commercials down is just a side-effect from the fact that it turns all loud sound down.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's simpler than that.

1). Gerrymandering is toxic and has to go. End it already.

2). There needs to be limits on spending. The current system whereby politicians need to spend so much of their time raising money is wasteful and it adds nothing to democracy, while detracting a great deal.

Show me a citizen that enjoys being harassed 20 times a day regarding their political views. Also, that court opinion that Money = Free Speech ought to go down in history as one of the dumbest Supreme Court opinions ever! Free Speech = Free Speech and Money = Money, and trying to equate the two is a fail of epic proportions. So override the court ruling with whatever legislation is needed.

One final point on the money. By putting money at the center of political life, we've handed unprecedented power to lobbyists, corporations and the wealthy. Again, not a healthy choice for democracy. The wealthy already have advantages too numerous to mention so why do we give them additional power in society? Are they so downtrodden, unlistened to, and disadvantaged that they need a special boost during election time?

Yeah, not so much.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

The industries got around this by the fact that, the commercials/loud portions of the shows are NOT "technically" louder. The sound bites are compressed differently to "sound" louder instead. I.E. Their volume levels, as read by machines, is identical, but for all practical purposes it sounds louder/quieter. This allows them to have ads that APPEAR to sound "louder" while not breaking the law.

Yeah... there ya go. Corporations and politicians are Lawful/Evil - the law isn't there to stop them, just to pacify their victims while they "don't break the laws" that hold us all in check.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nailed it! This is also how companies and advertisers can make their commercials louder without breaking the law designed to prevent this crap.

Re:Congress and FCC are worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

LMAO! Do you also consider complaining to a mugger about his behavior?

I mean seriously? Advertisers were PISSED when people demanded laws to prohibit making commercials louder than shows and fought actively against it. So the solution was that the law was directed specifically at volume levels. This left advertisers free to use compression to sidestep the law and make the commercials "louder" without running afoul of the legislation. There is a reason legislation is written so stupidly and enforced so "to the letter": corporations and politicians are lawful evil... the law isn't there to stop them, it's there to stop us.

relative

[Anonymous Coward]

i'am sure the performance of a 3" Chinese pressed steel chassis with a plastic cone and poorly wound voice coil will sound great!, those pesky laws of physics don't apply here.

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Speakers that only work with one device? Hell yeah, welcome to the future!

Re:110010001000 is a butthurt jackass

[DontBeAMoran]

Maybe AC made a typo and was talking about 110001001000, not you.

Sadly I need these

[Presence Eternal]

Although these look like a ripoff, I preordered some for my Mom. She's declining and can't really manage to use our existing soundbar. She's obsessed with the newsy loop, watches it over and over again, and some of the clips are 20db louder than others.

Re:Sadly I need these

[Anonymous Coward]

I gotta say, your Mom story sounds familiar, mine was the same way.

The only thing was, her hearing was going and she wouldn't get hearing aids. I think the blasting parts of the newscasts actually helped her hear better! Still can't believe the neighbors never complained about the volume though... They were seniors too, it's the only explanation I've got.

Re:~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if CNN has anything to say about it! #treason #impeach45 #resist #notmypresident #soylent

Re:~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Anonymous Coward]

The Communist News Network is nothing if not irrelevant. Excessive lying and shilling for the dems and their traitorous masters in the three-letter agencies and multi-national conglomerates has left them hollow, soulless, husks with no credibility.

Just a modern day Pravda.

Fix the remote

[Snotnose]

I have a Roku talking to a Pi 3B+ and a 2TB NAS. Buttons the remote needs: FF 30 seconds, rewind 10 seconds, mute (I see the same damn 2 ads every 10 minutes, they got old fast).

Buttons they could repurpose? Netflix, Sling, Hulu, and Amazon.

There. That's 3 buttons that would make my Roku experience 100% better, with no loss of quality (I don't subscribe to any of those channels, the buttons are useless).

And yeah, I have a Sony TM-VX320 universal remote. I found a Roku code (or maybe it was plex), but controlling my Roku from my universal remote makes less sense than driving a DVD in my PS3 with a PS3 remote. In other words, none at all.

Re: ~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Anonymous Coward]

This is where we run into the issue of you don't know what communism is. This is my first time back on /. in some years but holy **** have the comment sections gone downhill.

Re: ~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, everything is flooded with Trump shit these days, but then that's pretty much the TDS world we live in. It's hard to tell anymore where the trolling ends and the genuine insanity begins.

Re: the day Trump kissed Vladimir Putin's cock

[Anonymous Coward]

You sure do talk about men and penises a lot. You're funny.

Re: ~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Shikaku]

if(post != political){
  prevent_anon_russian_ip_and_new_accounts_from_posting_about_trump();
}

Someone just do it already

Re: ~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Anonymous Coward]

Anon? We all know it was Putin and Trump, together forever, making big cash and looking for more power.

Dynamic range is good for music

[piojo]

Dynamic range is great for music, where you don't need (or want) to glean all the information from the work for the optimal experience. Plus, in music, a short loud burst isn't that hard on the ears.

For speech, you need a lot more of the information, so dynamic range is your enemy. It's as in photography, where a scene with a lot of dynamic range is beyond what cameras can capture. And if you turn up a movie volume enough to hear the whispered scenes, the rest of the audio will be painfully loud, and it will probably hurt more than a short cymbal crash of the same volume.

Re:Dynamic range is good for music

[cascadingstylesheet]

Dynamic range is great for music, where you don't need (or want) to glean all the information from the work for the optimal experience. Plus, in music, a short loud burst isn't that hard on the ears.

For speech, you need a lot more of the information, so dynamic range is your enemy. It's as in photography, where a scene with a lot of dynamic range is beyond what cameras can capture. And if you turn up a movie volume enough to hear the whispered scenes, the rest of the audio will be painfully loud, and it will probably hurt more than a short cymbal crash of the same volume.

Exactly.

A movie is an inherently unrealistic experience, the whole point is that we get to eavesdrop on events and dialog in a completely unrealistic way.

Making the experience easier, more pleasant, and less painful sounds good to me.

Re:110010001000 is a butthurt jackass

[ArchieBunker]

Agreed. I've been calling him a cunt for a while now. Guy has issues.

As long as I can turn it off...

[williamyf]

All this post processing is fine and dandy, as long as I can turn it off when I am watching a movie and want to hear it as the director indended.

Basically, think of every movie that has won an oscar in sound-related categories.

Of course, this improving dialogue and boosting volume of soft pasages will be nice for heavy dialogue material, like (melo)dramas, comedy, et al.

And also, the turning down sound of commercials is something I would pay good money for.

But for movies with no commercials (DVD, BD, Streamed), the best setting is the one that turns all this postprocessing off...

Re:As long as I can turn it off...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are the exact reason everything is so crappy... idiots like you. Smdh.

First off, they shouldn't be winning any awards if their movie sounds are so off-balance that you can't hear dialogue without risking being blasted by sound in the next scene, and frankly, I've been around explosions - I get it, they're loud. I don't need my ears blasted off to convey that. I mean, wtf?!

Re:As long as I can turn it off...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not me: I would *love* a magic box that could flatten all of the supremely irritating "award winning" volume contrast on many movies. You should not have to risk hearing damage just so you can understand the "artistically" whispered dialogue immediately preceding the deafening explosion.

Captcha: recoil. An apt description of what happens when you've cranked the volume to 11 to hear some guy whispering and cop the full force of the subsequent loudness.

Mute for 28 seconds button.

[Bing Tsher E]

WhatI have long wanted is a 'mute for 28 seconds' button on a remote control. It would become automatic to hit such button any time a commercial started. It would be second nature to hit it to 'refresh' at each commercial segment. And it would be low tech and easy to do. Why hasn't such a function existed for the last 25 years?

Re:Mute for 28 seconds button.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like you know why

No, it will not turn commercials down

[Anonymous Coward]

It will adjust all levels of all audio using probably dynamic compression and other algorithms, but nothing suggests it will detect commercials.

It seems misleading/clickbait headlines are now common on /.

I do this on Kodi

[HalAtWork]

I set the volume amplification to -20db to compress audio, now I no longer have to deal with deafening musical crescendos or whisper-level dialog and can set my TV volume to a sane level and still hear everything fine.

Now if only I could get the same kind of setting on my podcast app of choice ( AntennaPod ) but both that and Kodi are open source so if I figure out how then I'll be able to add in the feature myself! A lot of podcasts I listen to have hosts and guests on at varying volume levels and are not professionally produced.

Re:the day Trump kissed Vladimir Putin's cock

[Opportunist]

Because this president doesn't smoke cigars.

Can /. turn down the adverts please

[Anonymous Coward]

This was a very nice advert for this item, so thank you slashdot.

But I do wish there was some method of turning down the adverts on slashdot. I would prefer more signal, less noise.

This is noise.

Also, as an advert on audio-related things, it fails on two compulsory questions:

1. Does it have a headphone jack?

2. Does it do flac?

Feature request:

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you please make it so that quiet scenes in movies have voices that are actually audible without me having to turn my TV up to the point that when the next loud scene happens I have to go apologize to the neighbours.

Re: ~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Anonymous Coward]

You canâ(TM)t code for shit

Follow the money

[biggaijin]

For many years, the TV manufacturers insisted that it was impossible to mute commercials, even though they were consistently louder than the program material that contained them. Of course, many people said that it was really possible but that the TV companies were afraid of what the TV sponsors would do if their commercial messages were interfered with. Now, finally, a company that does not have a vested interest in sponsor advertising has given us part of what we need. If they would allow us to completely mute commercials and block the video that goes with them, I would be even happier.

Re: Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot.

But can it mute the drug ads?

[RogueWarrior65]

Wake me when it can auto-fast-forward through the commercials.

Re:But can it mute the drug ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't EVER happen. We actually already have the technologies and the devices were out for a while until advertisers sued and forced action AGAINST those technologies because "it deprived them of their paid advertising spots". I.E. Advertisers were paying for slots that customers could just avoid. So they pressured networks to adopt methods and stances against these companies and devices until voila, they disappeared.

Holy counter productive...

[gosand]

And also, the turning down sound of commercials is something I would pay good money for.

This just makes me sad for us as a species.
Not because you don't like booming loud commercials - because nobody likes them. But because this is how our country works now. I can't tell what is worse in our society, Advertisers or Lawyers. Because advertisers are the ones who jack up the volume on commercials to annoying levels, it seems especially at night for some reason. It becomes annoying to the point where the only way to stop it is through legal means. Then our government has to get involved and put policies in place to prohibit it. Yet it still continues. see CALM Act.

We have this horrible ecosystem of advertisers / lawyers invading and influencing our lives constantly. They feed each other, we are the food. To the point where we are willing to pay money to make it stop. This is not only about commercials on TV, you can look at many aspects of our lives and see their influences there as well. It's all quite disturbing.

NEWSFLASH: apk 2 lrn2engrish

[Anonymous Coward]

prease 2 be lrnink2engrish.

Re:~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Anonymous Coward]

So many strategies have been tried. Who knew that just utterly and completely surrenduring and then giving them everything they want and then also giving head to Russia's head, would do the trick? Go Trump! The Poverty Party simply needed to rebrand itself as the Poverty and Subservience Party, to stay relevant and kick the Democrats asses. The solution to America's problems is for all of us to get on our knees and please.

Sounds cool, but...

[Cajun Hell]

Pretty damn cool. No kidding, this sounds like an outstanding, great product that people have wanted all decade long.

Unfortunately, the decade that I'm talking about is the 1990s. TV commercials, seriously? It's Y2K, time to get a Tivo.

mute

[Anonymous Coward]

Can the speakers turn the commercials all the way down to mute?

I'm skeptical that they work, seeing as how this slashvertisment still made it through.

Great...

[dragon-file]

Now we just need a speaker that turns dialog up and explosions down and we'll be set.

Re:Great...

[bytestorm]

That's a pretty common feature on receivers. It's usually labeled Dynamic Range Compression or Night Mode.

Re: ~o~ TRUMP ~o~

[Shikaku]

You canâ(TM)t code for shit

LOL