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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.
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%.