Turn That %&*#!$@&* Thing Down!

Okay, enough pontificating, at least for one month. Like a good, card-carrying curmudgeon, I've been doing an awful lot of sounding off lately. But I've strayed from the other part of what I wanted to do with this column, which is to give you some inside info about this thing we call "media" which is so much a part of our lives every day.

This happens to every one of us: You're nestled all snug on your couch, enjoying an evening of entertainment. Maybe Phoebe has just said something bubbleheaded and goofy, or someone has just eaten a bowl full of maggots, or Sipowicz has just said something cutting and sarcastic to another brainless perp. The screen fades to black. Then, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE!!! Maybe Victoria's Secret is asking you "What is sexy?" or some Mazdas are "zoom-zooming" across your screen, or maybe Ron Popiel is spraying hair on some poor schmuck's head. But all you can think is that your head is about to explode because the commercials must be at least three times as loud as the show you were just watching.

Why does this happen? How can they get away with it? Well, that's why I'm here, isn't it? To explain to you the inexplicable vagaries of the broadcasting biz.

The short answer is that the commercials and promos are no louder than the rest of the show. I know that doesn't seem possible, but it's the truth. Let me try to explain.

The tv shows that you watch have a lot of dynamic range in the audio tracks. That is, just like a piece of music, the sounds on a television show range from loud to quiet. When there are explosions or gunfire, or people are yelling, the show can get pretty loud. But most of the time, tv shows spend their audio time in a much more comfortable range. Conversation and other sounds are at levels that do not offend the ears. This is crucial because if it weren't the case, people would be less inclined to watch tv, since doing so would cause auditory agony.

Producers of commercials and other short interrupters of programming are under no such constraint. In fact, they want to intrude on your peaceful evening. It's how they can grab your attention. There are a lot of ways to do that: Arresting images (a la Victoria's Secret), lightning fast cutting, and of course by making dead sure that you're going to hear what they have to say.

The audio on commercials has, for all intents and purposes, no dynamic range at all. For those thirty seconds, the volume levels are run as close to 100% as possible. This is easily done using audio devices such as compressor/limiter/expanders. Using this gizmo, you can make the quiet sounds loud, and keep the loud sounds from getting distorted.

Additionally, there's the phenomenon of "apparent volume" that you have to contend with. This is, in my opinion, even more insidious than running the volume meters at or near the red line for the duration of the commercial. This involves concentrating most of the audio content of the spot into the all-important and very intrusive midrange area. Midrange sounds generally fall into the area between about 1000 KHz and 5000 KHz. Sounds at these frequencies have a very loud apparent volume. Also, this is the range of sound that is most painful to the human ear.

Getting to this point was kind of a slow evolution. For a very long time, television sound was bad to mediocre. The sound for most tv shows was acquired by hanging a boom mic over the set. In those days, television's Golden Age, it wasn't uncommon at all for the stars to do the commercials during the shows. The commercials were a part of the show. Audio was always the ugly sister of video - it had to be there, of course, but nobody really cared about it. And because the sound that was provided with television programming was unspectacular, manufacturers of televisions felt no real compulsion to build sound reproduction equipment into their tv's. Why bother when there's nothing demanding to reproduce anyway? For a while in the 60's a lot of people were buying "console" television sets that had stereos built into them (the first media centers?). The sound from the tv came through the same speakers that the stereo system used, but the tv programs still sounded tinny.

Finally, at long last, in the 80's the potential for good audio in television finally started to be explored. Television is, after all, an FM radio signal, so it should be able to sound at least as good as an FM radio station. Right about the same time that Hi-Fi audio started to become available for home VCR's, the networks started to broadcast the audio portions of an increasing number of their programs in stereo. This fact, like Color Television before it and High Definition after, was always trumpeted at the beginning of the show. The sleeping giant - pictures with good sound - had finally been awakened!

By this time, the concept of carefully controlling the audio levels in commercials had been slowly perfected, and the aforementioned audio gizmos had likewise come a long way in the scope and efficiency of their capabilities. The finishing touch was to forgo the new higher fidelity potential of tv and leave the bulk of the sound in that deadly midrange. Now you may noticing that lots of commercials have surround sound information in them, and you'll hear sounds coming from your rear channel speakers. But guess what? Even the surround sound is concentrated in the midrange, although to my ear it sounds like they've mixed in a little more of the higher end of the midrange to give it an illusion of higher fidelity.

Folks, what we really have here is an ongoing battle. As I've said before, there is a point of view that holds that the only reason there are shows on television is to fill up the spaces between the commercials. I like to hope that it isn't quite as bleak as all that, and I think most people agree. When muting the sound on a television first became an option that one could use from a remote control, the possibility was there that viewers could simply turn off the sound during the parts that they didn't want to hear. The first salvo had been fired and answered. The next step was to make the message unavoidable, even with the sound off. Commercials became less about "Buy our product. It's better than their product, and here's why." and more about making sure you couldn't look away. The editing became faster and faster, and the special effects became flashier and flashier. It is, of course, no coincidence that the lightning cutting in commercials and music videos is so similar. Music videos are just another kind of advertising, after all. But that's another discussion for another day.

So anyway, VCRs came out with commercial-skipping features. The first ones were fairly primitive; you could choose to make the tape advance thirty seconds, one minute, or two minutes. Later models got pretty sophisticated. Up at the top of the picture, out of the range of your home television's screen, reside all kinds of information. Along with test signals and time codes, there are also cues and signatures for all the events that take place during the recording. The VCR logs these events as it records and skips the commercials with pretty good accuracy. Hard disc recorders like TiVo and Replay TV do the job even more effortlessly, since there's no tape to advance.

This is one reason why it is now impossible to watch anything on any television channel anywhere without there being a "bug" on the screen. What's a bug? It's the little logo tucked into a corner of the screen. Often unobtrusive but nearly always there, bugs are there to make absolutely sure that you know what channel you're watching. Then bugs started changing and telling you what show was coming next, or what movie would be on tomorrow night. Now you see that the bugs have become fully animated, and that means that they get a promotion. The animated ones are referred to as "snipes." The snipes, you may be noticing, are not always just promoting another show. Sometimes, they're advertising stuff. So there, Mister Smarty-Pants TiVo Owner! Go ahead and skip the commercials. We're gonna advertise inside your show, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it, is there?

You gasp in indignation, and then you take a look around. Oprah Winfrey's Oh! Oxygen channel always has little factoids and, oh yes, little commercial messages, too, at the bottom of the screen. ESPN's Bottom Line has advertising in it, so man or woman, you're getting this stuff thrown at you. This nonsense is carried to its most irrational extreme on CNN Headline News. There is so much other extraneous information sprinkled all over the screen that the live video is tucked up into the corner, in effect nearly becoming the snipe for the graphic info on the rest of the screen.

So, like so many other things in life, there is no simple answer to the question of why the commercials are louder than the rest of the show. What it boils down to, though, is that there is some validity to the thing about the shows being time-filler for commercials. The fact is that without commercials, most of what we see on television would not be possible. The money to make tv shows comes from sponsors, and those people rightly want to see a return on their investment. This doesn't change the fact that we viewers, The Good Folks At Home who are ultimately responsible for all that money that is generated, ought to be able to avoid the parts of programming that we don't like, whether that be a show we find offensive or a bunch of people saying "Whassup?" to each other.

Who knows? Maybe somebody will find a way to get all those snipes and Bottom Lines out of your picture. But don't forget that we're waging a war here, and just about the time you get a chance to defeat their latest thing, they'll find some new way to get you. So don't be surprised when someday, as you sit watching your UltraHiRes Plasma Media Display with your Liquid Memory recording device equipped with SnipeKiller® Technology, you see the next grenade get launched in this ongoing war. Maybe, for instance, after just having said something petty and self-serving to Will, Grace will suddenly turn to the camera and say something like "How do I keep my hair so lustrous, bouncy and shiny? Preference by L'Oreal, of course, because I'm worth it." And then tv will have come full circle with a return to its Golden Age, when the stars did their own commercials. Maybe this time, at least it'll sound better.

(C) 2003 - Karl Cable