cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/mrlovenstein/p/1660117/volume
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/nonpolitical_comics/p/1657114/mr-lovenstein-volume
[Mr Lovenstein] Volume
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The ad people explained that they do not mess with the volume! It’s that “movies have soft and hard sound pieces and ads have more hard sound pieces.” To me, that sounds like they mess with the volume and know it.
It’s compression. (As in audio processing not data storage) Loudness is a perception thing. Pure decibels don’t tell the whole story about how your mind perceive audio.
It’s the same principle as the “loudness wars” in music.
Audio equipment still has upper limits, but music is produced to sound louder.
This is also why modern standards of measuring loudness is more complex.
But in the end this is sort of just being pedantic. Yes commercials make their stuff sound really loud and will always push up against what ever limit you put on it.
Movies and TV shows care more about quality of audio and dynamic range (that’s is sort of the issue made funny in the comic above, when your equipment is unable to create audio clarity at the full dynamic range something is made for)
Actually quite a few TVs, soundbars, and audio receivers have a “night mode or quiet mode” that will compress or limit the dynamic range of what you are watching to avoid this scenario
(Yes I know… I’m ruining a perfectly good funny comic :P )
I once converted all my mp3 songs to the same loudness by scaling based on RMS, it might not be %100 accurate as you said but to me it was perfect. I believe there could be a setting to squish that range by calculating RMS chunk by chunk and scaling them each, but instead they just add all kinds of stupid modes and settings
Usually I adjust the volume for each song when I’m driving. Some are just louder than others, but that’s kind of ok I think. I really dislike Spotify (and other platforms) automatic loudness dynamic adjustment things… they usually make things sound really bad and weird
“look, it’s all in your head. Wanna buy home insurance?”
‘We don’t know how to mix audio properly’