your TV shouldn’t be yelling at you

If you’re anything like me you really don’t appreciate the games that your television service providers play with you. It would be nice, for instance, if Comcast didn’t compress its programming to within an inch of its life. It’s a lousy way to treat your customers.

But even more grating is various broadcasters’ habit of jacking the volume way, WAY UP whenever a program goes to commercial. For a while I dismissed this as the sort of paranoid anti-corporate rambling that I enjoy indulging in but only sort of believe. But at this point the effect really can’t be denied: if I’m watching a live broadcast I almost always have to turn down the volume when it breaks for commercial.

It sure would be nice if we could make them stop these hijinks, and in fact there’s some proposed legislation that aims to do exactly that. As you might expect, the guys over at the Tech Liberation Front think it’s outrageous that anyone would try such a thing — markets(!), etc. Most recently they’ve been quoting AV columnist Ken Pohlmann, who has a similar perspective but has different motivations: he’s worried about Congress accidentally messing with his audio quality. And he thinks there are easier solutions, anyway:

At the broadcast and distribution end, as part of the ATSC standard, Dolby Digital has built-in loudness-normalization parameters. Using these protocols, any receiving decoder will recognize the metadata and adjust the sound to proper levels. All Dolby audio signals are controlled by these parameters; when used properly, they ensure consistent levels across one channel and between many channels. True, some engineers and producers aren’t setting the metadata properly, but that’s a simple matter of education and experience.

It’s sweet that he thinks this is just a big misunderstanding — a few audio engineers who are tryin’ awful hard, but still learning their craft. My perspective is a bit more cynical. Anyway here’s Adam Thierer, the author of the TLF posts:

As I pointed out in my essay on this, the thought of FCC bureaucrats sitting around squandering their time and taxpayer money on this nonsense is really appalling, and I can’t wait to see the reams of paperwork they would spit out when they have to open an proceeding about how “excessively noisy or strident” ads will be defined, measured, and then penalized.

I remain unconvinced by these arguments. The CALM Act (PDF) doesn’t specify what the penalty for violation of its admittedly vaguely-worded volume requirements would be — presumably that and other details would be up to the FCC to decide. So it’s hard to say how good this specific regulatory proposal would turn out to be.

But even if this specific attempt ultimately falls short, there’s nothing incoherent or impossible about the basic idea of telling broadcasters not to blast their ads at us. Nobody is saying that enforcement has to be undertaken at great government expense, or that such a regulation would have to apply to anything other than commercial messages. All you’d have to do is say that channels may only broadcast commercials at a volume X% greater than the average volume of their noncommercial programming (as the CALM Act basically does), and that citizens who receive programming that is consistently in violation of that regulation are entitled to collect civil damages not to exceed $Y per documented instance. There: no need for government monitoring; no interference with the audio fidelity of non-ads; no incentive for “gotcha!” enforcement of single technical mistakes; but a credible threat of class-action suits that would almost certainly dissuade broadcasters from playing these petty games with their customers.

It’s not rocket science, and it’s not unreasonable. I understand that TLF’s knee-jerk response is to oppose any regulation whatsoever, especially if it’s coming from the FCC. But Thierer’s favored solution — having everyone buy audio-normalizing hardware — seems considerably more ridiculous to me than asking the FCC to say “knock it off!”