Lowering the tone
16 March 2007
We have all experienced it. You make yourself a cup of tea and switch on the TV in time for that film you have been wanting to see for ages. You settle back into your sofa, rest your feet on the coffee table and ease into the opening part of the film, a tense and suspenseful courtroom drama, before …
BAAAM! – the commercial break: an all-singing, all-dancing chorus line exhorts you to visit a carpet showroom. And, because you have just spilled your tea on the carpet in a frantic scrabble for the volume control, you might just have to.
Loud and clear complaints
For many years, we have all grown used to being deafened by over-loud ads and few of us complain about them. Mostly, we just use our remote control to adjust the volume down for the commercial break and up again for the programme. But some viewers take the trouble to write to the ASA to complain about noisy ads. During last year, the ASA received around 250 complaints about noisy ads; many complaints were about noisy ads in general, some were about specific ads.
As most of those complaints testify, the problem is wider than a few isolated loud ads. Lots of viewers would agree that TV ads seem loud: the ITC’s Public View of 2002 research document reported that around 40% of the people asked thought TV ads were often or very often too loud.
With co-operation from the broadcasters, we hope we can now do something about it.
A question of subjectivity
A big part of the problem is the discrepancy between levels of sound compression for programmes and for ads. Programmes often have wide dynamic ranges (think whispered speech and loud explosions) but ads usually have a much smaller range, with the quieter parts being almost as loud as the peak levels. So, if the hero of your film is having a quiet conversation just before the ad break, the chances are that the ads will seem subjectively loud in comparison.
The main difficulty in keeping ad sound levels within an acceptable range is that broadcasters have traditionally used audio meters that measure peak loudness levels, not subjective loudness levels. And, until now, we have not had a universally accepted way of measuring subjective loudness levels.
Measuring up
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), based in Switzerland, has created a set of standards, which helps to define acceptable levels of subjective loudness. The ITU formed those standards by playing hundreds of audio clips of programmes and ads to volunteers, who indicated whether they thought the sound levels were acceptable or not. The results of the research means that more sophisticated audio-measurement equipment can be used to check that the sound levels of TV ads are within an acceptable range.
BCAP will shortly propose a new TV sound levels rule that encourages broadcasters to monitor the sound levels of the ads they broadcast with loudness-level meters conforming to the ITU standards.
What you can do
We shall launch a consultation on the proposed sound levels rule soon so, for those of you who want to have your say or just want to find out more information, the consultation document will be published on the Consultation page of the CAP website. You are welcome to respond to the consultation by offering your opinion on the proposed rule or by answering the consultation questions in the document.
We intend the proposed rule will better enable broadcasters to manage the sound levels between programmes and commercial breaks. So, hopefully, you will be able to sit back and enjoy your film in future without unnecessary noisy interruptions!
Link to ITC research document: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/research/tv_publics_view_2002.pdf
Link to Consultations page of CAP website:
http://www.cap.org.uk/cap/Consultations