Perhaps Carin and I are just crazy old people (the fact that we still fairly happily pay for cable television suggests that we might be), but in case we’re not, I’ll toss this out into the world.
Has anybody else noticed that, even though it’s not supposed to happen and hasn’t felt like a problem in years, that commercials are suddenly loud as hell again? Carin might have a different time frame, but I’ll put it at the last three weeks to a month.
At first I thought that it was a problem with one specific broadcaster since all of the stations I was noticing it on were ones owned by Corus/Shaw, but more recently I’ve started hearing it on a couple of Bell owned channels as well. That would mean that either both companies are dealing with the same issue and/or running the same non-compliant experiment simultaneously or that the problem is on the Rogers end. I don’t know exactly how the signal processing works there, but if it’s broken, it isn’t broken across the board…at least I don’t think so since it’s not happening on every channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL9SfcHva0I&feature=youtu.be
Perhaps the issue of perceived loudness is coming into play, but I don’t think so. Yes it’s summertime and we live near a busy road, have all our windows open and are running fans to keep cool which means that the TV is a bit louder than normal at times, but that’s the case every year and this is the first time in many of them that I’ve had to carefully mind the remote at every commercial break. And it’s happening no matter what we’re watching, which for me further rules it out.
I also don’t recall nor can I find a sunset clause being built into the standards, so that’s not it either.
Sooooo…what’s happening here? Any ideas?