Blown AwayAs much as we love HD and you know how much we love
HD, we hate loud commercials. No we don't watch them very often
thanks to our Series3 TiVo, but on occasion we don't hit that 30
second skip button fast enough and we get blasted. Part of the
problem is that the shows are usually Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
sound and the commercials are not. Why this causes problems for
the engineers is beyond us, but lucky for us the FCC has our
back. You see the FCC has rules about the volume differential
between programming and the commercials and it is a little
different for DTV. They say "The value of the dialnorm parameter
in the AC-3 elementary bit stream shall indicate the level of
average spoken dialogue within the encoded audio program.
Dialogue level may be measured by means of an "A" weighted
integrated measurement (LAeq)." In other words; the commercials
can't be louder than the dialog, which is good cause otherwise
they could compare the commercials with the volume level of the
explosions during 24. If