Like some infomercials are louder and ear piercing compared to other commercials
In: Technology
The loudest sound your TV can produce can be adjusted by the volume setting of your TV.
How loud the sound of a movie/commercial/whatever is depends on its audiotrack. There’s only a relative loudness in this track, going from silence to maximal loudness. E.g. an explosion would be very loud, reaching the max volume of your TV, but people talking are only half as loud, whispering is even quieter. The higher the volume setting is, the louder everything will sound, but there’s stilll the relative differences between the whispering, the talking and the explosions.
Here’s the kicker: If you mix the audio in a normal way, the explosion would only hit max volume for one peak moment, while the whispering is still quiet. This is called dynamic range, you have very loud or very quiet moments, but also the most part of the track is around average values, making the other moments stand out. Now imagine you record yourself whispering and then shouting, Then you use some audio software, you select the ONLY the whispering part and make it louder, so it reaches the same maximal loudness as the shouting section.
That’s what those commercials (and songs) do to stand out. Instead of having a normal sounding audiotrack that has a wide dynamic range of silent and loud moments, they amplify everything that is “not maximal volume” so the whole track is always at the maximal loudness.
It’s not really measurable louder by the absolute values, it’s only almost always at the max volume, while normal sounding stuff only does reach that loudness a few times.
Keyword: “Loudness Wars”, some artists did this ( i think in the 2010s) to make their songs appear louder than others to stand out.
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