Comment Agh! (Score 3, Insightful) 95
Been a bucketload of fail, and a waste of terabytes of useless "news" stories posted on the internet.
Can we just call this one, guys? Time of death: 2005 (and that's being GENEROUS ).
I hate loud commercials too, but this is just too much government IMHO. I'd much rather just have intelligent TVs or receivers that turned the volume down upon detecting a commercial...based on the settings *I* want, not what the government thinks is best for me.
My old as hell tube TV has this (it's a 27" RCA TV, circa 1999). I just checked and it's called SoundLogic in the menu, and I've gotta tell you it's a pretty terrible feature. It basically turns the volume on everything down (making an amp or what have you work harder), and anytime there is a spike in volume it re-adjusts and turns it down.
What I've found it does is make every good kaboom in every good movie I've watched with it on go flat. It also takes a second or two for it to adjust, so you still get too much sound. With commercials that are only 30 seconds long, this leads to a very uneven "HAVE YOu ever heard of product x?", 30 seconds later "WATCH THis tv show on sunday", etc.
Like I said too, you always have to remember to toggle it off before you watch a movie. Kind of a pain.
Maybe the technology needs to be improved, but my experience with it has been pretty bad. I don't think it's been enabled in at least 8 years.
"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein