[BC] DTV Audio Levels

[Rich Wood]

------ At 02:31 PM 6/14/2009, Tom Dimeo wrote: -------

>Last Friday morning on WOR John Gambling was talking about
>the subject of spots being louder than other program content.
>  He must have been reading some of the same comments.
>
>He asked listeners to let him know if that was the case on
>his program and if it was he'd do something about it.

He's going to regret having mentioned that. Now he'll get calls from 
people who never noticed a problem saying it's destroying their 
listening pleasure. I spent 10 years with WOR running their radio 
network. Unscientific surveys of affiliates always told me we had the 
best level control of the many networks they ran. I don't know what 
John can do about it. WOR is a Talk station and, as such, is heavily 
processed. That's not the problem. Advertising agencies equalize 
their spots to favor the spectrum the ear is most sensitive to. Get 
rid of the low end, do a little magic and the spot sounds louder but 
the processing doesn't hear it that way. It's been a problem since 
the dawn of radio advertising. You'll probably notice that spots cut 
at the station don't have that problem. It's not the station's 
problem beyond the heavy processing of everything. If you try and 
lower the level in the studio the processing brings it back up. I 
understand that's one of the main reasons for multi-band processing.

>I listen to WOR on the Internet stream and the levels are
>surprisingly stable.  Only problem is that they have at least
>one silent period, and often more, that might run for several
>minutes.  Think someone on this list explained that it has to
>do with cues triggering certain events.

It's a number of things. Due to AFTRA regulations stations can't 
stream agency spots without subjecting the ad agency to higher talent 
fees. Most stations use a third party service to substitute other 
material to cover the spots. It's very tough to do.

When a show is locally produced it's relatively easy to insert cue 
tones to activate the substitution. If the station is running an 
external network there's no way to cue the substitution. Many 
networks run their network spots first in a break without a cutaway 
cue. That's to prevent unethical stations from running local spots 
where, by contract, the network spots should be. Most networks have 
at least a few "floating" breaks. Without the cues the stream runs 
the prohibited spots. When I was there WOR never ran programming 
(except overnight news) from any external network. Now they produce 
much less local stuff and take syndicated shows from networks that 
may have different cueing or none at all for spots. I set up the 
original WOR stream with the long gone broadcast.com. That was before 
the AFTRA problem and everything ran simply as a simulcast. When 
AFTRA stepped in we talked with several substitution services. At the 
time, none could figure out how to handle breaks without cues. I'm 
not sure if they're using a service or just going silent during 
breaks. I'll call to find out.

Rich