On Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:28:59 -0500, metspitzer
wrote:

The sound difference was noticeable on my old set. I now have a new
TV with Stereo sound. The change in volume is much greater. The

That discourages me from buying anything new.

difference is head splitting sometimes.

If there is, in fact, a law against the volume level for commercials,
I guess we have one more law on the book that no one enforces.

I don't think there is such a law and they insist they're not doing
it, although I'm not at all convinced.

This is not a new topic. It's been discussed for more than a decade,
maybe much more.

I hate it too. Just one reason, sometimes I want to be able to fall
asleep to the tv and the commercials wake me up. Sometimes even tne
music between segments on NPR seems enough to wake me up.

I looked and found "Volume controllers" or something like that for
sale. One was 10 or 12 dollars, one from Amazon about 26 dollars and
one around 60. Maybe all of them from Amazon. I figured I'd buy the
one in the middle. I hooked it up a couple months ago and I hear no
difference. Without a convincing endorsement, I'm not buying the 60
dollar one.

It would be easy, no more than one more button on the remote control
and maybe not even one, to enable two volume levels for televisions.
One could raise the level and press Set, and that would set the higher
value, then lower the level and press Set and that would set the lower
level, and then just press Set to go from high to low and back. I
think this would be a popular feature, but maybe the networks are
paying or would pay the manufacturers not to include it.

I'm sure all radios and tvs continued to have AVC and AGC forever,
whether they advertised it or not. It's an essential circuit, that
takes as little as one or two parts. (For Sony that would be 5 or 10
parts. ) Other than maybe the digital ones. I can see why maybe
it is not included in digital, where signal strength is not directly
related to volume, iiuc.


I still like watching a show "live" even if there is nothing live
about it. When I watch a copy that I record, I'm always going
backward to hear some word I misunderstood. I'd sort of rather watch
it live and just miss whatever I miss.

But I"m not always home and I do watch a lot that I've recorded, and
then I mostly skip the commercials. Even that has it's disadvantages.
I sort of like the commercials because I can relax, think aboutother
things during them, if the sound were not blasting. WAtching an hour
show in a half-hour can wear me out. (I even skip 30 seconds from when
the 3 Jeopardy contestants are introduced to when the categories are
shown. Alex says the same thing every day during those 30 seconds.)