With a name that sounds more akin to a nighttime wrinkle cream solution than a breakthrough multi-room audio distribution system, NuVo Technologies Renovia is designed to make adding music to existing home a far simpler proposition. With new construction starts down across the country, a “no new wires” solution will allow installers to tap into the potentially huge retrofit market.
Well, they did a survey, and it's official. The end of the world is near. Parks Associates surveyed 2,000 broadband households in the U.S. and Canada, and found that roughly two-thirds of them are regularly using PCs to play music at home, and one-third are listening to music through their televisions — a percentage equaled by MP3 players. The report, Digital Media Habits II, also cites game consoles, mobile phones, and portable game players as preferred audio playback devices.
As far as I'm concerned, those numbers conclusively portend the end of the world, and I'll tell you why.
Don't hate me. It's just my job, and they make me do it. Yes, I am one of those cursed recording engineers who mixes television commercials, and mixes them to be as loud as possible. It's not my fault, it's just the way it is.
You know how loud and startling the jump in audio levels can be between your favorite TV show and the commercial break. You want to believe that the ads are much louder than the show, right? I've known all along that it's not the case, but a new report is backing me up.
There's a peak loudness level that commercials can't exceed, so most commercials compress the dynamic range. The differences between the loudest part of a voice-over and the softest are minimized, and then the flattened out track is pushed right up to the limit. Why do I do that?
Continue reading "Commercials Are "Excessively Noisy or Strident"" »
Not always, really, but a lot. So I like it when people start talking about something I consider important but largely overlooked — color, for example.
Maybe we take color for granted, or maybe it’s just too vague. The things people get hung up on in audio or video usually have numbers attached to them: TIM (percent), slew rate (volts per microsecond), jitter (picoseconds), phase shift (degrees), and so on and on. That’s just a short list of audio-related items that never actually mattered much, if they ever mattered at all, yet got tons of ink at one time or another. The perennial hot topic in video has been resolution. In the dark ages before HD, TV manufacturers touted lines of horizontal resolution, the more the better. So you would see TVs spec’d at, say, 800 lines of resolution, which was fine, except that there were no sources that delivered even half that. Now the buzz-spec is 1080p — not exactly the same situation, since we do have 1080p sources available, but when you see what a gorgeous picture you can get on a truly huge screen with a good 720p front projector you start to think perhaps it’s not the most important thing in the world, especially on something like a 32-inch LCD.
