Turn it down!

It's been said that every American trend arrives in Germany about five years later. But there's at least one that's gone in the opposite direction: digital television. While Europeans are already used to its advantages and disadvantages, Americans are still coming to terms with them. Analog reception didn't end until June 12, 2009.

TV is not important, you say? Try telling that to 292 million US residents over the age of 2 who watch an average of nearly six hours of video a day.

Their representatives in Congress took a break last week from talking about federal revenue to vote on a most urgent matter: loud TV commercials. Complaints about these in just the first quarter of 2010 numbered 132,416 — ten times as many as in the last quarter of 2009. The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television in the US, will now be told to require that commercials be played at a volume similar to the speech in the programs they're interrupting.

Americans have complained about loud commercials since the 1960s, but the arrival of digital television has made them worse. Digital signals have a wider dynamic range — quiet sounds no longer get lost in the static — so loud sounds seem louder.

Until now, the maximum volume of a commercial was determined by the maximum volume of normal TV programs. If a program was mostly dialogue with occasional gunshots or explosions, the commercial — every second of it — was permitted to be as loud as those explosions.

The new Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation, or CALM, Act, will require that commercials be calibrated acoustically according to their perceived loudness, not their absolute volume. Loudness, as researchers have shown, is subjective: the brain pays more attention to speech than to other sounds.

That's why that guy screaming about his phone bill in the commercial with Heino seems so much louder than the car chases in the movie he so rudely interrupted.

Advertisers say they don't necessarily make such loud commercials just to jolt us viewers awake. Some claim instead that they do it because they don't want their commercial to sound less loud than other commercials that come before and after it.

It's also taken until the digital age for technology to catch up to the problem. In 2002, Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco developed a machine that can recognize speech and adjust other sounds to match its volume.

Democrats in the Senate and now the House of Representatives have been the main force behind the bill. California Representative Anna Eshoo says the CALM Act is the most popular bill she has fought for in the 18 years she's been in Congress. "If I'd saved 50 million children from some malady, people would not have the interest that they have in this," she told The Wall Street Journal. Voters have been stopping her on the street to thank her for this, she says.

Australia, Brazil, France, Israel and Russia already have similar laws in place.