Fair warning: This is a rant.
I'm sick of waking my wife up and scaring my dog.
Years ago, back in the dark ages of the early '10s, I went to music school to learn audio engineering. I had played in bands my whole life, I loved audio in general, and I wanted to learn more about it.
As I learned about dynamic compression, limiters and the like, I started to wonder about other parts of my life.
I had come home late from my night job and sat doesn to watch my guilty pleasure and the learning channel, which teaches nothing: Pawn Stars followed by Storage Wars.
I was so into it, I was googling the items and intrigued at what people found in their lockers or brought into ChumLee for appraisal. I was enthralled in the search, then BAAAAAM! A commercial for feminine products blasted on my TV. We lived in an apartment so now I'm worried what my neighbors would think about my self-care regimen, but it got my mind wandering during the commercials, and it has been wandering here for the following 13 years: if I can set a compressor or limiter to keep some drunk vocalist's rage scream under the threshold on stage, why can't my self-proclaimed "smart" TV do the same thing for douche commercials?
A compressor is designed to take sudden spikes in amplitude and progressively bring the amplitude down, so as not to damage equipment and ears and to keep the mix cohesive. A douche commercial coming through at 120 dB seems like the obvious place to use this wonderful technology.
And now that we have pretty decent software compression, why can't that software be loaded onto a chip that lives in my little budget Vizio?
If anyone know that answer to that please tell me below. I've scoured the internet for reasons, but I just can't find it. We deal with it much less now in the age of streaming, but I suppose it still happens from time to time. WHAT's THE DEAL?!?
Comments