Their audio compressor is set up even worse than it was before. I was watching an episode of "Outsourced" where the running gag is that you can barely hear one of the women speak. Except on Global, where as soon as there's silence the volume gets cranked up at least 21db louder and you can hear her speak at a normal level - along with so much background noise it's like they're standing next to a jet plane taking off.
It's actually so misconfigured that it's ruining shows. House is another show that has both talking and not-talking parts, and whenever there's a not-talking part Global ramps the volume so much I find myself cranking down the volume on my remote. And then the first part of the first word that someone speaks is way louder than it should be, until it catches and ramps that back down again. They quite literally want all of their audio tracks to be a perfectly flat 0db at all times - even if they have to crank up pure background hiss to achieve it.
