On October 5, 2010 at 08:41, Daniel Tonks said...
OK, what is the deal with Global this season.
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.
Absolutely mind bogglingly stupid.
If Global's audio compression is messing up their audio so bad then don't bother watching them unless you have to. Most of their programming is from one of the US networks anyways so you will get much better quality when watching directly from the originating network.
In the case of "Outsourced", this is a NBC show so you have the option of either watching it OTA from WGRZ or even better yet, from NBC's studio feed on KU-Band satellite. The bitrate on NBC's studio feed is a lot higher than WGRZ with the video being pumped close to 30 Mbps v.s. 15 Mbps.
Last edited by DrSat on October 11, 2010 12:19.
