Dolby Volume, The Newest Attempt to Fix Loudness (from CES)

Dolby has a new scheme to fix the level differences between absolutely everything on television these days. They've introduced a scheme called Dolby Loudness that doesn't care what the signal is, it will automatically set the loudness and should make everything sound essentially the same to the human ear. Now all they need to do is get manufacturers to add this option in their upcoming products, which may be more difficult than anyone thinks.

Dolby already came up with a way to correct loudness in digital television, called Dialog Normalization, which is part of the ATSC specification, but no one plays by the rules for a multitude of reasons, so it doesn't work. It could, but it would require too many changes in too many places, and analog television would not change. Also, even the digital television signal can be destroyed, either in the home by some funky processing stage in a bit of your gear (most likely the television itself or the cable box) or at the cable company (though this is far less likely with digital than it is with analog tv).

So, hats off to Dolby for continuing to try and fix these problems. Now if they can just get all the other kids to play nice...

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