For Heaven’s Sake, Turn it down!
Thursday, February 4th, 2010Those words or something similar may have been said many times while you and your family are watching television if your experience is anything like mine. I can’t say exactly when this happened, but I can say that I don’t recall this annoying and frequent event happening a decade or so ago. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but it seems to me that we used to be able to watch TV and not have to worry about adjusting the volume when a commercial came on. I don’t believe it was all that long ago.
This is obviously something that others have noticed as well, since satellite broadcaster DISH Network recently announced that they will be rolling out some new features to eligible receivers that is intended to put an end to the automatic volume roller coaster.
The technology in question comes from a company called SRS and it is called TruVolume and it was created to even things out. In other words, when one of those annoyingly loud commercials comes on the tube, the big increase in volume that you may be expecting will be reduced to better equal the volume of the program you were watching.
Looking at some new televisions that are available, I see that some of them come with the technology already integrated. I wish I had a good explanation as to why those crazy changes in volume ever occurred in the first place, but I have not chased that information down. I’m sure someone can explain it.
I suppose I should just be happy that something is finally being done about it. I have not noticed any new features on my DISH Network DVR just yet, and I don’t know if this will even be something I will be able to turn on or off. Perhaps it will just be downloaded as part of a new software upgrade, and will be enabled automatically. I’m hoping my ViP622 DVR is capable of supporting this new technology. For those of us without televisions with this feature built in, it may even be worth switching to DISH Network. There are a good variety of DISH Network packages available starting with entry-level options that are very affordable. If you already have cable, you’ll find a DISH Network plan that has the programming you want, and is probably less expensive.