By Andrew Liszewski
You’ll be hard pressed to find a more boring, generic looking box than this TV Volume Regulator but since it only has one specific task it really doesn’t need to look that hi-tech. You see through the use of some creative sound mixing and mastering commercials usually always sound much louder than the TV show you’re enjoying. The idea of course is to grab your attention but instead they end up being annoying and quickly muted once you find the remote.
This is where the TV Volume Regulator comes in. When hooked up to your set it will deliver a consistent audio level through loud and quiet parts of your show and will also deal with those obnoxiously loud commercials. I used to have a Magnavox television with this feature built-in and it worked quite well. Normally the adjustments were so subtle you couldn’t tell it was working but once you disabled that feature it was pretty obvious it was doing its job.
The TV Volume Regulator is available from Amazon for $39.97.
pretty cheap for what is essentially a brickwall limiter. you could probably use this for music mastering. haha
A big disadvantage is that you loose the dynamics of movie soundtracks.
I’ve had two of these. Be careful – they tend to be buggy and unreliable. Sometimes mine would stop working and I’d get no audio. I’d have to “reboot” it by cycling the power (which was no easy task as I had it buried deep within the wiring of my stereo and TV components). And both of them eventually stopped working.