You clearly aren't the only one aggravated by this, Funky. From
The Wall Street Journal:
Lawmakers Make Noise About Loud Commercials
The story says broadcasters are working on standards and hope to implement them this fall. A lack of standards is, I think, at the bottom of this issue, and it can be approached from two different directions.
On one hand,
DTV is a fairly new system, and this is one of a large number of bugs that still need to be worked out. Source materials, from programs to commercials to PSAs to station promos, vary in volume level, and there's no procedure as of yet for making volume levels more uniform. The broadcasters worked out standards for automatic gain controls in analog broadcasts back in the 70s, which IIRC is the last time the
FCC clamped down on this.
On the other hand, some stations, knowing the
FCC was extremely busy managing the
DTV transition, may have cynically decided it was time to play "Wild, Wild West" with something that should have been settled 30 years ago. After all, there was little chance of getting clobbered by a busy regulator, especially since digital broadcasting was considered "experimental" until June 12, right? Well, June 12 came and went three weeks ago, the
DTV that was an experiment is now the standard, and full-power analog is almost completely gone.
I'll let you decide which one seems closer to the (ahem) truth. Bottom line: Relief is on the way in one form or another.
