Why are adverts so loud?

There's still a lot of simplification here, so hopefully sound technicians and physicists will forgive me! ■ AD: 👨‍💻 NordVPN's best deal is here: nordvpn.com/tomscott - with a 30-day money-back guarante

Tom somehow convinced NordVPN to pay for the worst ad ever made on purpose.

Tom Scott just trolled us all into watching a Nord VPN advert which 90% of us would probably skip through normally.

The funniest thing is Tom immediatly calming down angry sound-engineers because he knows how fast they get angry

Not only did I learn why ads are annoyingly loud, I also learned why some movies have annoyingly silent dialogue which make me turn up the volume just to get a heart attack when the loud bangs follow.

My pet peeve: I'm watching TV, straining to hear the dramatic dialogue as the hero reluctantly half-whispers their dark secret. Enthralled, I turn the volume up to hear it clearer. And then a character shoots a gun, and all the windows in my house shatter from the volume.

I've always hated that the advertisements are always 20-40% louder than the show or music playing. Especially on the radio.

Eating the microphone has got to be the funniest thing Tom has ever done. A little reward for staying to the end of the video 🤣

My poor laptop speakers could not render the low tone in the comparison, so the experience was: "if you want this tone: " silence "to sound as loud as this tone" *beep*" 😅 Thankfully I had another audio output available... Which I rarely use because it makes everyone's voices seem four tones lower than I'm used to

A little over a decade ago in Canada there was a major controversy over the fact that cable and broadcast advertisements where significantly louder then the programs they where playing, people where constantly having to mute the ads the moment they came on because of the difference and the government very quickly got regulation passed to equalise volumes because everyone hated it.

As an audio engineer, I hate everything about this video because it’s so true and sums the pain of mixing and mastering up very well

Here's where i get to actually contribute something! I work in a technical role at a television station where one of my jobs is to segment advertisements and get them on the air. One thing that is incredibly common in ads is that the raw file of each ad is incredibly loud. I'm talking ear-splittingly loud. Unsafe to air kind of loud. So, our process involves an algorithmic "loudness reducer" which scans the video file and turns down the LUFS on the ad before letting us segment the ads and get them on air. So, as loud as ads are on television, just know that they are WAY WORSE before they get to your ears.

Acoustic engineer here - superb video! To reassure the audio engineers out there, I can confirm that dealing with “loudness” in projects as an acoustician is also a headache!

Small note: The 100hz example at 4:48 can't be heard on a lot of laptops and phones.

I didn't expect to receive an actual answer to the question "If a tree falls when nobody's around, does it make a sound?" off the bat. Enlightening, thank you Tom!

You may have noticed radio adverts often use a lot of reverb. It's because you can add reverb to certain frequencies to create the impression of loudness without it actually being so.

When I did my music production course, the teacher said adverts sounded louder because they were more compressed. The shows having a higher dynamic range making it feel quieter.

That was by far one of the most entertaining adverts I've seen on this site out of how purely chaotic it was. Eating the microphone was the cherry on top.

I honestly don't mind Tom just talking about something instead of going somewhere cool. He has really great research and information to share all the same.

Man how I’ve missed these more informational videos from Tom, we’ve been getting amazing places and such for too long, just let Tom have room to make jokes.