Music on TV Programmes.

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

I didn't have a license(or telly) for 10 years and they sent threatening stuff about once a month, it's just the system they have and if you're not breaking the law then you can't be prosecuted

They turned up at the door once and I refused them entry, they have no right to enter without your permission, don't let them tell you otherwise

You are under no obligation to sign anything either, 100% of the burden of proof is their problem, if they want to stand outside my window 24/7 for a month then they can go for it, and don't ask to use my toilet

I'm not sure if a radio license still exists, while I never listen to them there might be one in a box somewhere

The TV system kind of crosses the line trying to put people into a state of fear and alarm

if one of us posted their kind of abuse to a neighbour we'd probably get served with a restraining order or charged with coercive control under the domestic abuse act

Its a private company which does enforcement nowadays, they usually look for easy pickings like student halls of residence and bedsits

Edited By Ady1 on 13/11/2021 00:51:34

[Anonymous]

Posted by Howard Lewis on 11/11/2021 18:33:59:

In the form of TV licencing who will NOT believe that anyone has no TV.

…. I'm still trying to parse that, Howard

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

For convenient reference : **LINK**

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/692/contents

MichaelG.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Peter – A good question, who has to prove which! They do seem to find it hard to believe not everyone has a television or watches TV programmes on-line, but otherwise appear to rely very much on trust.

Ady – What area are you in? The TV Licence office contacts me only about every 2 or 3 years. I forget which but the last time was earlier this year and I could reply by letter or on-line.

We used to need a radio licence licence (or combined TV & wireless?) but that was so small it became costlier to manage than it raised.

Realkly it ought be re-named to what it effectively is: "Subscription". And by the normal course of things it is actully the cheapest TV subscritpion service going, at less than the cost of a pint of beer a week!

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

I was chairman of our Village Hall and some years ago received a communication demanding to know how many televisions were located in the Village Hall, we have none and I replied that there weren’t any. They didn’t believe me and kept harassing me with letters, I got fed up answering them and in the end ignored them putting their letters in the bin, it didn’t take long before they gave up and so far they haven’t repeated the exercise. Dave W

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

The system just churns out letters to registered addresses which have no paid up license, so replying to say you have no telly changes nothing

If you sent a lawyers letter off it might be different

If you're doing nothing illegal just ignore them

[CirclipParticipant @circlip]

Without going through all the legal gobbltygook, the original GPO/Telecoms document was license to receive television pictures and although the independent broadcasters didn't get any money from this was the bone of contention for many who "Didn't watch BBC", the term "Receive" being the killer. As the GPO/Telecoms were an independent licensing authority and gave a "Sub" to the BBC did not the terms change when BBC were handed the golden goose when it changed from getting crumbs from the fees to the golden eggs of total control of collected revenue?

Regards Ian.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Peter Greene on 12/11/2021 22:44:50:

Posted by Nigel Graham 2 on 12/11/2021 21:08:59:

there are still ariels on the wall, too high for me to remove safely, and if they did gain entry how I would prove I do not use this PC as a television.

Do you have to prove that you don't or do they have to prove that you do?

(A genuine question from someone who's been out of it – the TV licence thing – for 50+ years)

They have to prove that you do!

The system works like this. In the UK almost all homes own a TV. Not owning one is truly exceptional. Therefore the authorities use a computer to identify all residential addresses that don't have a current TV licence, and focus their attention on them.

Although there are many valid reasons for not having a licence, one of the rarest is genuine non-ownership! It's far more likely that an occupied residential address contains dishonest fee dodgers rather than an truthful individual who doesn't own a television. Most people who claim they don't have TVs are liars, and until the government recently downgraded licence dodging to a civil offence, they were criminals.

However, although they can write and call, there is no right of entry. So you can tell them to go away. Unfortunately, this is exactly what dishonest folk do, and it leaves the case open. Expect repeat calls!

An elderly friend of my mum returning from a holiday in North Africa was pulled aside by customs and asked if she was carrying drugs. Thinking it a huge joke that anyone should suspect a respectable granny of being a drug mule, she replied yes. Wrong answer: she was detained and subjected to a humiliating intimate body cavity search. It's because quite a lot of respectable grannies are employed as smugglers… Likewise, never joke in airports about bombs or say you allowed someone else to pack your luggage.

The easiest answer is to show there really isn't a TV on the premises. Huffing and puffing on the doorstep proves nothing. A quick tour of the house fixes it. Of course, it's embarrassing if your Dining Room is a shrine to Adolf Hitler and the kitchen is a Crystal Meth Lab. If you have anything to hide, pay for a licence!

Dave

[Gary WoodingParticipant @garywooding25363]

Getting back to the original theme of this thread, I've just seen a few minutes of BBC's coverage of the Lord Mayor's Show. One 'float' was really an advertisement for the musical version of 'Back to the Future' that, apparently, is showing in the West End. A guy roared into view in an old DeLorean, got out and sung a song. He had an exaggerated American accent and I couldn't understand one word – not a single word.

[colin hawesParticipant @colinhawes85982]

Quite often I get a good laugh at subtitles; are the "howlers" created by poor elocution?; also there seems to be vastly more bad language than there used to be; Why?

[colin hawesParticipant @colinhawes85982]

Quite often I get a good laugh at subtitles; are the "howlers" created by poor elocution?; also there seems to be vastly more bad language than there used to be; Why?

[Nigel BennettParticipant @nigelbennett69913]

Going back to the original theme, the one that annoyed me most was the "Sky at Night". When Patrick Moore was in charge, he wouldn't tolerate any music at all apart from the opening and closing credits. Excellent. Especially when somebody without English as a first language came on to explain or describe something.

But now some dipstick with a third-class degree in applied toilet paper or something has decreed that they have to have music to drown out the boring technical stuff being talked about. Why do we have to pay for some blithering idiot's sixteenth-rate irrelevant squawking in the background when somebody's talking about black holes or dark energy? How does that help understanding or improve clarity of diction?

Grr! Grrr! GRRRRR! etc…

[Robert Atkinson 2Participant @robertatkinson2]

On The licence thing, many years ago I was in a rented aparment and had no TV. TVL came round asking the usual questions saying I didn't have a TV licence.
I said I had a Licence to receive TV, they said I didn't. I said go check the records, I can even transmit TV signals. This confused them so I showed them my amatuer radio licence. They went away muttering….

Robert G8RPI.

[Andrew CattellParticipant @andrewcattell93655]

We found the sound quality from our latest TV to be quite poor so I hooked up some much better speakers and excellent amplifiers with a bit of grunt to the sound output sockets on the back of the freeview box. Now we find that all sorts of stuff in the background that we shouldn't be receiving can be heard. Traffic rumbles, passing trains, passing aircraft, slamming doors even on studio recorded speech programme material.

As for stuff you are supposed to be hearing being a nuisance, why does a news programme need background music?

I don't have an issue with regional accents but I switch off if anyone says fink (think), fort (thought), anovver (another), free (three) etc. Does nobody correct youngsters speech these days?

Andrew.

[Jon LawesParticipant @jonlawes51698]

Posted by Andrew Cattell on 23/11/2021 20:21:00:

I don't have an issue with regional accents but I switch off if anyone says fink (think), fort (thought), anovver (another), free (three) etc. Does nobody correct youngsters speech these days?

Andrew.

Street vernacular has been around a lot longer than you or I….

[John Doe 2Participant @johndoe2]

Sadly, not being able to focus on wanted sounds and ignore unwanted sounds is a sign of ageing hearing.

I was demonstrating a Nintendo brain-training game to my parents once and they asked if I could turn the music down – it was already very low level, but they could not filter it out.

Television companies do spend a lot of time and money achieving very high sound quality – easily as much as vision quality. However, they use very expensive amplifiers and speakers in the sound control rooms, which do sound amazing and it is very easy to pick out what one wants to hear when listening to those.

In the home however, television speakers and amplifiers are usually very small and very limited and they cannot reproduce the full dynamics and frequencies, so they "muddle and scramble" the sound to some degree.

What can be tried is that many televisions have a variety of sound or audio settings in the menu, some including a 'clear-voice' setting for speech. Worth trying them all to see what they sound like.

Some have user definable audio equalisers – like a tone control but with 6 or more channels instead of just bass and treble. Try reducing the level of frequencies in the 250Hz – 500Hz range and boosting frequencies in the 3,000Hz (3kHz) – 5,000Hz (5kHz) range. This will increase speech intelligibility, while reducing the apparent volume of the overall sound. I did this for my parents who reported a clearer sound, and they did not need it as loud overall as before.

Having a sound bar or a good set of speakers is another way to go. Adams Audio, a German company, make semi-pro studio monitor speakers with built-in amplifiers, such as their T7Vs. I have a pair of these fed from the headphone output of our TV. These speakers are absolutely incredible and a pair are cheaper than many sound bars. We can now hear a whole lower register of sounds and music, such as car doors slamming, double basses in the orchestra etc, and the speakers and amplifiers are so good and neutral that voice reproduction is clear.

Adverts do annoy me though. They compress the volume, so they sound much louder, even though, technically they do not peak much louder than the normal audio. My finger hovers near the mute button for all adverts and trailers.

 

I have no connection to Adams Audio.

 

Edited By John Doe 2 on 15/01/2022 12:56:37

Edited By John Doe 2 on 15/01/2022 12:59:10

[Brian HParticipant @brianh50089]

Going back to my original post, surely it must be possible to electronically filter out the background music?

Brian

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

Why when listening to the speech on a documentary does the volume suddenly go so low that you can barely hear the speech and then moments later return to the volume that you set, this is using a good quality sound bar so no problems with the reproduction equipment. Surely a good sound engineer could ensure that the speech level remains constant throughout the programme, there is enough technical equipment available to achieve this, perhaps there is a lack of training with the sound engineers. Dave W

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by John Doe 2 on 15/01/2022 12:55:23:

Adverts do annoy me though. They compress the volume, so they sound much louder, even though, technically they do not peak much louder than the normal audio. My finger hovers near the mute button for all adverts and trailers.

Check out this link to 'Loudness Wars' and its impact on recorded music.

Neil

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

I have had noise related hearing loss for MANY years. A HUGE gap between 2 KHz and 8 KHz, about the frequency range of the human voice. But my NHS aids are programmed to compensate for that, and do very well most of the time.

I find that the perceived volume level can vary from programme to programme, on the same channel; and channel to channel and between a live broadcast and a recorded one. (And between recordings from different channels )

As for "background" music, IF only it were! And made worse, by either poor sound and vision monitoring or poor diction by the person on screen.

The situation is like the curate's egg, good in parts, but TERRIBLE in others, especially where bit seems mto be thought to ,be trendy.

If a generator were coupled to Lord Reith in his grave, a lot of UK's power shortages would decrease!

Howard

[John Doe 2Participant @johndoe2]

@ Samsaranda,

That sounds to me that you might have something like a 'clearvoice' audio setting selected on your TV?

It might be called something else, but it tries to track the level of vocals for better intelligibility, but depending on what other audio is also present, sometimes gets it wrong.

Unlikely for professional sound operators to get it wrong, unless it is a very low budget production. Sound is carefully monitored and if it is wrong or not up to spec, they will normally do another take, unless it is live, obviously.

Edited By John Doe 2 on 17/01/2022 11:07:56

[John Doe 2Participant @johndoe2]

Regarding loudness wars, yes, the basic compressor limiters used in the past regulated the whole audio spectrum as one, and this could cause problems in that a bass sound could cause the more audible frequencies to 'pump' or vary in level*. Modern versions compress the audio in lots of narrow frequency bands which avoids this and also has much more loudness effect. This is now used to make pop and rock music seem louder. Listening to Led Zepp just the other day, it sounds slightly tame and subdued (!!) in comparison to modern tracks which have the multi-band compression.

Ironically for our discussion, compression can be useful when listening to the spoken word in the car for example. Radio 2 is extremely compressed: the natural dynamic range of natural voice and music can be 60-100dB, but Radio 2 is transmitted with barely 6dBs range. Compare that with orchestral music on Radio 3 which is hard to hear properly in the car, because the quieter parts are drowned out by road noise etc. (I don't know how much, if any, compression is used on Radio 3).

Compression makes audio fatiguing to listen to after a while.

With adverts, compression is applied at the max, so they sound very loud – to get our attention of course.

*This might have been the cause of the fading voice level mentioned in the thread earlier – the sound tech might have only had basic compressors while out on location.

 

Edited By John Doe 2 on 17/01/2022 13:57:33

[SamsarandaParticipant @samsaranda]

John Doe 2,

I think your suggestion could be what is the problem, we have a sound bar which has various settings, film, news etc so I will try experimenting with the different settings to see if it helps to stabilise the volume of speech, many thanks for your input. Dave W

[CalumParticipant @calumgalleitch87969]

An awful lot of the issues discussed are down to the simple fact that much television is now being made very cheaply. For most of broadcasting's history, the equipment was simple but high quality and maintained and used by highly trained engineers and operators who were given the time and resources to get the best from it.

Nowadays, a spotty youth can operate a black box and get adequate results. Once a programme is made, all these adequate results are mixed together by another underpaid spotty youth with too much to do and not enough time, with inadequate supervision, and the result is broadcast, mumbles and all.

Of course progress has done great things: the BBC offers many more services than they did, and I don't think many of us would want to return to the days of two, three, or four television channels.

[modeng2000Participant @modeng2000]

Here are a coulpe of links that might be of interest.

http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1412272721

http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1640693430

John

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