We have a small but steady number of complaints about the levels of background music in certain programmes that appear to be drowning out the commentary for some viewers.  A recent post on this website about the background music levels in Time Team: The Secrets of Stonehenge led me to a very knowledgeable person indeed – the series editor for Time Team was trained as a sound engineer at the BBC so he was able to explain to me in some detail how background music levels are set and what can go wrong between the perfect conditions of a recording studio and the ears of the viewer at home.

He told me that there is a universally agreed level that sound should not rise above, but that modern compression techniques tend to bring all the sound up to this level, making the overall effect that of a noisier programme, albeit one that is still within the agreed limits. This is often evident in commercials, which tend to be highly compressed to make them stand out more in a crowded environment.  Add to this trend a gradual deterioration in our ability to hear the higher frequencies as we grow older, which are important in distinguishing speech, and less than perfect conditions in many of our living rooms, and you have a situation where music, particularly percussion or synthesisers, will start to compete with the level of the voices and, in the more extreme cases, make the speech very difficult to hear.

In the case of the Time Team programme on Stonehenge, his review of the music levels on several different televisions showed that there was a danger that some people would not be able to hear Tony Robinson’s commentary clearly enough, and he immediately suggested that the sound levels should be rebalanced – ideally before the programme’s next transmission – to make sure that the programme was accessible to the widest possible audience.  So thanks to you for raising it and to Time Team for being such good listeners!

PS A quick update to let you know that the rebalanced version will be broadcast this Saturday (13th June) on More 4 at 10pm