I went into this thinking it’d be a simple rant about broadcasters turning the volume knob up for adverts. It isn’t. The whole “adverts are louder” thing is a messy collision between how humans perceive loudness, how audio is measured, and how TV and streaming systems actually handle sound. What feels like “louder” is often about average loudness, compression, and the way speech and music sit in the mix — not just peak levels. In this video I dig into why regulators and standards bodies ended up caring about “loudness” rather than “volume”, why measuring peaks doesn’t match what your ears complain about, and how adverts can end up sounding aggressively in-your-face even when they’re technically within the rules. There are also plenty of ways for things to go wrong in the chain: different mixes for different platforms, different playback devices, and the sheer number of places audio can be processed before it reaches you. The takeaway is frustratingly non-satisfying: there isn’t one culprit, there isn’t one fix, and the reason it’s still annoying is that it’s a system with lots of moving parts — and they don’t all agree on what “loud” even means.