Why does fox make the commercials ten times as loud as the game

Helps older people hear

For the same reason they pump in the crowd noise. That first play made it seem like we were playing in Philly the crowd was so loud screaming for the eagles stuffing the run..

So you can hear the commercials even when you use the toilet. I'm a big fan of the mute button.

Do you have cable or satellite?

Local stations are losing their local master control rooms in favor of virtual or centralized master control. Where the local signal or network feeds are sent via fiber to the corporate headquarters and sent back down to the local station for air with commercials.

Cable does this too. They take the local stations and send it to a regional or virtual headend via fiber then send it back via fiber to the nodes.

In the early 2000’s this was a crazy idea and only a few stations did it. Fox 8 in New Orleans was one of the first to do this when they were owned by Emmis. They sent the signal to Orlando where they did the switching. But I guess that helped out for Katrina when their studio flooded, but Emmis was also trying to get out of the TV business at the same time.


One station on Comcast in Houma is almost a full minute behind the broadcast version.


Some of this is to help in costs requiring less equipment and manpower to monitor the stations, but the ongoing costs on Fiber must cut into that. Then you also have the incidents where the fiber gets cut and there is no backup route. Comcast in Houma had this happen a few times.

To remind me to hit mute immediately

Commercials are made with the audio levels at near max all the time. Normal speech goes up and down.
That's the difference.