[Al Skierkiewicz]

Well, that is strange, I thought I told them to send everything to your house really hot.
No really, the only way for this to occur is for your TV to have a setting that monitors room sound. It is pretty rare but some audio engineers have included this monitoring in their devices so that audio levels are adjusted for ambient noise in the listening environment. The CALM act linked above, is still not officially in place due to some problems in monitoring. Most broadcasters and program producers are already voluntarily adhering to the law at this point. They had to buy the equipment with the anticipation that the law was going into place on a certain date. Why not use it if it is in place. The objective test for this act is the little old lady sitting at home watching her TV. She should not have to reach for her remote to adjust levels if every thing is working as designed. Loud parts of the program will still be loud (cars, explosions, etc.) and soft parts will still be soft (whispers, wind, pen drops). CALM is all about perceived loudness and the equipment to measure it can be pretty expensive. I think ours was a $12k solution. Yes the standard covers mono, stereo and 5.1 sounds.