Haha, I love it. I can go on forever about this kind of thing. Your comment about US television raising the volume of commercials had me laughing. I used to HATE that. It was so deliberate and so utterly obvious. I used to record everything so I could skip commercials to avoid this very thing. Unfortunately though I have noticed that Japanese television also does this, but not to as great an extent.
As for external speakers, I actually do have some. I don't even bother hooking them up to my TV (as I have them connected to my computer using some nice D/A converters). I do admit though, the new digital TVs (which I bought around the new year) do make a slight difference... but it still just gets to me too much. And whenever I go to the in-laws, all they ever watch is variety shows anyways, so there's no hope as far as that's concerned.
It's funny though... I've noticed the same over compression with Japanese pop & rock music. You often hear about people complaining about over-compression in American pop music, call me crazy if Japanese stuff isn't even worse. It's ironic though because sometimes American groups will come out with wonderful sounding remastered CDs that are exclusive to Japan. I just don't get it
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