The latest YouTube app for Android TV and Google TV has a new feature that many users will be happy with: Stable Volume. It’s a feature we’ve already seen in the YouTube mobile app that does a good job of solving one of the biggest audio annoyances in YouTube videos, so we were hoping to see it elsewhere as well. (through Android Authority)
That annoyance is inconsistent volume levels. You might be watching a show on YouTube where the speech is soft but the music is loud, or you might be watching something like a podcast, but one person might be silent while the person next to them is louder than a Foo Fighters concert. If the audio isn’t mixed properly, the levels can go up and down like a kangaroo on a trampoline, with levels ranging from “what did they say?” to an unexpected audio attack.
Stable Volume is designed to prevent that, so it’s great to have it on the best TVs with Google TV and Android TV, including models from Sony, TCL, Hisense, Philips and more, as well as on Chromecast with Google TV.
How stable audio works on your Google TV or Android TV
Stable Audio works a bit like Night Mode on your TV or soundbar, analyzing the audio from whatever you’re watching. But where Night Mode then adjusts frequencies to make dialogue more prominent and explosions more neighborly, Stable Volume is only interested in the overall volume level. If it’s too quiet, it increases the level; if it’s too loud it rolls back a bit.
This should happen so quickly that you don’t notice it; the feature listens ahead and adjusts the audio before it goes to your speakers or soundbar. And it should also help narrow the difference between overly quiet clips and the professionally mixed, everything louder than everything else, ads that appear during and after them.
The new feature is enabled by default, and the toggle for it is in the same Settings menu you’d normally pull up for any video that’s playing. bit. Smoothing out volume levels is a good thing for speech, but it can take a lot of enjoyment out of music: entire genres depend on the soft bit/loud bit dynamic, and there are countless songs with a huge difference between the quietest and the loudest. parts of the soundtrack are completely intentional.
The new Stable Volume feature is available in both Android TV and Google TV with version v4.40.303 of the YouTube app.