Industry to turn down the volume on noisy movie trailers

Tuesday, March 9, 1999 | 4:40 a.m.

And now Hollywood is doing something about it.

A new volume standard has been developed for trailers so they will be at the same level as the features, industry representatives announced Tuesday at the ShoWest theater operator convention.

Long a major source of complaints, trailers are usually so loud that projectionists have to turn down the volume. The problems come when projectionists forget to turn the volume back up for the feature, making it too quiet.

Ioan Allen of Dolby Laboratories, who worked on the new standards, said that 40 percent of trailers in the last two years were too loud.

The quieter trailers should be running by the end of the year, he said.

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