dingostew.com

So you’ve started watching the World Cup in South Africa, you’re enjoying the games, but the thing that’s spoiling it for many are those vuvuzelas. Until FIFA gets around to banning them, there is another way of reducing the sound on your television. Dr Sean Marlow, lecturer in DCU’s School of Engineering, tells us how.

Marlow Method A
[for TV with a good sound equaliser]

Step 1: enter the sound settings for your TV, find the equaliser.

Step 2: drop the 233Hz [or closest] channel (which Samsung TVs have, second from left), and raise the adjacent levels.

Step 3: save as a custom setup (if you can).

Repeat for 466, 932 and 1864Hz

We gave it a try on a Samsung TV, and while it doesn’t remove the vuvuzela noise completely, it does tone it down. It also takes some of the depth out of the commentary, as voices sound less rounded and full bodied, perhaps no bad thing.

The settings should work on most TVs where you can make changes to the sound levels in this way, but if they don’t on your television you do have another option.

Marlow Method B:

Play the sound through your PC sound card. Run the free program Audacity and set up notch [cancellation] filters at frequencies 233, 466, 932 and 1864Hz

wow, genius!!

I also route the digital signal through my laptop with a little DVB-T USB stick I have. Gonna try that software.

Try out this app: does the same as a PC with Audacity, less hassle:

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/vuvuzela ... 78269?mt=8

looks pretty good. It seems like a noise cancelling app though. Apparently they'er less than ideal for live TV.

The software i use for watching TV on Windows is called ProgDVB. I just discovered it has a 10-band equaliser built in. Gonna try mess around with that and see if I can reduce it. Else, I have some other stuff in Ubuntu I can try.

BTW, I ended up giving up on this, coz as it turns out, Audacity does not to real time streaming! You need something that can modify the sound as it comes in. Audacity only does recorded stuff!

Remind to look into this again for the start of the new premiership season though! I have a feeling I'm gonna need it!!

PS, anyone interested in a fantasy football league?