Hi Creechuur,
Thank you for posting on our forums and bringing this concern to our attention. We apply audio normalization using the ITU-R BS.1770-1 : CALM Act algorithm during our transcode process.
I've spent the morning looking into 'The Hobbit' from a number of different perspectives and agree its a bit unsettling. My team will look into this issue further and run some tests to see what can be done, if anything, to help this.
Creechuur wrote:Why do I get the feeling that this is Comcast's lazy fix to content with bad audio, like commercials that play WAY louder than the program being watched?
Ad's are not always within Comcast control and many times provided by third party systems. While we provide our specifications to all third parties its often hard to enforce due to Comcast not actually serving the ad.