# No sound after powercut / restart



## benallenuk (Aug 1, 2005)

Hi, I run a tivo back home with a Pace NTL box attached. I'm away A-LOT, so use a slingbox to view recordings etc. My electric meter is one of those key meters, which my flatmate is suppose to keep topped up, which he doent. This results is lots of power cuts. 

Say the power went out at 1.00pm, I come from work and view through the slingbox at 9.00pm, all the recordings since 1.00pm will have no sound. There isnt any sound comming through the AUX from the pace box. I get a picture through aux and I can hear the TIVO sounds (Bing....etc). A quick restart through the system menu always fixes the problem and I get sound back.

The problem has been with me longer than slingbox, which makes me think its nothing to do with the slingbox.

Any ideas? Or is there a script solution, apply a double restart for example. 

Cheers for replys.

Ben


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Sadly there is no easy solution as you are just unlucky with your Tivo's motherboard objecting to the larger loads imposed by bigger hard drives and a Cachecard. I personally have 2 x 250Gb hard drives and a Cachecard and 512Mb of RAM and have never had the sound loss problem in 20 months. I have however had the Sky box Aux input suddenly slow Blue screen a couple of times because the Tivo stops taking notice of the Sky Aux Scarts signal. The Sky box in fact transpires to still be outputting the signal normally when connecting direct to the Tv.

Can I suggest sorting our your flatmate might be a starting point and failing that buying another power supply (which may be at the root of the problem) from www.tivoland.com and fitting that.

If that doesn't work then get a Tivo off Ebay with a Lifetime sub and then sell your current one if you don't get the problem with that Tivo after transferring your hard drives and network card across to it. As long as somebody only uses your current Tivo as a basic Tivo with no network card they won't then get the sound loss problem.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

P.S. Blindlemon did mention something about turning up the output of the blue pot on the power supply in the Tivo to increase the voltage output to someone else on here. It may be easier just to fit a new one though if it is a few years old.


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## benallenuk (Aug 1, 2005)

is this a common problem of a dying powersupply? It does work fine after its been restarted.

I might take a look at the voltages of the power supply with a multimeter, or would a fault only show under load?

Another solution to test would be to runt he hardisk off an old pc power supply and see if the problem is still present.

I'll post findings.

Cheers

Ben


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

benallenuk said:


> Another solution to test would be to runt he hardisk off an old pc power supply and see if the problem is still present.


This has been discussed before and the Tivo won't work if you try to do that.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

benallenuk said:


> is this a common problem of a dying powersupply? It does work fine after its been restarted.


It's a common problem but not necessarily indicative of a dying power supply and replacing the PSU doesn't normally fix it.

The problem occurs because (so the theory goes) the extra load imposed by a large drive and/or cachecard at startup affects the voltages in some way causing manufacturing (or possibly age-related) tolerances in certain motherboard components to trigger a failire of the sound chip to initialise properly. A "soft" restart (or two) will allow the sound chip to initialise correctly in 99% of cases and most people seem happy with this.

If you want to ensure that your TiVo starts up with sound then you could write a script that either forced a single soft restart after an unxepected restart (including power offs) or even kept doing so until the output from the sound chip in the kernel log looked correct.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> If you want to ensure that your TiVo starts up with sound then you could write a script that either forced a single soft restart after an unxepected restart (including power offs) or even kept doing so until the output from the sound chip in the kernel log looked correct.


Are you offering to do this blindlemon as far from all end users are capable of such feats.


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## benallenuk (Aug 1, 2005)

Restarting till an output from the sound chip is locked sounds like a god method. I;d be well up for testing it, ive no idea bout tcl scripting and am busy enough writing VB code for a research project.

Cheers

Ben


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