# No voices - but background sound on OTA on the HR10



## TivoinTexas (Oct 2, 2002)

Interesting issue 

I have 2 HR10's. One has 6.3a and one has 3.1.

Tonight, the ABC affiliate OTA has background sound (music, window crashes, etc), but not voices. CC1 close captioning works
and voices comes back when it shifts to commercials.

It's never done this before.

So - I think it's a local issue - but I pull out a little portable tv we have and tune to OTA ABC and viola - sound AND voices - 

I'm stumped - anyone know what may be happening?????


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## rminsk (Jun 4, 2002)

Do you have dobly digital turned on? If so, are you only listening to the left and right channels? The voices could be coming from the center channel.


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## dan_the_man (Sep 20, 2006)

My guess: the broadcast is apparently in Dolby 5.1 and something isn't decoding the center channel. Commercials are not in DD 5.1, so they sound fine. Look at your Audio settings on the HR-10 and make sure they are what you expect. Selecting PCM will fix it, but that might not be what you want.


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## TivoinTexas (Oct 2, 2002)

Sorry- I should have stated my setup on audio

When the problem started, I had:

Audio DRC to ON
Dolby Digital set to No, record in standard audio
Digital Output set to Dolby Digital to PCM

The crazy thing is - it's working now on both TV's (I hear voices :-o) and I've made no changes.

It appears the issue occurred from at least 8:30pm CT to 9:50 CT.


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## jautor (Jul 1, 2001)

I've had this happen on my local ABC affiliate (Houston KTRK) a few times before... Center channel gone, just music and effects (left, right, surround channels). You didn't hear the issue on the portable because its a different broadcast (NTSC vs. ATSC) and it's the ATSC feed that was messed up... Hasn't happened recently, but very odd when it does.

This is the reason why, at least in the earlier days of HDTV, I kept the names and numbers of the station engineers or control rooms in my address book... Calling them actually worked sometimes!!! 

Jeff


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## Arcady (Oct 14, 2004)

I got the same thing on Boston Legal tonight. Weird. I guess I'll watch the SD version instead.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

I've had the same thing happen with the CBS station here several times. They correct it after a minute or so.


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## andystj (Mar 17, 2004)

I just went to watch Boston Legal and had the same problem on both my HR10-250's. Recorded OTA. Thought I should check this forum to see if anyone else ran into the problem.

Pretty clearly a local problem for the Dallas market. I'm going to send a quick email to the local station. I'm sure they've heard about it, but they should hear again and again and again and again.


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## avoiding work (Jan 3, 2005)

I had the same problem (no voices) in McKinney for "Help Me Help You"


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## jgriffin7 (Sep 29, 2006)

I emailed WFAA about this Tuesday night. Got this reply a few minutes:
_
Thank you for writing.

We heard from several viewers on an audio issue that arose on September 26 in prime time during Boston Legal and Help Me Help You. Our engineering department reported it as a failure in the Dolby 5.1 encoder. This was a garden-variety equipment failure that has been corrected. As soon as it occurred our engineering staff was on it - it took a little time to track down the source; however we monitor all broadcasts closely and are the first to hear/see that there is an issue. The supervisor on duty told us the problem was corrected by 8:45 p.m.

We regret any inconvenience this may have caused our viewers. The fact is even the most sophisticated technology will malfunction now and again, and that was the case here.

Let us know if we can be of additional assistance.

Best regards,

Ann Clark

Program Coordinator

WFAA-TV_


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## Arcady (Oct 14, 2004)

jgriffin7 said:


> _Let us know if we can be of additional assistance._


They should air the show again, since the first time had no sound, and really doesn't count as a broadcast. Would they give the same stupid reply if there was audio but no video for the first 45 minutes?

I'm glad I still had an SD recording of it, but it has gone to the bottom of my priorities, since I make time for HD material first.


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## kbohip (Dec 30, 2003)

My wife was mad about no sound last night on CSI. Something must have gone wrong at our local CBS station because the sound was out on the HD signal all night. Unfortunately the sound on my wife is working fine.


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## lowboy (Nov 27, 2000)

Had the same thing happen last night on Law and Order (still on 3.1 BTW). Was able to pick up the 2nd half of it on my SD tivo, so I will have to watch half of it in CC, and 1/2 in SD off my old SA tivo...


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## bmw528is (Sep 30, 2006)

Same here- just watched CSI off hard drive with no center channel audio. It came back on after about 10 minutes though.............still annoying.


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## FourFourSeven (Jan 3, 2003)

This reminds me of the first movie I watched with my wife after we got a 5.1 surround sound system. It was "Moulin Rouge." We knew it was supposedly a weird film, but after about 10 minutes, my wife turned to me and said "isn't it weird there's absolutely no diologue?" Suddenly it hit me - the center channel wasn't connected correctly!


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## Langree (Apr 29, 2004)

jgriffin7 said:


> however we monitor all broadcasts closely and are the first to hear/see that there is an issue. The supervisor on duty told us the problem was corrected by 8:45 p.m.


Translation: please don't write us, we dropped the ball and our station manager is pissed.

If they were so on top of things they woulda/coulda/shoulda put a crawl on the screen stating that they were aware of the issue and working to fix it.


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## jsirota (May 26, 2003)

This happened tonight to us, Cold Case on CBS, KPIX in San Franciso. HR10, OTA, no DD decoder (PCM stereo via HDMI to the HD monitor's built-in speakers).

Music, but no voices. My wife immediately switched to SD via satellite.


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## videojanitor (Dec 21, 2001)

jsirota said:


> This happened tonight to us, Cold Case on CBS, KPIX in San Franciso.


The same thing happened on KCBS/LA -- they switched to SD once or twice while trying to fix it.


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## gastrof (Oct 31, 2003)

Things like that have been known to happen on analog too.

For a few months after UPN came on the air, our affiliate repeatedly messed up on the audio.

There'd be these glitches that'd suddenly come up where we'd start geting all the background noises we wanted, but the voices could barely be heard, if at all. (I don't know how many episodes of STAR TREK: VOYAGER I had to re-record over the weekend because the audio was ruined on the primary broadcast.)

Must have taken them months to finally figure out what they were doing wrong...and how to not do it any more.


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## holligl (Dec 28, 2004)

Our last two episodes of NCIS have done this. We are on Comcast Cable, THD with Cable card. Last week we watched the internet version, but could not skip the commercials.


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## TyroneShoes (Sep 6, 2004)

DD 5.1 typically places dialog in the center channel, music and effects in L and R, and surround info in LS and RS. There is supposed to be a local mixdown at your tuner to DD 2.0, which mixes the dialog also into L and R creating conventional stereo, and that is controlled by metadata flags in the transport stream. If they don't parse the metadata properly at the station, sometimes there is no mixdown, and DD 5.1 L becomes DD 2.0 L, while DD 5.1 R becomes DD 2.0 R, meaning no dialog reaches either speaker. This is probably what was referred to as a "garden-variety" failure, which is a head-scratcher of a characterization. One translation of that is "common", or "something we F up regularly ".


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