Monday, September 01, 2008

Stardate 62669.14 - Calling All Nerds

I love my HD Television (Panasonic), I love my HDMI receiver (Onkyo), I pretty much love my HD DVR (Scientific Atlanta), and I am ok with our HD cable (Time Warner). But for some reason, when Gossip Girl (in HD) has been recorded from CW11 onto the DVR, we get periodic sound drops during re-play. It is driving Cheryl nuts. The only thing I found through Google was someone in New Jersey who had similar issues and they stopped when he upgraded to 1.3a HDMI cables.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? If so, what was the fix? I'm dreading contacting TWC about this because I anticipate them not being very helpful.

Thanks!!

NYC

6 comments:

JamesF said...

We will occasionally get sound completely out of sync, but I think that's due to our provider. I don't recall ever seeing periodic dropouts.

Is it possible you get them when the DVR decides it needs to delete something to make space? If that's the case you could try deleting stuff prior to recording and seeing if the problem goes away.

Anonymous said...

We haven't had any equipment-related issues with our HD-DVR (through our Cox cable service) or HDTV. The only sound issue of late has been Bravo with no sound at all.

To go along with James's comment, you can also try unplugging and resetting your equipment.

Curt Sawyer said...

James - the DVR is only 33% full. It isn't a space issue.

Steve - Everything has been reset before, it still happens.

It really ONLY happens with Gossip Girl. I don't think it has happened with any other show.

JamesF said...

Capt Sawyer: It really ONLY happens with Gossip Girl. I don't think it has happened with any other show.

How many other CW shows do you watch? I mean I know you said it only happens with Gossip Girl, but are you actively watching any other CW shows? It's entirely possible the problem is associated with that particular channel. Did it just start happening or has it happened for like a year or something. Just curious if you have any other CW show data points to compare against (I know you watch Reaper, but that hasn't been new for months, which is why I was asking when it started).

If it's not a space issue it may be signal strength. With our TV you can check the signal strength real time through some of the menu driven diagnostics (I'll mention this only works if you've split the input one to the DVR and one to the regular TV input and the digital channel is unencrypted).

Curt Sawyer said...

It happened last season, too. Reaper is really the only other CW show we watch, but I don't remember it happening on Reaper (or if it did it was once or twice across the entire season, instead of 5-6 times per show like it does with Gossip Girl).

My setup is everything through the received, video and audio, and a single HDMI cable from the receive to the TV. We only use the HDTV for video, and run the sound through the receiver/surround-sound system.

Trailing Male said...

No clue. With our lifestyle, I wouldn't dream of investing in much HD stuff. After all, who knows if it would work in the next spot we're headed? Sigh. One of these days I'll go into Best Buy and actually watch an HD TV and BluRay DVD just to see what all the excitement is about.

Starting next May I can report on the state of Elbonian, that is Albanian, television.