Power cut affects audio

[rickcb]

Hi, all. I'm a newbie so forgive me if I cover any familiar ground.

In the wake of Thursday's storms my area was affected by a power cut. When the power was restored after some 4-5 hours I noticed I was getting no audio on the TV pictures viewed through my Tivo. The Tivo's internal sound was ok, as was anything I had recorded before Thursday's power cut but all recordings since then have no sound.

I checked the AUX output and that was fine, sound and video.

Has anyone had any experience of this situation and what do you suggest I do about it? Advice I have had so far suggests I turn off both my Tivo and Sky digibox for 10-15 minutes and then restart. As of writing I haven't tried that.

Should that not fix the problem is there anywhere in the UK I can get my Tivo repaired (if that's possible)?

Thanks in advance for your help on this frustrating problem.

[kitschcamp]

The main "fix" at the moment is once there has been a powercut do a softreboot, not a power off at the mains. So go to the setup menu and restart from there, or if you have a network card in your tivo, telnet into it and type reboot.

[blindlemon]

Hi Rick - welcome to the forum :)

Yes, the only known solution is to do a soft restart. The problem occurs because the the sound chip sometimes fails to initialise correctly after a power-on, but as the drives are already spinning and the electrical environment is different on a soft restart it usually manages it OK then.

[rickcb]

Guys, thank you SO much! The soft restart did the trick and audio is now back. If not for this forum I'd be facing the prospect of, at best, trying to find someone to repair my Tivo and, at worst, having to replace my my machine (somehow!).

Great to see this kind of support for the Tivo in the UK.

[PhilG]

Bear in mind that this does seem to be a hardware bug affecting some (but not all Tivos)

Mine was amazingly bad - out of 10 restarts, I'd ususally have no sound on 9 of them :(

HealeyDave (at Tivoland) has a hardware fix which, whilst not 100% guaranteed, certainly has got me up to around 99% sound DOES appear after a restart!

[Automan]

I hope someone finds the component that seems to be causing the problem.
I suspect an electrolytic or tantalum cap on the mother board.

Else our Tivo's may end up at http://www.mytivo.co.uk/ !

Automan.

[JudyB]

Bear in mind that this does seem to be a hardware bug affecting some (but not all Tivos)

Mine was amazingly bad - out of 10 restarts, I'd ususally have no sound on 9 of them :(

HealeyDave (at Tivoland) has a hardware fix which, whilst not 100% guaranteed, certainly has got me up to around 99% sound DOES appear after a restart!
Our experience seems to indicate that this could be either component failure or, possibly (?) a power supply issue.
We have been experiencing this quite a bit since we upgraded to a larger disc and added a cachecard. This leads me to guess at three possible conclusions:
1) This is a coincidence and would have started happening anyway (component failure)
2) This is a consequence of upgrading - perhaps something was dislodged?
3) The power supply is on the edge of being unable to support the current components and this causes initialization issues on the sound

Does anyone have any extra information which might confirm or reject any of these possibilities?

[PhilG]

My problem has always been there - however it certainly did appear to get worse when I upgraded my disk BUT changing to a new(er) power supply didn't help

Only Mr Healeydave fixed it for me