[ReidWings]

I have this issue pop up on 2 recordings in the last 24 hours on my Roamio Pro with Hydra. I go to watch a show and I can only hear the laugh track and not the regular dialogue.

Strangely, I began watching one of these shows and the audio was completely normal. I then paused it for a minute and when I resumed it, the dialogue was gone and only the laugh track was audible.

At this point, I looked at the available audio tracks and switched from English to Spanish to see what would happen, and the "spanish" audio track was the proper english track (dialogue and all) PLUS the descriptive audio for the blind.

I tried restarting the box and this recording still had the same issue.
Other recordings I have tried work normally.

Notably - I am on Hydra as well so not sure if this is a related bug.

Any idea what would cause this and/or how to fix it?

 

[kitt84]

I have this issue pop up on 2 recordings in the last 24 hours on my Roamio Pro with Hydra. I go to watch a show and I can only hear the laugh track and not the regular dialogue.

Strangely, I began watching one of these shows and the audio was completely normal. I then paused it for a minute and when I resumed it, the dialogue was gone and only the laugh track was audible.

At this point, I looked at the available audio tracks and switched from English to Spanish to see what would happen, and the "spanish" audio track was the proper english track (dialogue and all) PLUS the descriptive audio for the blind.

I tried restarting the box and this recording still had the same issue.
Other recordings I have tried work normally.

Notably - I am on Hydra as well so not sure if this is a related bug.

Any idea what would cause this and/or how to fix it?

I don't know what causes this, but if you change your audio setting from Dolby to PCM it will usually resolve it. You can change it back in the future and it will work fine again.

 

[V7Goose]

Probably a Dolby issue - VERY common with NBC in many areas (especially local content on those channels). It seems they send out a signal flagged as Dolby, but not properly encoded, and some receivers just cannot handle their incompetence. The issue is caused by dropouts in the center channel, which carries the vast majority of audio, so you do not experience it on TVs or other systems that synthesize the Dolby signal down to just L/R speakers.

The engineer at my local affiliate in Albuquerque stupidly SWEARS they do not transmit ANYTHING in Dolby at all, but he is too ignorant to explain why the signal triggers the Dolby circuits in my amplifiers! I saw this same thing in the Dallas area, and it happens with cable and satellite feeds of the same channels too, so it is NOT a bug specific to TiVo hardware. NBC network programming does not seem to show this problem very often, but it plagues me on virtually ALL local content on their channel, such as the local news. If you have a system that chokes on this garbage, the only solution I have found is to switch the audio output from the TiVo to PCM or switch the amplifier to 2-channel.

Not all amplifiers are totally screwed with this garbage signal - my Yamaha amp doesn't completely drop the center channel like the Sonys do, but you can still hear the audio switching back and forth from the center to the side speakers on those programs. And all of my equipment is over 10 years old, so I have no idea if this has been improved in more modern equipment.