Strange audio problem in HD shows recorded using HDHR and SageTV

[elwoodps]

Hi All,

I'm new to SageTV and some of the Clear QAM HD shows I've recorded off my HDHR tuner have a really bizarre audio problem. The characters' voices are very muffled but the music and even the background noise are loud and clear. The audio of the commercials recorded during with the show is completely normal.

It sounds as though the show's audio is divided into several tracks and there's something wrong with the "voice track". When I turn the TV volume up loud enough to make the characters' voices clearly audible the show's background noise becomes so loud that the voices are quite difficult to understand, the background music is uncomfortably loud, and the theme music that plays at the beginning and end of the show is deafening.

Anybody have any idea what's causing this problem or how I might be able to fix it?

My setup is as follows:

• C2D e7400 on a GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard
• 512mb HD4350 video card connected to my LCD TV via HDMI
• 1x HDHomerun
• 1x HD-PVR
• Win XP Sp3
• SageTV 6.5.9

Any help you can offer will be sincerely appreciated.

Elwood

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by elwoodps

Hi All,

I'm new to SageTV and some of the Clear QAM HD shows I've recorded off my HDHR tuner have a really bizarre audio problem. The characters' voices are very muffled but the music and even the background noise are loud and clear. The audio of the commercials recorded during with the show is completely normal.

Sounds like you're running stereo audio to your TV. You've got an audio decoder setup issue. The audio decoder is decoding the 5.1 and then apparently only sending the L/R audio instead of downmixing everything to stereo.

[babgvant]

Make sure you've got ac3filter selected as the audio decoder and make the output format look like this -


If that doesn't sort out the problem go to the gains tab and mess with the settings until it sounds right.

[elwoodps]

Thanks to your help I seem to have fixed the problem, but I'm not sure if I did it the right way.

@babgvant: I couldn't figure out where to find the properties dialog you showed in your post. The closest thing I could find to twiddle with was the "MPEG2 Audio Decoder" setting in the "Audio/Video" section of the SageTV "Detailed Setup" menu. It was set to "MPEG Audio Decoder" so I changed it to "AC3Filter". That didn't help. Then I noticed that there was a choice called "ATI MPEG Audio Decoder". Since my sound is coming from the HDMI port on the Radeon video card I decided to give that a try just for fun.

I have no Idea why but that appears to have solved the problem, at least for now. I'd still like to change the output format to stereo as you suggested, if I could find that properties dialog.

Again, Many thanks to you both.

Elwood

[babgvant]

go to the sage dir and run ac3config.exe.

[elwoodps]

Originally Posted by babgvant

go to the sage dir and run ac3config.exe.

Got it!

Thanks again.

Elwood