music loud, voices quiet?

[cameramonkey]

I am experiencing a weird one...

I just dumped cable and went strictly OTA. On my old SageTV6 box with a hauppauge 1600 we noticed an oddity... on some OTA HD streams we would get perfectly loud music soundtracks, but the actors voices are amazingly quiet, almost like they are at the end of a LOOOOOONG tunnel.(music blaring, voices barely audible). commercials are OK, but program actors voices are quiet.

I replaced the PC and tuner with another atom 330 based system and a hauppauge 2250 card to get dual digital tuners (fresh load of XP). It appeared to work well for several days, but now I am experiencing the same issue.some HD programs have severely imbalanced audio.

anyone have any ideas on what is going on?


xp pro, Sage 6.62, ASUS AT3IONT-I MOBO, 2GB ram, etc.

[Olias]

It could be related to the audio output of the channels/shows in question. What kind of audio setup do you have?

Sage may be trying to send out a multi-channel, surround audio signal. The center channel would contain the bulk of the dialog and the left and right speakers would mostly have music and backgound effects. If you don't have a center speaker connected, then you would get the results you've described.

[cameramonkey]

its an ASUS motherboard using an Nvidia ION HDMI out.

I agree, it does sound like it but I dont recall seeing any settings for the sound.

In fact, on those Nvidia boards, if you install the onboard audio drivers, HDMI audio fails miserably. You have to leave the onboard sound card hardware unconfigured and uninstalled (but not disabled) for them to work properly with an HDMI TV output. It was a very moment during that discovery period.

[Fuzzy]

Sounds like you need to do some work in AC3Filter Config (AC3Config.exe in the SageTV folder). Make sure it's set to output Stereo sound (2/0), and NOT set to passthrough AC3 (or DTS for that matter). This will cause AC3Filter to downmix the Surround sound to Stereo and send it as uncompressed PCM to the TV over HDMI.

[cameramonkey]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Sounds like you need to do some work in AC3Filter Config (AC3Config.exe in the SageTV folder). Make sure it's set to output Stereo sound (2/0), and NOT set to passthrough AC3 (or DTS for that matter). This will cause AC3Filter to downmix the Surround sound to Stereo and send it as uncompressed PCM to the TV over HDMI.

I think thats my best bet. I just tweaked, so we'll see what happens tonite when it records the surround stuff in prime time.


THANKS!

[Fuzzy]

You don't have to wait for new recordings, this works on the playback side, so any previous recordings that you had the problem with, this would still change.

[cameramonkey]

that did it Fuzzy, thanks a million.

And I did have to wait. all the recordings we had were deleted due to the shows being un-watchable, and our market generally doesnt broadcast anything in HD surround except during select prime time shows.

Now if I can just get this ION to render HD video smooth, I'll be all set. Supposedly it can handle it, but presently Its watchable but a tad choppy.