Curious about Hauppauge pci card lifespans

[Galaxysurfer]

Wondering from other Hauppauge pci card users about how long your cards are lasting. I have a graveyard of old HVR -2250s & 2255s. They seem to suffer from tuner component failure. ( same thing as the Quad I returned for warranty replacement.) The quad is just a dual 2255 with an input splitter according to Hauppauge. Is this hardware a lemon? I"m not comfortable replacing cards so regularly. My main pc components are way older & still going strong.

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by Galaxysurfer

Wondering from other Hauppauge pci card users about how long your cards are lasting. I have a graveyard of old HVR -2250s & 2255s. They seem to suffer from tuner component failure. ( same thing as the Quad I returned for warranty replacement.)

Repeat failures make me suspect something else: what's the input source? Rooftop antenna? If so, nearby lightning (or similar) can destroy the input stage of **any** tuner. A direct hit isn't required. An HDHR can suffer the same fate. Always a good idea to ground the antenna mast.

Is the incoming coax properly tied to ground at a single point? Lack of a good ground can allow foreign voltage to enter via the coax and damage the tuner, too. This applies both to rooftop antenna or being fed from your local cable company.

Is the coax also connecting to other powered devices (antenna amplifier, TV, cable box, etc)? I've seen situations where a faulty TV has injected voltage back into the coax, causing other equipment to fail. Once such case involved a TV with a broken ground pin on the AC power plug. Bad things happen in the absence of proper grounding.

The quad is just a dual 2255 with an input splitter according to Hauppauge.

That might be true from a marketing perspective at a 30,000 ft. altitude, but I'm very skeptical that's true from a hardware component & design perspective. My Quad and 2250 appear to have very different hardware. Of course, I haven't attempted to de-solder the can that covers the actual tuner front-end, so I reserve the right to be dead-wrong here. SHS can probably report the inside scoop from HCW engineers.

Is this hardware a lemon? I"m not comfortable replacing cards so regularly. My main pc components are way older & still going strong.

As I previously posted, I've had no tuner failures with over a dozen tuners of various types in 10 years. Only one wall-wart failure during that time.

[Galaxysurfer]

The older cards were hooked up to coaxial cable & cable tv service until a few years ago, before I switched to rabbit ears. The newest Quad one is strictly indoor antenna. Is it due to a change in electrical current?

Not sure of the purchase date of each unit. The older ones may have went through pc change. Original tower was a Dell Dimension, then switched to current custom build in Lian-Li server case about 8 yrs ago. I remember one card I no longer have kicking around that did get fried. It was black looking after it met it's demise.

So verdict is I'm just hard on my tv cards? I do put them through their paces. ( full days of taping often) Only thing I can think of doing now is passthrough antenna via surge protector, but that may alter signal.

[Galaxysurfer]

The quad is just a dual 2255 with an input splitter according to Hauppauge.

I could be wrong on that. I am only going by a comment from Huappauge tech guy.

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by Galaxysurfer

The older cards were hooked up to coaxial cable & cable tv service until a few years ago, before I switched to rabbit ears. The newest Quad one is strictly indoor antenna. Is it due to a change in electrical current?

Voltage spikes on the building's AC wiring can certainly get coupled into the tuner input and destroy it, but I'm hesitant to offer a specific guess without knowing EXACTLY what all your system wiring looks like. Equally hard to speculate about a common cause if the input source (antenna, cable) has changed over the history of dead tuners. And I'm unclear about the exact failure symptoms (PCIe card no longer recognized by Windows, vs. tuner no longer receives stations).

Are the current rabbit ears connected ONLY to the tuner input, and the antenna wire several feet away from any other wiring? All bets are off if this is an amplified antenna with it's own wall-wart.

I have a lovely tale-o-woe about an (outrageously overpriced) AC surge suppressor that promised to protect everything under the sun. It connected to the incoming coax, telephone line, power cords, etc, etc. And it failed in a subtle way that sent the phone line's 90 volt ring voltage into the STB, causing pixelization on the recorded program whenever the phone rang. Fun stuff.

[doc]

I've been running 3 Nova-S2-HD cards from when the BBC went HD, which google tells me was 2010.

I'm also running an Nova-T-500. I searched my emails and found one to Sage support in 2008 about that card, so it's over 11 years old.

All of those cards are still working fine.

The only card I've had fail on me was a Terratec Cinergy 2400i dual tuner DVB-T card, which lost one of it's tuners.

[tmiranda]

I've had several of their tuners, including the 2250 with zero component failures. I still have the original tuner I bought when I first tried BeyondTV and then SageTV.

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by Galaxysurfer

... I switched to rabbit ears. The newest Quad one is strictly indoor antenna. Is it due to a change in electrical current?

Discharge of static electricity can do permanent damage. Walking across a carpeted room and then touching the rabbit ears (maybe to re-orient the antenna) could do it. Wool carpet with low humidity tends to be bad. Best to touch some grounded metal object (the metal faceplate of an AV receiver?), to bleed off the charge on your body, before touching the rabbit ears.