Star Trek - audio distortion?

[JustRob]

Hi, am I the only one that is noticing a quite noticeable and annoying distortion on all of the Star Trek episodes with DirecTV? This is happening on G4 and SpikeTV. I have a DirecTivo, if that makes a difference.

The sound is akin to warbling, and is most noticeable when there are trumpets or other winded instruments during scenes. It almost sounds like a hiccup, whereby the music is momentarily (few milliseconds) slowed or there are dropouts.

I have a 94% signal strength on my receiver, so I doubt it is a problem with the receiver or signal strength. It also is only noticeable on Star Trek episodes. It doesn't even happen on any of the classical XM radio channels.

Anyone else notice this?

Specifically, G4 is channel 354, and G4 is 325. I am using Svideo for video, and left/right audio outputs from the DirecTivo. I noticed this with my old receiver, SD-DVR40, as well as my new receiver, HR10-250.

 

[dfergie]

Which channel are you watching them on?

 

[JustRob]

more specifics added above

... more specifics added above (channels, receiver, etc.)

 

[dfergie]

Btw, Welcome to SatelliteGuys!

 

[Jimbo]

Hi, am I the only one that is noticing a quite noticeable and annoying distortion on all of the Star Trek episodes with DirecTV? This is happening on G4 and SpikeTV. I have a DirecTivo, if that makes a difference.

The sound is akin to warbling, and is most noticeable when there are trumpets or other winded instruments during scenes. It almost sounds like a hiccup, whereby the music is momentarily (few milliseconds) slowed or there are dropouts.

I have a 94% signal strength on my receiver, so I doubt it is a problem with the receiver or signal strength. It also is only noticeable on Star Trek episodes. It doesn't even happen on any of the classical XM radio channels.

Anyone else notice this?

Specifically, G4 is channel 354, and G4 is 325. I am using Svideo for video, and left/right audio outputs from the DirecTivo. I noticed this with my old receiver, SD-DVR40, as well as my new receiver, HR10-250.

Welcome to the site :

I have been watching on 354 for the last 20 minutes or so and have not found any trouble sound wise.
Using H-10 and TV speakers.
Are you using an audio / vidieo receiver ?

Jimbo

 

[dfergie]

Watched for about 10 minutes with a Sammy T360 then switched to E* version only heard 1 dropout from D* but sound did sound slightly distorted thru my Audio Receiver...

 

[JustRob]

audio recording needed?

Looks like I'll have to sample it with my sound card or something and then post a capture. To be more specific, the distortion only happens on those channels, that I can tell. Same TV, if I use the same inputs, from a DVD player, to play, say, Star Trek 2, no distortion occurs. So I don't think it's a problem with the TV.

Since the audio and video stream coming into the DirecTivo is digital, it is impossible to insert this kind of distortion into the stream. However, it is possible when transcoding (i.e., DirecTV receiving it at one sample rate and re-encoding it at another sample rate), or also during converting to audio format. I doubt this is the problem, or I would see it for all programming and not just Star Trek.

 

[JustRob]

sample file - MP2

I just used my Hauppauge WinTV USB2 PVR device, with the WinTV2000 application. Captured the audio and video, then used Flask to strip out the audio. I then just renamed the .mp2 file to .mp3. It still played correctly in WinAMP so I guess it's smart enough to figure out a misnamed file.

After an attempt to upload this, it said that it exceeded the forum limit of 4.29MB. So then I transcoded it to ogg. Oops, no way to upload an OGG file format. So I renamed it to .mp3. Be sure to save the file, then rename the extension to .ogg manually, then you can open it up with WinAMP. Maybe the admins can also allow file types of .ogg in addition to .mp3

I then uploaded the original MP2 capture, changed the extension to .doc. I would hope that everyone wouldn't automatically open MS-Word docs w/o saving and scanning them first.

If anyone can't hear the distortion with this, please do let me know.

Sure hope no copyright violations here; hopefully not since it's a lossy capture. If this is not the case, please let me know immediately so I can remove it.

 

[JustRob]

Btw, Welcome to SatelliteGuys!

Thanks!

 

[ChrisPC]

I hear what you're talking about. It sounds like it's the part of the master tapes. That's why it's on every episode on every channel.

 

[JustRob]

master tapes?

Thanks for your reply. I don't know if it's on the master tapes, because some of those episodes I have on DVD and they don't make that sound. I don't know about the original series but surely The Next Generation I don't hear the warbling.

So now the question is, is it the problem of G4 and SpikeTV in their versions, or could it be a problem in how DirecTV converts the format from G4/SPKE to the format that is uplinked to our DirecTV receivers? I would think that this could be a transcoding problem.

Just wish I could get someone sufficiently knowledgeable from DirecTV to answer that question. It is extremely difficult to convince Tier1 and some Tier2 staff about this problem. Sometimes they tell me "have I reset my receiver recently?" and "does this happen on all receivers?". Clearly, they are just grasping at straws and this kind of problem as why would it be happening on just StarTrek episodes and nothing else. I once got hold of someone very competent there and they were able to perceive the same distortion, but I never heard back from him.