A customer has a Yamaha RXA-870 with an HR54/700 DTV genie. They also have a sonos connect and a Roku. On the DTV sometimes the audio drops out for a second. It sounds like its been muted for just a sec. The video never drops out or lags. They cant tell me if its just certain channels. Im on site right now and have been able to reproduce the problem on Nickelodeon HD. Right now IM thinking its HD channels with Dolby audio, but thats a guess. The other sources are fine. Because the tweo other TVs in the house with DTV clients connected straight to the TV have no issues and this receiver worked fine in their previous house, the customer doesnt accept that its a DTV problem.

Because my boss once said something about maybe its a bad HDMI cable, the customer is convinced its my problem. But because Im not seeing any video problems, I dont think its a cable or HDMI issue.

Any thoughts?

The AVR, the bane of our existence- along with DTV. AVR's tend to do weird things like changing their EDID's. Did DTV do a firmware update recently? Can you lock the EDID's in the AVR?

If it was working before, it's likely not the cable. All cable related questions go to Brent.

Good luck chasing it down.

Jeff

It looks like if I disable Dolby Digital in the DTV audio options the problem goes away. Im not aware of a way to lock in EDID on a yamaha AVR

Run a 3 day test with fiber/DC and keep it that way if it works?

Really?
Fins, you know better than that, put a HDM-JRPLUS on it.

I wish I’d thought about that and had one put on the order this morning. I still haven’t rebuilt all of our inventory on that kind of stuff after the flood.

This maybe unrelated but,

I had a customer a month ago with a Yamaha AVR and DirecTV. System had worked fine for 3 years then he got an upgrade to the new DirecTV system.
Audio did the exact same thing you are saying, except it wouldn't come back on until you either rebooted the DTV receiver or went into the DTV menu and switched Dolby off then back on again. I determined it was a faulty DirecTV box and we just left Dolby turned off - he liked his surround sound in 5ch stereo anyway *facepalm*

I made the mistake of explaining to the customer everything wrong and even demonstrating by turning Dolby digital on and off. They didn’t want to live with Dolby turned off until a new DTV receiver arrived. I should have just turned of DD and enabled 5 channel stereo. They wouldn’t have known the difference.

Brent, you'll remember that didn't fix my audio drop out problem with DTV a few months back.  ;-)

After further consulting with the mighty one (Brent), I ended up running HDMI for picture, and Optical audio for sound.

I am still having this issue with the new 4K DirecTv stuff.