My TV is randomly muting tv stations... Why?!?

July 7, 2006 6:56 PM

The sound is muted on 95% of the tv channels and perfectly fine on the remaining 5%. Video quality is great. What is wrong with this cheap TV?!?

My roommate just bought a $20 27" Sony Tv (KV27TS22) from a friend of a friend. We have basic cable from Comcast.

First time it was plugged in, nothing but snow. After fiddling with the coax input and ensuring it was screwed down all the way, we get perfect picture quality (though missing some channels we got with our old tv) and perfect audio quality... but only on about 5 channels. The rest have absolutely no sound as if it's muted (not snowy whitenoise), and again, picture quality is superb. It's always the same channels too.

Besides the obvious "it's a $20 tv", what could possibly be doing this? We've checked the old tv and everything is fine then.

I wonder if there are any sort of signal conditioning techniques or at least any other precedants for this sort of inconsistent behavior. I thought sound either worked or didn't.

posted by johnstein to technology (3 comments total)

It sounds like the audio has been set to some kind of alternate setting. I would browse around through the audio settings and look for stuff like SAP/Stereo, closed captions, etc. Many TVs can be set for blind people so that a voice explains what's going on when there's no talking. "Monica is giving Chandler a strange look." So, just randomly switch stuff around until you find it.
posted by fcain at 7:12 PM on July 7, 2006

SAP is a good guess... but I have a question.

Do the channels that work all have standard audio? (what you would expect based on the picture) If you're not hearing any weird alternate languages or PSA's on any of these channels, I have to wonder if SAP is the problem.
posted by BlzOfGlry at 7:31 PM on July 7, 2006

hah! SAP was it!

when I pressed the 'display' button earlier, it would display the channel number and "SAP" underneath. so I just went to try it, and pressed random buttons afterward. There's a "MTS" button and pressing it changed "SAP" to "BOTH".

Thanks so much
posted by johnstein at 7:39 PM on July 7, 2006