annoying sound on fox soccer channel

March 18, 2006 11:51 AM

This is a random question, but it's driving me nuts. Can someone explain to me the purpose of the dial-up sound on the Fox Soccer Channel?

I'm an avid watcher of premieship football (soccer) and so I watch Fox Soccer Channel at the weekends. I'm being drivien crazy by this dial-up sound that appears seemingly randomly during the commercial breaks. What is it's purpose? They can't be dailling-in a connection to a feed can they? Why would we hear the sound? Please note that this sound even appears during taped matches (well, in the commercials of.) It's really begining to bother me and now my wife is also getting peturbed by this. Please help end my quest to know the purpose of this annoying sound!

posted by ob to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

Best answer: It's to tell the local carrier (e.g. your cable company) to insert their commercials.
posted by kindall at 11:55 AM on March 18, 2006

Response by poster: Yeah, I thought about this, but it most often happens at the end of the commercial break...
posted by ob at 11:56 AM on March 18, 2006

Best answer: kindall's right, it's DTMF cue tones. They are typically sent out in the middle of a commercial break to tell the local carrier that they can now insert local commercials if they want, AND then at the end of the "local avail" period to tell them that the network program is about to continue. Usually it's a 60 second local avail. The tones literally tell the local carrier's servers (used to be VTR decks) to get ready to playout then get ready to switch back.

If the local carrier doesn't have any local commercials to run, then you see the commercials that the network is continuing to feed, typically low-end stuff like the Super Strainer Spoon and Ditech Mortgage and so forth.

I also posted about this in another thread a week or so ago.

The sound isn't really supposed to be heard by you. The local carrier has their equipment misconfigured, but they probably don't have the budget to care. Might be worth complaining to them (the cable company! not the network!) about, maybe they'll fix it.
posted by intermod at 12:17 PM on March 18, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks guys. It was really beginning to get me down, but now I know what it is. Oh, and belive me I will talk to the cable company about it, although I don't hold out much hope as they're really pretty bad!
posted by ob at 2:21 PM on March 18, 2006

Hunh - I had assumed it was FSC's fault, since Time Warner in NYC and Comcast in Boston (both big ass companies in major metro areas) had the sounds.
posted by sachinag at 5:18 PM on March 18, 2006

It's possible that FSC is bleeding the tones over to audio pairs that aren't supposed to be carrying it, or that they keep screwing up the audio assignments and the cable headends have given up trying to fix it (i.e. chase FSC).
posted by intermod at 1:58 PM on March 21, 2006