OK!

I had my Hitachi 55HSD69 installed a week ago, and I'm about 80+ hours into the break-in.

Today - I turned on the Daytona 500 on FOX in HD - (looks AWESOME - Fox 66 in Flint, MI), BUT - there seems to be a delay in the video and audio on the Hitachi compared to other TV's in my house.

The Plasma is about 1.5 seconds behind all the other TV's in my house connected to the same OTA signal. So now I can't have the volume on on any of the other TV's, or else I hear the Plasma HT setup "echo" what was just said.

I'm new to all this - so is this just the nature of HD signals in general? (My other TV's are all on the standard OTA channel - since they are not HD).

Is my only solution to run a bunch more wire to get the audio and video line out from the plasma connected to alternative inputs on the rest of my TV's? (That would be a pain...)

Thanks for any thoughts.

Steve C.

Are your other TVs SD or HD?

The process of MPEG encoding/decoding intrinsic to ATSC HD broadcasting is the largest contributor (among other things) to this kind of delay. In the early days the SD signal was sometimes 5 or 6 seconds ahead of the HD path, but encoders have gotten better. While it could theoretically be compensated for, an HD lag is almost inevitable during a "live" event.

"Lip flap" used to be an annoying problem too; at least today the audio on the HD side is almost always in sync with the video!

And of course there are those "7 second delay" black boxes, the MPEG gear used by cable companies to distribute off-air signal around their private fiber loops, etc. I guess nothing is really in "real time" live anymore...

Mike