HORRIBLE ECHO please help!

fear itself did have bad audio but dont recognize any problems anywhere else...else...else.

Yeah, sometimes the audio signal on certain channels, might be shows or commercials, is messed up. Nothing you can do about it, really.

I have an HR-20 and use it a few hours a day and haven't noticed anything either off satellite or off air. I would suggest you start with a remote reset. The box does get itself tied in knots with what I suspect are sub-programs looping and taking most of the cycles. For instance twice mine has been unable to decode mpeg4 channels and the remote was acting very sluggish. In both cases a remote reset restored full functionality. If the reset doesn't do anything, then I'd suggest turning off digital sound output and see if that affects it. Not sure what to do if it does, but it will at least provide an avenue to investigate. Good luck; this problem would drive me nuts too!

What NBC station are you watching (where do you live?) Your information would appear to narrow your problem down to just one station, so let's start with that.

I suspect something might be amiss at the station, otherwise other markets would have heard it, too. I do NOT subscribe to the theory that "sometimes it is screwed up and there's nothing you can do." I also would avoid a mindless re-boot, like those CSRs first suggest you do.

Unfortunately, many stations don't monitor their HD channels (this will hopefully change in 2009!) so sometimes you have to smack them upside the head to get their attention. Once you get through to the right person, I'm sure they will appreciate that you took the time to let them know. Hopefully they won't just say, "Nope, sounds fine here."

I will suggest something that may be quite obvious.
Make sure that the volume on your television is turned down to zero when you are using a surround sound system or you may very well hear what sounds like an echo.

When the echo is evident, do you have sound output via both the TV
speakers and the Onkyo system? If this is the case, try muting the TV (or
the Onkyo) to see if it goes away.

Don't mess with your system.

Charlotte (WCNC) had the same issue with their encoder setting. Horrible echo for the first half hour before it was finally fixed.

Which NBC station were you watching?

This problem is caused by the the local station having trouble dealing with the unusual way NBC feeds multi channel audio over their sat. I hear it on by local NBC station on some commercials during the NBC national news.
John

Well, if you're not watching live, you can't call them up and have them fix the audio at the cable station that you have recorded on your DVR from 2 days or a week ago. So there's nothing you can do.

You might not want to help, but there are others on this forum who don't give up as easily as you do.

Unfortunately, if the OP can't offer more info, and others (except CPanther) didn't hear it (or something similar) it's tough to actually track it down and get it fixed. Maybe Mr. Quest lives in NC?

Granted, NBC has a screwy audio and video distribution system and should be ashamed that it hasn't been fixed by now, but not all NBC stations had this problem, as far as I can tell.

hphase,

If 99% of the time the TV audio is fine, and there's one commercial or one show that is screwy, then (unless another family member has messed with something without you knowing), it's coming from the cable/TV station. If it's live, and ongoing, sure, you can call and complain. They may even fix it, if they know what the problem is. But by that time the show may be over. But maybe they can't fix it. Maybe it's in the original source coming from the TV studio, and has nothing to do with the re-distribution of the signal. Or maybe you're watching something you've recorded and there's nothing anyone can do.

If you know of something you can do to fix the audio on a recorded TV show, please do tell.

I'm all about helping. But some things you can't help. I've experienced this a lot before, on NBC and sometimes other channels (here in California). Sometimes it's just a TV commercial. Sometimes it's a show like Jay Leno. Sometimes a show will have an echo, and the commercials are fine. It's annoying, sure. But you just learn to get over it. Because, really, there is nothing you can do about it. Except call and complain. But would you call a company and complain about bad audio on a single commercial, really? Come on. Do you call every time you see bad mpeg2 compression artifacts in an HDTV signal?

There are people on this list who make their living sorting out these sorts of problems. (I'm not one, but I know some who do.) These people want to hear about these problems, so you aren't just whining to them, you're helping them. The trick is to find that someone who cares. The problems that happen all the time are easy to fix. The odd-ball ones are a bit trickier.

It might be a moot point, because we haven't heard where this artifact was heard, except that something similar was heard in Charlotte. I've heard these problems before, and it always points to a problem that can be fixed.