NBC app Live Local TV - Weird Sound mix

[whistleandthumb]

Trying to watch the live local stream on my NBC App, and all I get is background music. It's like I'm getting a 5.1 mix but in stereo, and they forgot to include the Center channel that has the dialogue/talking. Even the news programs (Today, Nightly News, etc.) I only hear music and sfx.

I've tried changing the settings in Apple TV to "Stereo" (from 5.1 or Best Available), tried changing the audio receiver to Stereo... I even tried going around the audio receiver straight into the TV, and it's all the same.

To make matters even more bizarre: The NBC App on my iPhone and iPad does the same thing.

All the On Demand shows play perfectly... it's just the Live Local stream.

Anyone else having this issue?

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

There's a lot of possibilities here. It's probably how the audio is mixed or perhaps how the stream works vs. OTA. Can you pull the same channel over the air and compare the sound? if the OTA version also having the same issue?

The on-demand stream is probably the national feeds, encoded ideally by network engineers.

I've noticed some commercials seemed to be sound encoded to ignore the center channel in a 5.1 setup. Suddenly what should be front center sound like voices are playing from the left & right speakers instead... and sometimes from the rears. I'm confident that's also just encoding issues.

If you can sample the OTA versions and you don't hear the same that way, that's probably pretty good proof that the stream just has something funky setup for audio. A good test would be to listen through the stereo TV speakers to basically replicate the (only) stereo speakers of your iDevices and TV.

A potential solution that almost no one typically thinks about: call the station or better yet, GO to the station so they can hear the problem first-hand. The engineers that run these stations are- in my experience- nearly shocked to hear from the public. And they seem almost excited to learn someone is actually watching.

Here in South Florida, we've had a few hurricanes do some damage and knock some stations off the air. This is especially true for sub-channels. When the hardware is repaired, sometimes the stations seem to forget to turn sub channels back on. A call or an email gets a dazzling level of response.

Take a tablet or phone into the studio and let them hear what you hear. You might get dragged into the depths of the engineering department and get a little first-hand lesson of how everything works. In my experience anyway, they seem to LOVE to solve such problems when an actual member of the public is noticing the results of the work, even if that notice is that it's not working as expected. You might have several guys making every effort to correct the issue.