Tivo audio has stopped working

Very strange behaviour. I attempted to replay a show recorded last night and there was no sound - also I noticed that the normal tivo sound effects for the UI didnt sound correct (but they were working).

I rebooted tivo and it came up OK, but still no sound from live tv source. Sound did work (albeit a bit distorted) during the startup animation.

Plugging the STB directly into the receiver excluded it as a possible source of the problem. Just to be sure I swapped tivos audio cables as well but it made no difference.

Going back to a recording made a few days ago tivo had sound working OK.

Today tivo has no sound output at all. Not even the sound effects from the UI. I have rebooted tivo several times and still no sound. Powering off makes no difference either.

Does anyone have a suggestion - or are my worst fears likely to be realised that it is a hardware problem and I need to replace/repair my tivo?

BTW my tivo is a Phillips US model HDR112 with a 160Gb hard drive and a Turbonet Cache card with 512Mb.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Peter.

Hi Peter

Do you have any sound from recordings form, say, a week ago when things were considered normal? If they too have no or distorted sound then yes you quite possibly have something hardware faulty from the MPEG decoder chip downstream, which also includes the D/A audio converter and the output preamp circuit. If you are able to try your hard disk in another TiVo to rule out anything software wise that would be a good start, otherwise you are quite welcome to ship the whole thing down to me and I'm happy to make a full assessment at no cost.

Thanks Darren, I am pretty sure that I dont have sound output at all, but I will recheck when I get home tonight to be certain. On the day I had the original problem I had distorted sound from tivo itself (ie sound from the UI), and nothing from free to air via tivo. Older recordings did have sound though. The next day even the distorted UI sound was missing, and think I tried the older recordings too, but cannot remember for sure.

I dont have easy access to a second tivo so I will let you know once I've made certain that I have no sound at all re shipping the box to you.

I hadn't realised how dependent I had become until tivo stopped working.

Regards, Peter.

LOL! Yep once you have a TiVo you never look back. To save divorce I have several and any married person should consider the same. The wrath of a woman whose TiVo you have messed up while tinkering is something no man should have to suffer :)

Distorted and then no audio sounds very much like another TiVo I had in to fix which turned out to be relatively easy and inexpensive to repair. I can't judge or quote without looking at yours first, but that's why I extend the offer of a free assessment first before a go/no go from you on a repair or total board replacement if it is something seriously wrong.

Cheers

All fixed.

Took about half an hour to diagnose/trace/repair.

You had lost your 8 Volt power regulator for the analogue sound output stage. This 8V is derived from the 12V of the power supply and regulated to 8V by U62. No volts = no sound :)

Here's a snapshot of your board with the part highlighted by the yellow box outline. This picture is with the replacement part soldered in place. Apologies for the lack of detail as the forums only allow for a 39K attachment :(

Darren, you're such a smart cookie! :D

Hey, just a query on behalf of us NZ TiVo people. If we have hardware issues with our units, would you be prepared to look at them if we sent them to you at our expense?

Absolutely. I'm prepared to look at any TiVo from anywhere and happy to give no obligation free assessments of what is wrong before any work is done. So long as shipping costs are paid for I'm not losing any money so therefore no problem :)

In Peter's case I pretty much had it fixed before I knew what was going on so I just fixed it anyway on the spot. The part was only a few dollars and the end result is his TiVo will be back to him by weeks end.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Darren King

Apologies for the lack of detail as the forums only allow for a 39K attachment

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As a side note....

I'll have to look at upgrading this. I didn't realise it was only 39k. The biggest problem for me is that I am slowly running out of Disk space on the webhost I use. I am thinking of jumping servers, but that won't be happening soon as I'm limited for cash at the moment. Will look at upgrading when I have the chance though!