Weird Commercial Sound Thing Today

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been watching ABC network today (basically it’s just on as background) and at one point I heard music playing during a commercial and no other sound. I looked over to see an Abilify commercial with only music and no sound even though the cartoon woman was talking at some point. I thought maybe the network was having trouble with the sound and was playing music but then the next commercial played normally.

Then I noticed some other commercials with only music, even though the people were talking, so it seems part of the sound track works but not all of it. The TV shows run fine but maybe about one third of the commercials are having this issue. It seems to be happening for the past two hours. What would cause this and why haven’t they fixed it?

2

Did you accidentally switch your TV audio settings to “SAP (second audio program) On”?

3

I wouldn’t even know how to do that. Granted the cats often walk across the remote and change things but I looked over the remote and menu and there is no option that I can find to change SAP. It’s still happening but not as many commercials are affected, but since I don’t like commercials anyway I guess it’s no big deal.

4

I had a similar experience while watching an NFL broadcast a couple of years ago. I could hear all the crowd noise, music bumpers, etc. but there was no play-by-play/color commentary whatsoever. I thought that maybe the network was reviving that experiment from the 80s where they broadcast a game without announcers.

After several minutes I discovered that the commentary was solely in the center channel of the 5.1 mix, and I had somehow knocked a speaker wire loose from my receiver.

5

I’ve also had this problem crop up a few times, almost always on ABC’s HD feed. Back during the last few seasons of Lost it would happen quite often, so I had to choose between the SD feed chopping off the sides of the picture, or the HD feed cutting out the dialogue.

IIRC, it has something to do with the surround sound feed going wrong, like they switched the front and rear channels. Since I don’t have a surround system, this meant I wasn’t getting the channels with the dialogue.