If youve poked through the new features of Comcasts A25 updated Menu and functions you might have come across something a bit new under "Set Up"-->"Audio Set Up". Its Descriptive Audio Service. And its a repeat trouble call waiting to happen. Forum Member Chainzz presented us with the below issue, which had us all scratching our collective heads.

Here is a snippet from Chainzz initial post.

    " Had a service tech call, can't figure out a digital issue so I roll out the address and take a look. Greeted by the customer, fustrated but very cool and nice. Anyways digital mux, when tuning to a channel on the mux the audio drops completely within 10 seconds, picture is perfect. Alright break out the meter, low levels and qam levels getting iffy. Replaced everything in the house, drop amp installed to help compensate for some of the splits in the house, however box did this direct to ground block. Digging through the alerts and whatnot and found out we were having issues since the firmware update, however not affecting this series box. So I said ok, I'll replaced it this time with a totally different box ....worked great for 2 days, however the guy waited almost 2 months to call me back and said the issue arrose 2-3 days after I left the previous time.

     Now, this is in an established area, alot of customers in a small area and this is the only callin for the area over and over. I have come to the conclusion its not RF / PLante related - noise floor is clean (just rebuilt that node) this is where I turn to the brains, any idea's??? "

     Always up for a challenge the forum members starting throwing out ideas. Everything from combining at the headend to bad grounds or SAP and recievers. Chainzz added more info stating after an initial box swap things worked perfectly. A few days later however the issue reappeared.

     Chainzz updated us. The customer was going into the menu and setting Descriptive Audio. Having no idea what it does, just setting everything in the menu. After an initialization hit the settings would be wiped out and everything would work again. The customer would then again go into the menu and reactivate it.

     A simple note to managers, supervisors and technical trainers- cover this in a morning meeting. Its only a matter of time before the same issue pops up in your area with one tech and one customer who will spend the next month going slowly insane.

A little about descriptive audio and its purpose below, yet unrealized apparently. It behaves much as SAP does. Removing all audio if there is not a second audio track present, or simply locking onto the 2nd audio track, which if available is usually a blank audio track. As of this article, Im not aware of a channel carrying a second "Descriptive Audio" track.

Descriptive Audio

Some audio compression standards such as Dolby AC-3 and E-AC-3 support transmission of descriptive audio as ‘associated service’ to decoders that have the ability to combine the ‘main’ audio information with the associated information.  This type of usage reduces the channel bandwidth to transmit both ‘main’ and ‘descriptive audio’. However, it does require receivers with the capability to decode two audio streams and mix them.

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