Audio problem after firmware 2.2.28

It’s cool. I just want the manufacturers to fix their product.

When it wouldn’t work on my phone, I was told to change the Tablo from surround to stereo. That made it work on my phone but then the recordings started chirping. So they told me to change it back to surround. That fixed the chirp but now I can’t watch live TV on my phone again. I get picture but no sound. So I changed it back to stereo and I still don’t get sound on my phone. So, to recap, it works on my TV if I set it to surround sound. It doesn’t work on my phone regardless of where I set it, even though it did at one point. Does that clear it up?

I get that this has something to do with Android because it works on my iPhone, but YouTube and every other video app works with Android. Tablo needs to fix this so it works with Android too. It seems to me that much of the community here is more interested in acting as apologists for the company than they are in seeing the company get things right. I can’t wrap my mind around it. We pay for something and it is advertised to do certain tasks. Shouldn’t we expect it to actually perform as advertised?

The problem with that comparison is it is not necessarily apples to apples.

Thanks for the clarification though because the part that doesn’t make sense to me now is when you switched back to stereo you still can’t get sound on your phone with live TV. Definitely seems like something is up there that might warrant opening a ticket with support.

I was just wanting to make sure it was understood the only thing to which I was speaking was the surround sound and Android phones, not the original issue for which this post was created.

I wish ALL Android phones were supported as well, I’m just saying they never said surround sound worked with all Android phones. This article even says “select newer models only”…

Possibly a timing thing. Tune a channel, change a setting, failure to stop and retune the channel.

I just sent this same information to support@tablo along with a recording [attached in the e-mail] of the symptom.

I’ve seen this reported to Tablo for years with a lot of finger pointing to Roku or NVIDIA etc but his happens on my INVIDIA Shield TV, a Samsung Smart TV and my laptop.

This Tablo must be restarted daily due to false, low signal or no signal messages and missed recordings. I have my home automation system turn it off at midnight then back on a 8:00am every day. That fixes those error messages.

However, about 50% of the time, I get this excessive chirping and to stop it, I simply switch channels then go back to the original channel and it is gone for the rest of the day. The attached video shows me starting with channel 2-1 and the excessive chirping then switching to channel 4=1 which now the chirping sound is gone. Switching back to channel 2-1 gives me normal sound, no chirping for the rest of the day.

This ALWAYS works unless I forget to do it and then my nightly recording of the local news on Channel 2-1 will have the chirping sound for the entire news cast.

I have reported this numerous times and usually I get a response late afternoon on a Friday to activate remote control for your evaluation but of course, you shut down for the weekend and then my home automation will have shut and restarted the Tablo 3 times when Monday morning comes around.

I’d just buy a new unit HOWEVER given I’ve seen this reported at least as far back as 2015, it seems Tablo is ignoring the issue or cannot determine the cause. Obviously as 3 totally different devices play the Tablo Live TV or recordings with the chirping the problem must lie with the Tablo unit.

I have Surround sound turned off as it does not play nice with my Panasonic 3D TV.

From the Settings Page:

Tablo device: 2.2.40

HTML Application: 1.9.20 build 1011 [202112081441]

MAC Address: 50:87:B8:20:0A:E4

By turning your Tablo off at midnight and back on sometime in the morning, you might be missing the nightly maintenance updates. For me, those updates happen sometime near 3am.
Maybe the nightly maintenance updates could fix or correct the problems you are having?

Our team has received your ticket, and you should be receiving a reply shortly, once they’ve had a chance to investigate.

Same with a Tablo dual air purchased this year and up to date.
Chirping is directly related to the sound spectrum.
There is little to no chirping with medium to bass voices and sounds. As higher pitched sounds occur in the recording stream, the chirping occurs and is louder than the actual sound.

Some recordings have it. Unrelated to the channel, signal strength or time of day.

Extremely poor customer service.

In what way? Can you explain how the customer service is poor?

This issue has been going on for years (since2015) with no definitive explanation or solution. The topic has been opened and closed many times in this community and yet, here we are in 2022 and it is still going on. Users have provided suggestions on individual solutions such as degrading QOS of the recordings or 3rd party applications. Some solutions have transitory effects, and yet the problem persists.

My uneducated guess would be one of the encoding algorithms is unstable. The issue occurs during playback on an extremely wide variety of devices using both the Tablo app designed for that device and the 3rd party players. In my case, a recording exhibiting this characteristic still “chirps” on Apple iPhone, iPad, ROKU TV (using either internal speakers or optical link to an amplifier), generic Android media box, Android TV, and windows 10 app.

The goal is to pay once for the tools to cut cable / satellite without losing capabilities. The competitive devices do not exhibit this issue, while apparently all Tablo devices have a propensity to have this fail mode.

@valleau Sorry to hear you’re running into this issue.

We have seen this happen rarely in cases where one or more channels in the customer’s lineup have weak or problematic signals which the Tablo can have difficulty decoding.

Other customers who’ve experienced this have had success improving their antenna setup and/or removing the suspected trigger channels.

As you may have seen, rebooting the Tablo seems to clear up the issue for a short time until the weak or problematic signal triggers this decoding issue again.

We had previously mentioned this in a different thread which you may have missed.

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RE: Electronic noise/chirping in audio

This also happens to me regularly and just happened again last night on a station with a strong signal. This has been a recurring problem for a few years. It might go away for a few months but it always comes back. It’s very frustrating since the recordings are basically useless when that happens. I know it happens on at least 2 different channels but I haven’t kept good notes of every time it’s happened - regardless, it’s not specific to one channel.

I would also take issue with the rebooting suggestion. Maybe it works in some cases but mine was power cycled less than an hour before last night’s recording that has the chirping to replace the hard drive. I recorded another show later and it was fine.

One other thought about rebooting as a fix… if that is indeed helpful in some situations, why not make that an option in the firmware? That way it can be rebooted in an intelligent way - when it won’t interfere with scheduled maintenance and no recordings are active or within the next ~30 minutes.

Playback devices: Roku, Windows, Android (chirping happens on all of them - as other have mentioned, it appears to be baked into the recording)
Tablo Firmware: 2.2.40
Surround Sound: Off
Recording Quality: HD 720 5 Mbps

Can you give us a clip? Sounds like this has been happening to a few people but I have not heard it. Is it just the sound no video artifacts?

No, I deleted the recording but it’s the exact same issue that was reported in this thread:
https://community.tablotv.com/t/weird-digital-noise-in-audio/28653

The first post has a sample clip. You are correct, it’s just a sound issue and the video is fine.

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Thanks, I’ve never had this on my Tablo but I have heard that before in other digital media.

I had a recording with it a couple weeks ago, first time for many many months. My situation, it’s almost too rare to note any possible pattern.
(though I have many archived recordings wich may or may not be impacted)

@jimtablotv Please see my Original Post at the top. I posted a clip to DropBox.

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Thanks, I’m not sure how I missed it.

I got this artifact last night on the football game. Channel 2–1 in Atlanta. On both Roku and android tv. It eventually went away, after we went back to the android, after starting with the android, and then going back to Roku. I did try to turn on surroundsound to see if that would fix it, but it wouldn’t let me, because for some reason it says Roku cannot handle surroundsound . It sounds like a cassettes tape at high speed. Disappointing to have this issue. I’ve had it before, infrequently , on recorded programs.

What didn’t go away was the buffering issues. It might be the hard drive, it’s about 10 years old so I replaced it this morning. I did see buffering a couple times a couple times for just a few seconds with the new drive, but it’s not like last night. We’re just sat there for several minutes buffering.

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