5.1 Audio Fix Implementation – Your Feedback Needed

[dwieder]

Experiencing some drops on ESPN (1602) in the Houston area watching the football game tonight.

[scottfweintraub]

Lots of sound drops on TravelHD, No Reservations, 9-10 EST.

[thread_bear]

Still experiencing dropouts on Golf Channel (1641) and History International Channel (1274). SF Bay Area.

[wd0423]

As of Friday evening, the Big 4 channels have been upgraded for the following locations: 

• Atlanta
• Austin
• Birmingham
• Chicago
• Cleveland
• Dallas
• Dayton
• Detroit
• Grand Rapids
• Hartford
• Houston
• Indianapolis (including non-big 4)
• Kansas City
• LA
• Little Rock
• Madison
• Miami
• Milwaukee
• Mobile
• Nashville
• Oklahoma City
• Sacramento
• San Antonio
• San Diego
• Santa Clara
• St Louis
• Topeka
• Wallingford
• West Palm Beach

Again, thanks for your feedback on your 5.1 experiences with upgraded channels. Responses are being aggregated for audio team review.

[spd2demun ACE - Master]

Good job!  And Houston made the list, woot, woot!

So glad y'all are here working on this!

[Summertom]

The dropouts that disappeared a few days ago are back again in the West Palm Beach area. The national networks are showing about 6 drops per hour and the local Big 4 are dropping out every five minutes or so. 

I am using a Yamaha V-496 receiver with an optical link.

Thank you for your continued effort to alleviate this problem. 

[wd0423]

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SomeJoe7777 wrote:

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wd0423 wrote:

We are extremely pleased to see our efforts translate to an improved audio experience for our customers. Root cause analysis turned out to be much more complex than many of us thought it would be. 

---

I figured that the problem was highly complex.  This type of jitter issue can take huge efforts to diagnose.  Thank you for your efforts to correct the problem.

I recorded some programming last night on one of the channels that's listed in the announcement as one of the ones where the fix is implemented.  I'll be watching it and analyzing the audio on it tonight and will let you know the results.

I also saw that you mentioned that the black levels issue on HDMI was supposedly addressed in the last firmware update, I'll check that out as well.

Any news from your group on the baseball game recordings problem as described here?  There are many people waiting on a fix on that as well.

I only wish there was more communication between your Engineering group and the front-line tech support and premises technicians.  To this day, a majority of them still do not know that 5.1 audio drops are even a known issue, and hardly any of them know about the HDMI black levels problem.  Its frustrating to a customer who calls in that they are walked through needless troubleshooting steps and improper information for these issues.  How many truck rolls were dispatched because of 5.1 dropouts when there wasn't a thing that the premises tech could have done to solve the problem?

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A technical team has been made aware of the baseball game FF problem you referenced above and I'm told they're working on it. I'll pass on any status they happen to send my way. Thanks for letting me know.

[repertoire849]

The list of channels that has been fixed.

TNTHD is not fixed. Need to go back and revisit your fixes, and I do not think that all the fixes on the list are fixed, but it is difficult to watch each and every channel that is said to be fixed. You are depending on your customers to do that job for you "We need your Feedback"

The whole rollout of Uverse is another example of a company knowing that the product that is being released is inferior and full of bugs and has not been tested thoughrly. They just want a piece of the pie. Statistics probably show that they will not loose many customers over this. Just tell then we are working on it, or in my case blame it on the customers equipment.

I am seriouslly considering dropping Uverse at this point. I am loosing my patence each and every day.

[spd2demun ACE - Master]

Were you here circa 2006-2007?  UV's come a long way, baby!

Don't forget they're the new kid on the block, other providers STILL have bugs and they've been in business for eons.

[wd0423]

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ApexRon wrote:

Having been in the industry for many decades, I can state that you are correct but it gets deeper than that.

Cisco owns the package as a whole and Microsoft owns the OS. We are the customers of ATT who owns product delivery responsibility to we the customers.

For issues, the chain is as follows:

1. Customer reports to ATT

2. ATT has to confirm issue is an issue and if an issue outside of ATT realm of responsibility, involve Cisco to resolve

3. Cisco has to confirm issue is an issue and if an issue, determine if issue is within Cisco's realm of responsibilty to fix or involve the owner of the OS, Microsoft

4. Microsoft has to confirm issue is an issue and if the issue is within Microsoft's realm of responsibility to fix or involve the vendor for a particular hardware component (is the issue associated with the driver or a chip)

Now if a vendor of a particular hardware component releases a new driver, then the flow of evaluation goes the opposite direction.

How much time does it take to actually get something fixed? Well that is directly related to the severity of the issue (in this case probably how bad the issue is or how many customer it affects). I expect that the sound issue that EVERYONE is probably experiencing is one notch above the lowest severity since there is an available circumvention; just turn off Surround Sound. This is where everyone's cards and letters to ATT become important. If we had the email address for an executive of ATT's U-Verse so that everyone could send an email stressing the importance of resolving the sound issue because for probably most of us, ATT U-Verse is not the only choice we have and our other choices are able to deliver what they advertise, namely Surround Sound.

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This issue of intermittent audio drop outs on HD channels in Surround sound mode has been consuming many resources at AT&T and our vendor partners. Progress and status of efforts to isolate this problem and develop a pragmatic solution is reported to leadership every two weeks. I usually don't weigh in on dialogue of this type since it's not germaine to getting the problem corrected. However, knowing the effort expended on improving the customer experience, I think folks should know this is very high on our priority list and has been for quite some time.

[wd0423]

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dwieder wrote:

Experiencing some drops on ESPN (1602) in the Houston area watching the football game tonight.

---

Do you recall the frequency of getting the drop outs?

[wd0423]

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repertoire849 wrote:

The list of channels that has been fixed.

TNTHD is not fixed. Need to go back and revisit your fixes, and I do not think that all the fixes on the list are fixed, but it is difficult to watch each and every channel that is said to be fixed. You are depending on your customers to do that job for you "We need your Feedback"

The whole rollout of Uverse is another example of a company knowing that the product that is being released is inferior and full of bugs and has not been tested thoughrly. They just want a piece of the pie. Statistics probably show that they will not loose many customers over this. Just tell then we are working on it, or in my case blame it on the customers equipment.

I am seriouslly considering dropping Uverse at this point. I am loosing my patence each and every day.

---

Sorry to read that you're dissatisfied with our service to the point of dropping us. That's certainly not something I would like to see happen. We ask for your feedback on this particular issue because some AVRs are more sensative to this problem than others. It took awhile for us to acquire systems that would consistently exhibit this problem in our Labs and test beds. But no matter how much testing we do, the true test is always the customer's experience. Thanks for your input.

[thread_bear]

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wd0423 wrote:

This issue of intermittent audio drop outs on HD channels in Surround sound mode has been consuming many resources at AT&T and our vendor partners. Progress and status of efforts to isolate this problem and develop a pragmatic solution is reported to leadership every two weeks. I usually don't weigh in on dialogue of this type since it's not germaine to getting the problem corrected. However, knowing the effort expended on improving the customer experience, I think folks should know this is very high on our priority list and has been for quite some time.

---

I for one am grateful for this kind of feedback, as it has been impossible to get through U-verse Customer Support.

I would also be interested in any layman-level explanation for some of the apparent oddities. For example, I see that someone else in a different geographic location than me has also reported audio drops on local programming where network programming seems fine. Is this consistent with Engineering's current analysis of what the problem is, or is this something that requires a different fix?

Edit: To be clear, I mean network and local programming on the same channel.

[roadrunner_1]

Problem still exists in Houston on channels 1013 (ABC) and 1002 (NBC).  Audio drops for the length of one or two words about every ten minutes.  No accompanying video problem when the audio drops.

TNTHD and USAHD seem to be fine.  I have not checked others.

Setup is optical from DVR to Yamaha HTR 5860

[trparky]

wd0423, are you one of the people actively working on fixing it?  Getting "dirty" with the encoder hardware, software, configs, etc.

[trparky]

So wait... people have been saying that one area of the country can have a problem with a specific channel and another not have any problems?  Very weird.  Could the problem not be with the encoder hardware but somewhere on the network?

I know that highend video (like uVerse TV) requires a network with near perfect conditions; no packet loss, as close to 5 ms latency as you can get, and a network that can transmit the data packets in the order it's supposed to be transmitted 100% (or as close as can be) to maintain a consistent video stream on a long-haul network such as AT&T's video network.

[ApexRon]

Thank you for your feedback, I will take it down a notch.

However, and please correct me if I am wrong, there are two distinct audio issues:

1. Audio drops which appear to be being worked by making modifications to equipment/software not at the customer premise. In addition, am I to assume that the audio drops are associated with specific channels only?

2. Garbled audio which appears to be associated with the Cisco IPN4320 on the customer premise. I recorded a movie with the DVR in stereo mode. Prior to playing the movie back I changed the DVR to Surround Sound and played the movie. My audio equipment showed that it was receiving Dolby from the HDMI and it was wonderful. Then after about 45 minutes, the audio became garbled. I changed the DVR back to Stereo but the garbled audio continued, even when I started the movie from the beginning. I rebooted the DVR and with the DVR in stereo, no more garbled audio. So from my perspective, there is a definite problem associated with the conversion/sync of audio data from video (stream or recorded) to HDMI but I do not see any discussion on this issue.

Please comment.

[Mr_A1]

I am still experiencing major audio drops and now even more digital noise on my local CBS HD station out of Nashville.  I have still been getting drop-out and now digital noise on USA HDand STARZ HD. 

Setup: Cisco IPN 4320 to Yamaha YSP-3000 by HDMI

[dwieder]

It was enough to be annoying. I will try to monitor that in the future to provide you more information.

[darkenergy]

Just started to watch 2012 recorded on Starz HD Edge 1904 at 730 am in St. Louis on 9/6/10. The program is RIDDLED with audio (only) dropouts, about one every 15-20 seconds. This is MUCH worse than it has ever been. I am using a Denon receiver connected to the DVR with an optical cable. This same recording was then played on a set top box in a different room with minimal dropouts through a Yamaha receiver, also with an optical cable. So then I go back to the first TV and it plays without audio dropouts....   This is confusing, to say the least.  White Collar recorded on TNT HD tonight played without dropouts on either TV. Does this make any sense at all?  I'm very frustrated by this chronic problem....

[RJSinMO]

A lot of drop-outs/popping on Letterman and Craig Ferguson tonight on CBS here in STL, Dolby Digital signal. 

I honestly can't say it's any better for me.

[elmoglick]

Having frequent dropouts on the Kansas City CBS (1005) as well.    Was much better before the "fix", actually.

[gbh62]

While I'm happy that ATT has finally openly acknowledged this problem, and is (apparently) working on it, I'm discouraged by the apparent lack of progress.

The majority of people posting here seem to have either no difference or even worse audio than before.  I know it's still early in the process (well, not really) but, my gut feeling based on the limited info thus far posted here is that ATT still doesn't have a clue how to fix the issue.

Also, I'd be interested to know if anyone who DID NOT have the issue previously, still does not have the issue, or perhaps do they now actually have the issue.  ATT never asked this question.  That seems very odd to me. 

And, I have these questions:

1) Given that the majority of people posting here are seeing little or no help, why does ATT keep rolling this fix out to more and more areas?

2) Why would ATT even take the risk of rolling out a fix that might wreck the audio for people that don't currently experience any problem?

Excuse me for being skeptical about this whole "experiment", but it just doesn't add up for me.

[chrisw]

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gbh62 wrote:

While I'm happy that ATT has finally openly acknowledged this problem, and is (apparently) working on it, I'm discouraged by the apparent lack of progress.

The majority of people posting here seem to have either no difference or even worse audio than before.  I know it's still early in the process (well, not really) but, my gut feeling based on the limited info thus far posted here is that ATT still doesn't have a clue how to fix the issue.

Also, I'd be interested to know if anyone who DID NOT have the issue previously, still does not have the issue, or perhaps do they now actually have the issue.  ATT never asked this question.  That seems very odd to me. 

And, I have these questions:

1) Given that the majority of people posting here are seeing little or no help, why does ATT keep rolling this fix out to more and more areas?

2) Why would ATT even take the risk of rolling out a fix that might wreck the audio for people that don't currently experience any problem?

Excuse me for being skeptical about this whole "experiment", but it just doesn't add up for me.

---

I guess I'm part of the minority that has very few audio dropouts now that the "fix" has been applied. If it works for me and other people, It's a good starting point for AT&T. Now I'm curious if line quality has anything to do with these audio dropouts.

wd0423, Have the AT&T engineers tested this fix out in homes/businesses to see if it works there?

[wd0423]

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trparky wrote:

wd0423, are you one of the people actively working on fixing it?  Getting "dirty" with the encoder hardware, software, configs, etc.

---

Well, some team members end the day much dirtier than others but, yes, I'm a member of the audio QoE team.

[wd0423]

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chrisw wrote:

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gbh62 wrote:

While I'm happy that ATT has finally openly acknowledged this problem, and is (apparently) working on it, I'm discouraged by the apparent lack of progress.

The majority of people posting here seem to have either no difference or even worse audio than before.  I know it's still early in the process (well, not really) but, my gut feeling based on the limited info thus far posted here is that ATT still doesn't have a clue how to fix the issue.

Also, I'd be interested to know if anyone who DID NOT have the issue previously, still does not have the issue, or perhaps do they now actually have the issue.  ATT never asked this question.  That seems very odd to me. 

And, I have these questions:

1) Given that the majority of people posting here are seeing little or no help, why does ATT keep rolling this fix out to more and more areas?

2) Why would ATT even take the risk of rolling out a fix that might wreck the audio for people that don't currently experience any problem?

Excuse me for being skeptical about this whole "experiment", but it just doesn't add up for me.

---

I guess I'm part of the minority that has very few audio dropouts now that the "fix" has been applied. If it works for me and other people, It's a good starting point for AT&T. Now I'm curious if line quality has anything to do with these audio dropouts.

wd0423, Have the AT&T engineers tested this fix out in homes/businesses to see if it works there?

---

The "fix" being deployed corrects a clocking compatibility issue existing between two of the network elements in our head ends. This issue manifests itself as CRC errors to our HD encoders. The encoder, when detecting the error, will output a PA alignment error that is detected at the input of the STB along with the momentary loss of audio due to a dropped packet (or packets). Some AVRs handle dropped audio packets more gracefully than others, as you can infer by the various posts here, in that they buffer their audio input and repeat the last known good packet in the event an audio drop is detected. This results in some AVRs experiencing audio drops where others seem to work just fine. That presented a problem for us in being able to reliably reproduce the problem, not only in our Labs, but in our vendor's labs as well, to facilitate root cause analysis and appropriate remediation. As SomeJoe7777 correctly surmised in a previous post, we will be implementing this error concealment technique on the next scheduled HD encoder software upgrade. This "fix" we're presently deploying was tested in our Labs and by our vendors. Once Labs testing was completed, we rolled this fix out to the local HD channels in Austin, Texas as well as six National HD channels where they were monitored for 30 days by AT&T Labs, Operations personnel and friendlies in the Austin area that experienced AC3 5.1 dropouts prior to the "fix."  This "fix" was also implemented by one of our competitors experiencing the same issue with 5.1 audio some time ago. Can you still experience dropped audio with them on 5.1? Yes you can. As I've stated previously, this fix corrects a very specific issue. It's a real issue and this is a real fix. Are we done? Heck no. We'll keep at it. We share your frustrations (although I know it doesn't always appear that way). We know the service is far from perfect but we all take a lot of pride in how far we've brought it since it was launched.

[AmishGuy91]

First off I'm in the Dallas area and have noticed a great improvement in the audio drop issue.  Is it 100% fixed?  No, but it is a lot better.

Secondly, now is not the time to **bleep** and act all butthurt.  We've all had this problem since the inception of U-verse and have basically been ignored by AT&T in our attempts to get this fixed.  Well now we finally have an active response from AT&T and they are clearly working on the issue.  Let's stop the complaining and help them out the best we can with our feedback.

Wes

[wd0423]

Here is the current view of locations where the "fix" has been implemented to date for the Big 4 channels: 

Atlanta

Austin

Birmingham

Chicago

Cleveland

Dallas

Dayton

Detroit

Fayetteville

Fresno

Grand Rapids

Hartford

Houston

Indy (including non-big 4)

Jacksonville

Kansas City

LA

Little Rock

Madison

Memphis

Miami

Milwaukee

Mobile

Nashville

Oklahoma City

Osh Gosh/Green Bay

Sacramento

San Antonio

San Diego

Santa Clara

St Louis

Topeka

Wallingford

West Palm Beach

Wichita

[PuckMercury]

When the U-verse STB/DVR is in digital mode, programming offering 5.1 audio is pretty much spot on.  However, as was the case prior to this update, when programming is only in stereo, drops are still present and seem unaffected or at least minimally so.  The fact that digital audio isn't fully leveraged in stereo isn't really the point either before that is the route that anyone tries to go with this.  I don't want to have to go into the U-verse equipment to switch back from digital every time there is a commercial or a station/program is not offered in 5.1 audio.

[kilduffr]

I am experiencing Audio dropouts with my Onkyo AVR 3008.  I was not experiencing it with my Onkyo AVR 705.  I think there are a few issues going on here.  The CBS audio drop seems to be different than the other drops, it is more like a hiccup and was there with the 705 (not really an audio drop).

The real audio drop outs happen with all HD channels when you are no longer in 5.1 Dolby Digital.  No problems when program is broadcast in Dolby Digital.  When the program ends and the receiver defaults to pro logic, the drop outs are just like a bad zone of cell phone, you lose every other word.

WD0423, if you can get access to my account information and would like to call me, I can let you hear the experience over the phone as I have shared other techs there at AT&T.  That way we can confirm this is a true audio dropout.