Pace Box, New EPG Sound drop outs now constant!
Jaycee Dove
Posts: 18,762
Forum Member
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Enough is enough Sky.
Ever since we got the new EPG on our Pace box last year there have been regular, irritating sound drop outs on live TV. ITV HD are one of the worst but loads of channels (including Sky ones) have it, too.
I have contacted Sky to be fobbed off with the 'claim' they know nothing and it must be my box and they will come out but only if I pay Sky £65.
Yet the forums (including their own) have many complaints of an identical nature and it is blatantly obvious they have to be aware of the reality - which seems to me that the older (3 years in our case) smallest hdd boxes are struggling with the new EPG software in some way.
I have put up with this like others sure Sky must be working on the problem despite their rebuff to me and others who contacted them.
Now today the drop outs became permanent - with the sound going off, returning, off, on etc in a never ending cycle making viewing impossible.
I rebooted to zero effect - as I knew there would be from past attempts - and now have had enough.
Is anyone else with this issue finding that it has suddenly deteriorated today to the point you can no longer access certain channels in any usable way?
Ever since we got the new EPG on our Pace box last year there have been regular, irritating sound drop outs on live TV. ITV HD are one of the worst but loads of channels (including Sky ones) have it, too.
I have contacted Sky to be fobbed off with the 'claim' they know nothing and it must be my box and they will come out but only if I pay Sky £65.
Yet the forums (including their own) have many complaints of an identical nature and it is blatantly obvious they have to be aware of the reality - which seems to me that the older (3 years in our case) smallest hdd boxes are struggling with the new EPG software in some way.
I have put up with this like others sure Sky must be working on the problem despite their rebuff to me and others who contacted them.
Now today the drop outs became permanent - with the sound going off, returning, off, on etc in a never ending cycle making viewing impossible.
I rebooted to zero effect - as I knew there would be from past attempts - and now have had enough.
Is anyone else with this issue finding that it has suddenly deteriorated today to the point you can no longer access certain channels in any usable way?
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Comments
Maybe you need to accept it was nothing to do with the new EPG and your box just developed a hardware fault. In which case Sky are not fobbing you off.
also, using support forums as a basis to judge a wide-spread forum can be misleading, as you generally don't get everyone who doesn't have a problem posting that everything is a-ok.
i see you have 3 options going forward
1) pay the £65 and get a replacement box, hopefully you'll get an amstrad drx890.
2) bin the box and buy a replacement box yourself
3) go thru to cancellations and go down that route to see if you get a free call-out.
don't blame to people you speak to though. guaranteed they won't have any support notice about possible sound drops out possibly caused by an EPG upgrade.
I paid £300 to buy this box in 2009 to replace the £300 box I bought with Sky HD in 2006 that was KOd by the PSU problems.
So I am extremely reluctant to buy yet another full price box when new customers are getting better boxes for free.
May be a loyal Sky customer since 1989 but not going to be taken for a ride.
If needs be I will send a polite e mail to the boss if I run out of patience here.
new customers in any business always get a better deal, that's just the way it goes.
£65 will get you a replacement box, might even be an amstrad.
or as i said, go down the cancellation route and try to call their bluff, but be prepared to follow it thru if they don't.
I paid £250 for a crappy Thomson then when that finally drove me nuts I got a DRX890 then when that blew up I got a 1TB DRX 895 for £150 from Sky about a week before they started to give them away for £49.....
some of us just don't seem to get lucky..... :P
There are loads of us with the same irritating sound drop out problems on our Pace boxes. People have posted on here, avforums and Sky's own forum. There are plenty of long ongoing threads regarding this issue.
The problems DID start with the EPG update in November, briefly disappeared when we reverted to the old EPG, but we are now permanently stuck with the issues (unless there is a firmware fix).
These problems are not imaginary. Nevertheless I stopped posting on here. I am not after sympathy. I have written to Sky twice and been ignored, phone calls are useless.
Time to cancel!
I rang sky up the week before xmas about my Samsung box and the totally unwatchable poor quality picture low resolution pixeling etc. After a bit of polite conversation about how I have virgin media for my BB and phone and that fact that I could move my tv services to them I was finally offered the drx895 2tb box for £49. So it my be worth a call to see just what you can get the box is a lot more responsive and its all a myth about them being a poorer picture quality than the Samsung and pace boxes its just as good if not better.
I know others have the same problem but they dident have it go wrong several days before the new EPG was sent to their box and I havent heard any of them say it had got so bad the box was now unusable.
it certainly does seem strange.....
Which version of the EPG is it? I've sort of lost track of which is the current production version.
My Pace box has been fine with the 13.00P version and the lastest 16.00P beta release with probably not more that a couple of dropouts an evening. I just wish they would sort out the judder on HD channels when switching from a SD channel to a HD channel when the resolution is set to Automatic.
In reality I predicted it because both our Samsung and Pace boxes started acting strangely this week EXACTLY as they did in the few days prior to getting the new EPG software last year.
I said then that in my experience the new software is dormant in a box for a short time before activated by the update and this can lead to issues increasing in the interim day or two.
I was told on here that does not happen but I have been with Sky years and seen it occur before so I bet this might be what was occurring this week.
And - bingo - the Samsung got new software on Tuesday and the Pace overnight today.
Not psychic or a coincidence.
Seems it has resolved the long gap between pressing play and the sound emerging from amps that was another 'new feature' of the latest EPG. Which is good news and offers hope it might help the (I am sure related) sound drop outs as these - like the sound returning late - onkly occurred over optical.
Fingers crossed. But this issue is/was real and did start the week the new EPG arrived and was reported to Sky.
Looks like they have been trying to fix it. It would have been nice if instead of telling us to fork out £65 needlessly they would have just been straight and said the truth. I would have been happy to wait knowing they were on to the case.
Anyhow, let us hope the big problems yesterday were a result of the latent software and now it is here all will be well.
I also hear that if you are persistent with Sky and phone up to complain about your box being slow/unstable etc then many people have been successful in scoring a free box out of them.
Absolutely non stop drop outs on every channel.
I have tried everything to fix it and estab(lished a few things:
1: It is not (as I thought) an optical lead issue. Disconnect that and it still happens.
2: Nor is it a sound system one at all (disconnect it and use TV sound and it is still there in the background - like breaking clicks as opposed to total sound loss).
3: Resetting the box to non stereo and non DS is no help.
4: BUT - importantly - record and watch as live a second behind and the problem vanishes!
Can anyone think of why this should be happening.
No usual fixes cure the box. So I am starting to think I am going to have to try again to talk nicely to Sky.
faulty box?
unless of course everyone with a pace box is having the same level of problem.
I too have a Pace box and this is the first time I've observed this happening.
The workaround like you say is to pause live tv and it goes away.
I wonder if some software solution was on test with Pace boxes?
Does anyone from Sky have a clue why this occurred? (As you can see - Chenks - it was widespread)
Maybe we will get a software update this week as I note that problems usually happen a day or two before these arrive. When software is maybe awaiting activation?
it wasn't when i posted, hence the suggestion.
I appreciate that. Was not getting at you.
It is the Sky box that can't cope - this has been blatantly obvious since the EPG release last November.
To put my spin on Jaycee's synopsis:
- I can cure the audio dropouts by watching in live pause mode, or from recordings (therefore I can't prove the issue to an engineer by recording instances where it is particularly bad)
- last week I replaced my optical cable with a digital coax but the problem remains
- the problem is not there over hdmi, but then neither is Dolby as the Pace box cannot carry DD over hdmi
- on my box at least, the problem does not happen other than via an av amp, but I have tried 2 different av amps and the problem is still there
Like you I keep getting asked the same questions so just gave up.
I also did a one to one chat on Sky's forum with one of their people offering to help. But got no further there either.
At times in some of the replies from Sky people who seem in the know but are probably (understandably) scared of saying too much in public in case they say something not intended for open release - I did detect hints that Sky are aware of this problem of compatability between Pace and the new EPG but have failed to fully resolve it.
I would just like to be told this, that they are working on it and will either resolve it or offer to replace boxes that they cannot fix. That seems reasonable enough to me.
I think having given them near on 6 months now we are being patient.
To be honest if it is just a few times per day (the norm) it is put up withable. But the other day was an entirely new level and for hours the box was utterly useless and we had to watch via freeview.
Something different had to be occurring for our boxes to be so much worse (same problems but to an excessive degree). So it ought to be an indication of the cause and might - of course - indicate an attempt to put it right,
But how are we to know if nobody comes clean? All I can say is that if it happens again as bad as that then we will all be justiifed is saying to Sky that the time has come to either resolve the problem or offer us an alternative solution.