On regular but random occasions I find anything up to a minute or two of the sound during a recording playback is broken up. Speech sounds like slow stuttering i.e. short syllables interrupted by brief (1/2 sec ?) periods of silence. The picture during this speech distortion is perfectly normal. Sometimes it is possible to rewind and replay and the sound is OK but this does not always work.

I thought the hard drive might be on its way out but, since the picture is OK and since it is sometimes possible to recover the sound by rewinding and replaying, this may not be the problem.

Has anyone any ideas what is causing this problem and how to resolve it?

Sound to me like an MPEG decoder issue following a 'glitch' in the data stream.

Stop and restart may fix it? The rewind and play is not always enough to reset the decoder. Sometimes the 'glitch' is bad enough to repeat when played again (it's possibly in the signal as recorded - a reception issue - or sometimes caused by errors in the record/playback on disk, or even due to interference from something electrical.

If using hdmi connection, try scart/rgb for a bit (you must also remove hdmi cable from both TV and 9300T) to see if things are the same or improved.

Thanks for the suggestion. I switched from HDMI to scart connection between the PVR and TV and to date the sound problem has not recurred. Keeping fingers crossed!!

Spoke too soon! Changed to SCART connection and all initially seemed OK. However the sound distortion on playback has now re-appeared about as frequently as before. Would a new hard drive help?

I've been considering replacing the 9300 but contributors to this forum suggest all currently available Humax models seem to have significant though different problems. I have a 9200 bought over 10 years ago that is still working reasonably well (after several firmware updates) I would have thought that PVRs marketed now would all function reliably without glitches. Is Humax still the market leader it was?

I would be surprised if a new hard drive would have an effect on a sound issue. Any issue with the hard drive is just as likely to affect the video data as the audio data. Indeed as there is much more video than audio data stored on the drive you would think the video would be more likely to be affected by a dodgy hard drive.

It's more likly an electronics fault somewhere. As it affects both HDMI and SCART probably somewhere near the start of the audio chain.

If you dive into the other PVR forums here and elsewhere on t'interweb you could be forgiven for thinking that just about every single PVR ever made was or is a total pile of crap. Thing is people are more likely to post problems on forums such as this which can skew the perception of any particular product. Chances are that you will have absolutely no problems whatsoever with a new Humax.

And there are precious few machines above the cheap Turkish and Chinese clones sold by the truck load by the likes of Currys and Argos. Panasonic do a few machines for example.