Over the past several months, our digital cable box would exhibit the weirdest behaviour.
As anyone who owns a digital cable or sat box, severe pixelation and audio dropouts occur when signal reception is poor or momentarily lost. It seemed sporadic. Some days it was fine, other days it was awful, rendering some dvr recorded material unwatchable. The one thing I did notice was the phenomenon during loud peak passages (explosions, for example).
I checked the connections to the box. I checked the coax cables. I also checked the hdmi connections, but nothing.
One time I called the cable co. and they reset the box from their end. It seemed to clear up, but the problem came back a couple of days later.
After a couple of months, I called for a cable co. tech., who thought it was my Radio Shack active cable splitter. He said too much gain can cause as much problem as not enough. He disconnected it, subbed a passive -3db splitter. All signals were now within his required specs. I must add that no reception problems occurred during his visit.
Again, the problem cropped up within a couple of days.
A note about my pad. I own a health club in a small town. I also have a 3 bedroom open-concept apt in the same building. A great layout, except for the fact the aerobic studio is above us. Not a big deal as I don't generally have classes before 9am or after 9pm.
One night, the gf and I were watching tv and she pointed out the reception usually went for a crap during classes. I hadn't noticed this before, but dicarded her observation. Hey, along with owning the health club, I'm a control technician at a nuclear station. What would she know about these things?
A couple of weeks later, I was watching a show while a few ufc members were training in my studio. They were a small group, but made up for it with their stomping around above me. My reception went for a crap again, and I remembered what the gf mentioned before. I went thru the connection again but couldn't find a thing.
Then I realized, I missed one connection: the main coming into the house near my breaker panel in the garage. Sure enough, the main was connected to the splitter, but the living room connection wasn't even threaded!
It all added up. The thumping around from above; the loud passages helped along by my sub; the fact the tech dropped by in the middle of the day, when no classes were on.
After threading the connector on PROPERLY, I haven't had a problem since.
Lesson learned: don't underestimate the observational powers of your better half!
