[opendtv] No Commentary on Fox/NASCAR Broadcast


I am having a consistent audio problems with my recordings of the NASCAR
races broadcast on FOX.  Because I didn't watch the OTA signal live, I
don't know if it is in the recording or if it was live.  I did watch a
brief amount on cable at a friend's house (while waiting for the Indy 500
rain delay) and the commentary was consistent.

The symptoms are these:  the audio is fine for all commentary and
commercials until the drop of the green flag.  When the race starts, all I
get is natural sound, the audio of the race cars, and short blips of
commentary.  Commercials run fine with the proper audio.  The audio for the
racing action switches based on the visual (i.e., an in-car cam has in-car
audio, a track shot has the audio with the cars zooming by, etc.).
However, every once in a while, you hear a short bleep and there is some
commentary and a second later it goes back to natural sound without
commentary.  This happens the entire length of the race up to the post race
when everything is good again.

I am guessing that my VCR is stuck on recording SAP and that this isn't
happening on the regular broadcast (I checked my VCR and it says it is
recording the standard stereo broadcast.)  I can't imagine this happening
on multiple races without fixing it.  I am guessing that the feed to the
SAP is some aux channel on a router that is switching based some other
control signal and that the natural audio is mixed on a separate console
than the commentary or final output is mixed on.  Does FOX (or whoever is
producing audio) know that this is going out?  Does this audio go with some
special feature?  Does anyone know an engineer working on the NASCAR live
trucks?

Dan Grimes

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