No stereo audio on Cable TV
 

This is an annoying problem our household has been dealing with for years, with no solution in sight. I figured maybe some of you folks may have some insight. None of the TVs connected to our Spectrum cable boxes have stereo audio. I have checked and re-checked every setting in the TVs and boxes, to no avail. Tried composite, component, and HDMI out...nothing. Totally mono sound across the board. The one TV with a Digital Adapter (tiny square box) has stereo, just none of the actual cable boxes. They are Technicolor (Cisco) model 4742HDC units. I am beginning to wonder if this is a wiring problem in our house (damaged cable, bad splitter, etc.) Spectrum themselves are of no help.

Nothing is quite as annoying as trying to watch a blockbuster action movie, or listening to a music channel, with essentially one speaker!

I would contact Spectrum, as the problem is almost certainly with their equipment, wiring, etc. (it seems to me as if there may be a problem with old, worn-out cables or splitters).

I cannot believe Spectrum's technicians cannot help with this. There must be something wrong somewhere if you only get stereo sound on one of your televisions. The problem could well be somewhere in the wiring in the walls, defective cable boxes, or someplace else between your house and the head end; this is Spectrum's responsibility to repair, not yours. You are paying for fully operational cable service, including stereo sound, so you should insist the problem be repaired to your satisfaction. If, for any reason, Spectrum cannot or will not correct this, or gives you a runaround, I personally would drop the cable service altogether and go back to using a TV antenna. You always have that option.

I don't know if you remember the days before cable, when everyone used an antenna to get local TV reception, but if worse comes to worst this may be your best solution to the problem. I live in an area, 40+ miles from the Cleveland TV stations, which gets very good TV reception on all but one channel (the CBS affiliate in Cleveland, since that station went from channel 8 to channel 19, some years ago); this is why, and in fact the only reason, I have cable service at all from Spectrum (I have the company's "streaming" service, which works with a Roku device; I have used such a device for some time). If not for that, I would have cancelled my cable long ago and gone back to using an antenna if I did not have the problem with no reception of the CBS affiliate in Cleveland, as my reception of every other local TV station is excellent with an antenna, even rabbit ears (I use a cheap pair of amplified Zenith all-channel rabbit ears to use in case the cable goes out for any reason; the antenna receives every local channel except the one I mentioned).

Good luck. As I said, the problem with your TV's stereo sound is Spectrum's responsibility to repair, not yours. It seems to me almost incredible that they cannot correct the problem; after all, they should know their own equipment well enough to correct just about any problem which may occur. As I mentioned, you are paying for flawless cable service; if you do not get it, you have the right to cancel your service and go back to an antenna. I personally would insist the cable company correct any such problem because, as I said, you are paying for and therefore deserve to have full stereo sound on every TV connected to the cable. In the case of stereo sound it doesn't matter that much to me, the reason being I am practically deaf in one ear due to a brain injury at birth, but my point is since I am paying for flawless cable service, including full stereo audio, I would insist on having such whether or not I can hear it in stereo.

Years ago when they put traps to stop extra pay channel would clip the signal.
They remove the trap set was fine.
They tech said don't know why.put the trap back on and left
Clip the signal again.
So maybe something simular if they are not letting
All channels thru.

This problem is NOT caused by wiring unless you are seeing obvious problems in the video as well.

Composite and component only carry video, not audio. You would need L and R baseband audio connections as well. If the HDMI is carrying audio, that should be stereo, unless there is some reason the cable system does not have stereo on the signals.

You mention a digital adapter that works - what is the signal source for that adapter? Is it over the air antenna or isw it cable? Is this adapter supplied by the cable company? What kind of TVs are you using? Are they analog or modern digital flat screen? Is the HDMI going to an HDMI connector on the set or through an HDMI to analog adapter?

Without exact details, no one can diagnose your problem.

I figured it would be assumed I connected RCA L/R for audio when using composite or component video. (Yes!) The cable boxes and digital adapter (small box) are all provided by, and receiving the same signal, from Spectrum Cable. The two cable boxes are directly connected to modern digital HDTVs through HDMI, and the digital adapter (which only offers HDMI or coax out) is connected to a 27-inch Akai (Samsung) flat CRT via the coax jack. For clarification, the 'digital adapter' is essentially the device Spectrum gives you to connect any TV to the wall where there isn't a cable box, because you can't just hook your TV straight to the wall jack anymore for some reason. What I want to do next is try connecting that digital adapter to a modern HDTV via its HDMI out and see if that gets me stereo audio. (I assume that if the CRT is getting stereo audio, the signal must be there before it reaches the TV.) I'm almost starting to wonder if something about the way the cable boxes are designed is removing the stereo separation from the audio signal. Perhaps I'll ask around with my neighbors and see if any of them have this issue, if they are also Spectrum customers.

At one time cable systems were duplicating channels in analog NTSC and digital. The old cable boxes were analog of course. Now that they have gone completely to digital signals, I see no reason that the HDMI output of any box should be mono. So, yes, it needs more investigation, but the cable company is incompetent if they can't even tell you whether it's mono or stereo coming out of their box on the HDMI cable.

On the digital adapter/AKAi combo, I assume the "coax jack" is the RF tuner input, or did I misunderstand?

Correct, the digital adapter's coax out is connected directly to the Akai CRT's RF tuner coax in. The digital adapter outputs its signal onto NTSC channel 3 on the TV's tuner.

This very definitely is a problem with the boxes themselves, not any "bad signal or cable" issue. I have not had pay TV for decades, so I am not sure how a "digital adapter" is different from a "cable box". (To me, any device that connects between the cable/wall jack and a video display is a "cable box" regardless of any fancy name the company gives it.)

If you have one device from the cable company that gives you true stereo sound, then yes, I would try that device in each of your locations, or with each of its available output connections (HDMI, composite/left/right, optical/coaxial digital) to see if they all have stereo audio.

If all of your other (boxes/adapters/DVRs/servers/whatever) have only mono sound, I would suspect either menu settings that are buried in them, or a configuration problem at the cable company where you would be lucky to get access to anyone there who has the brains to understand the problem let alone be wiling to listen to you and/or fix it.

Let us know what you get from your tests.

Well, technically speaking, any signal coming out of an RF Modulator (the Coax Output of a cable box or video game) shouldn't be stereo, it should be mono (at least that's the way they used to work in the days of VHS and video games from the N64 era and before.)
So unless they've changed RF Modulators since then so that they output stereo audio now, then there shouldn't be stereo audio coming out of the coaxial output of your mini-cable box...:scratch2:

No stereo on RF modulators was the very common case, but not a hard rule.
VCR modulators were simple discrete transistor devices, but ICs have made stereo cheap enough by now.

Having owned half a dozen RF-only TVs from the 80s and 90s that don't have any other input connections, and that have onboard stereo speakers that produced stereo sound connected directly to the coax jack in the wall or an antenna at the time, I know this to be incorrect, or at least incorrect at that time. I now have no way of testing this theory (lack of either direct cable service from the wall or NTSC OTA signals) so I'm not sure if it's still the case.

Relatedly, one of my laments is not being able to find an RF modulator that will take a stereo audio signal from a game console (e.g. Nintendo 64) and output said stereo audio to an RF-only TV with stereo speakers onboard!

IIRC:
If it was an analog cable system in which the stereo signal was modulated in stereo or simply translated in frequency at the head end, then stereo could get through to the RF input of a stereo analog TV. But if the audio was some how decoded and remodulated from baseband in the cable box, it typically was mono even if the original source was stereo.

You are describing a different case that is exactly at the center of this discussion. Stereo sound was widely available from over-the-air analog stations since the mid-1980s, and also from analog cable-TV providers (initially only on a few channels such as the premium movies, and maybe MTV) starting some time later. But, stereo sound from consumer devices with RF modulators (VCRs, video game boxes, Laser Disc players, and cable boxes) has always been super-rare, almost nonexistent (on their RF outputs).

The very few exceptions I know of, that essentially were actual BTSC-type stereo RF outputs on channel-3/4 TV RF modulators, were some high-end big-dish satellite TV tuners in the early 1990s (Chaparral Monterey was one brand), and Radio Shack did sell one model of RF modulator that had a stereo output.

(Of course, do not confuse stereo RF output with any modulators that just have stereo audio INPUT jacks; most of the ones made since the 1990s probably had those jacks.)

Did you get a chance to do these tests yet, and if so, did you get stereo audio from any devices and/or any of their outputs that I described?

Also, this "digital adapter" that does give you stereo sound... How does it work? That is, when it is connected to a TV set, how are channels selected/changed, in/on the box itself or with the TV set's tuner? Is it in fact connected to the TV set only with a screw-on cable/F-type connector?

Cable was slow to get out stereo TV as I remember.

This was the days when direct cable fed cable ready sets were out ..

Those small cigarette size cable boxes from Comcast I have now has MTS stereo modulators in them..

Note: Yesterday I got a letter from Comcast saying the current boxes will be useless after May 22 when they will send everybody new updated boxes in the next few weeks..