Can a PAL-fluent person help me understand sound carriers?

[AlanInSitges]

Hello PAL people!

I've come across something that's got me stumped while working on several PAL sets: the sound is always "off" - smeary and distorted - like it's mistuned or something. I can generally bring it in clearly with fine tuning, but lose the picture in the process.

This has happened to me with two different Philips generators (one analog and one digital) as well as a cheap Chinese modulator. It's identical behavior across all the working sets I have; an early-60s Philco, a mid-60s Zenith, and an early-80s Telefunken solid-state color set.

I have the generator/modulators set to PAL B/G, which is the same region (Spain) as where these sets were built and sold, and presumably worked for many years.

I understand that sound carrier spacing is different across the different PAL flavors, but I'm not sure what I'm coming up against here. If it were one set I could believe maybe it was brought from the UK or something and tuned for a different sound carrier, but three Spanish-made sets that's not going to be the case.

So, the questions:

1. What would the symptom be if I were set to the wrong PAL version in my modulators/generators? That is to say, does the mistuned audio sound like the culprit?

2. Am I crazy to think I should try to do an alignment or even get in there and diddle on the quadrature coil? I'm leery of touching any of those since I don't really know what I'm doing yet, and worse still risking de-tuning any of those circuits when the problem lies somewhere else.

Thanks (as always) for the help and insight.

-alan