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SOMETHING WEIRD GOING ON KCAL 9

R

radiojomo

I tuned in to watch the 11PM syndicated showing of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" on KCAL 9 and something really weird was going on. The sound was in both English and Spanish (Spanish overlayed on the English)! I went into my DIRECTV system to see if something was up with the audio settings and they weren't altered! I also went into my tv to see if the SAP was on but it wasn't!
Has this every happened to any of you guys?
 
Maybe another Larry David stunt? Like the "backwards episode" of Seinfeld?
 
Someone made a goof, that's what happened...

Alot of shows that come from 20th Century Fox includes a third channel audio (Spanish.) If the person in Master Control (or Satellite Operations, at the TV station) does not properly tune in the correct coordinates for the show, you will get Spanish (or SAP) on one of the main English channels. For Fox, the audio settings, if I remember correctly since the last time I use to do Satellite Operations were 5.8L 6.2R 6.8S
 
Now, I don't know KCAL's setup, or if they HUB out their Master Control, but when I use to run Master Control, and I would have a bad feed like this; on our switcher we could route whatever the good channel of audio was to the “bad” channel, so you wouldn't hear the SAP.

For instance, if Channel Left was English, Channel Right was Spanish, I would just route Channel Left Audio into the Channel Right Audio, and that would fix the problem (and write up an OAD.)

Since I don't know anything about KCAL's Master Control, can't tell you why they didn't do this. More than likely, they are HUB'ed out, and the person on duty was paying attention to 2 or more feeds.
 
KML-224 said:
Um...what is an OAD? :)
Click to expand...

Sorry... lol... an OAD stands for On-Air Discrepancy. That's when something happens that wasn't planned or logged on the official station log. This (mixed up audio) would be an OAD, another is the station sitting in black/slate, wrong commercial runs, commercial runs too early or too soon, stations goes off the air (unscheduled.) Even breaking news could be considered an OAD as you are deviating from the log, and missing spots that needed to run.
 
Over here in Mobile, Alabama we had 2 episodes of CSI Miami with the same problem last season... Spanish and English at the same time. This is especially weird as I don't believe any Mobile, AL network affiliates have ever used SAP to broadcast shows in a second language.
 
poledo said:
Over here in Mobile, Alabama we had 2 episodes of CSI Miami with the same problem last season... Spanish and English at the same time. This is especially weird as I don't believe any Mobile, AL network affiliates have ever used SAP to broadcast shows in a second language.
Click to expand...

Could be two reasons for that, if you didn't hit the SAP button on your remote by accident: 1. It was the syndicated version. (Which I don't know if the show is in syndication yet. Do you remember it happening on a Monday during primetime?) 2. Possible that wires got crossed somewhere.
 
The incidents in Mobile were first run CSI Miami episodes last season in Prime Time. The problem was reported on local TV boards, everyone experienced it. The English was potted up louder than the Spanish, but the Spanish made the two episodes unwatchable. Someone posted an explanation from the WKRG engineer on a local board, but I can't remember what it was.
 
If a station receives all the audio channels simultaneously, and then sends them to their Dolby Digital encoder, without telling the encoder that it is a stereo-only feed, they could be sending both English and Spanish at the same time. Your receiver, thinking it was 5.1, would fold those extra channels down in to a mix of both Spanish and English.
Generally, the station's encoder will send metadata that defines the stereo mixdown, to mix the rear channels (where Spanish might inadvertently be located) to be about 3 dB lower than normal.
 
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