Blip blip blip - ARG !

Looks like an old problem could be back :

Sound issues ...


The link is what I wrote about it before but the summary is that every few minutes (at worst), there'd be a blip of a second or less where the soundtrack on a dvd would go silent through the new kit.

Thought I'd cracked it by switching to a couple of good HDMI cables but it seems to be back. Ho hum. I suspect it's me fixing another connectivity issue that's resurrected this one, so I'll be managing 2 evils :

1 - silent blips in soundtrack
2 - headscratching over how to get blu-ray player to talk to amp to talk to telly.

The combination will occasionally refuse to connect blu-ray player to amplifier and I suspect fixing that (amp getting confused over which inputs to use) has caused this one. I've done some tweakin' with the software setups and I'm now doing the evaluation thing again, listening out for those silent blips. 1 Babylon 5 episode so far and no blips. Good sign.

Telly off air (except the Ashes !) has been very bare of stuff to watch lately, so I've fallen back on rewatching some old stuff. The 1990s saw some absolutely brilliant episodic sci-fi come to the telly, some of which was so good it got ripped off and retreaded into things like Star Trek. (Deep Space 9 continually ripped off Babylon 5 stories and arcs).

The current catch up is Babylon 5, which spanned 5 series and a heap of TV movies. There was an attempt at a spin off, called B5 Crusade which got killed off due to the networks being numpties. Too much interference and when they didn't get their own way, B5 Crusade was killed off just as it was starting to ramp up.

Anyway ... Babylon 5. It's about a space station named after the series, which is a melting pot for all of the various races inhabiting the universe the series is set in. It's blessed with a series of strong characters and there's enough scope in the writing to inject snippets of humour into the interactions between those characters. It was made between 1994 and 1998 on a shoestring budget, so there wasn't the ability to use Star Trek quality visuals in the programme. In the early days, it was a farm of Amiga computers generating all the images. Saying that though, what they do with the visuals is startlingly impressive.

Low tech can beat high tech if you know what you're doing.

And they definitely knew what they were doing. B5 was the first sci fi series to have a Grand Plan covering what they intended to put on screen. It was originally scheduled to run 5 series (110 episodes), however the networks interfered and the main storyline got squished into 4.

Right - one of the better episodes of season 1 is ramping up so I'll get back to "evaluating" :-) Babylon 5 : second best scifi series of the past few decades. I'd be watching the best (Farscape) if my sister didn't have some of its dvds !