Where is the problem likely to be?

[micky]

All my tv's run off a central location, which used to include cable but now has a DVDR with an amplified antenna that brings in my city and the next one.

One tv is supplied a signal through a splitter/amp and a cable, and the sound is fine.

The kitchen tv has lately developed bad sound. Words are intelligible but sort of staticy or distorted. Sometimes it's worse than others. Its signal is supplied through the same splitter/amp, another splitter, another splitter/amp, and a long cable,

If you were a betting man, where would the most likely problem be, in the kitchen TV (which is 20 or so years old), the cable, or that second amp, which has been sitting on the basement floor and running constantly, needing no attention, for 39 years?

[Adrian Caspersz]

Hi Micky,

The TV. Try moving it to the other location to check.

If there were a problem with the cable or splitter amp, you would be seeing picture and sound disturbances possibly also on other outlets.

[John Larkin]

Kitchen TV? Why?

Move it to another place and see.

[Ed P]

Why not? Watch the news while eating breakfast for starters. Have the ball game on while cooking. You can even buy a refrigerator with one built in.

[John Larkin]

I see fancy brochures for 40ish megabuck houses on the lake with a giant flat-screen TV on the wall in every room.

If you're always watching TV, you can do that in any cheap dump.

[Martin Brown]

I find it hard to believe that a 20 year old TV will work at all on modern digital TV signals without a set top box interposed somewhere.

My money for distorted audio would be on the audio amplifier circuit in the set. Electrolytic capacitors seldom last more than a couple of decades without degrading to some extent.

Signal related problems on digital are generally of the all or nothing type due to the error correction and the image usually breaks up first. Audio tends to get short gaps in and/or ultrasonic clicks depending on the sophistication of the decoder (better ones mute bad blocks, crude ones generate intense high frequency pulses instead).

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I find it useful to have a small TV I can move around to check things. That could quickly locate your problem.

[TimR]

Could a lot of things but first guess would be TV volume control, second guess amplifier volume control.

[Clare Snyder]

Multiple splitters. Each has an attenuation factor of -7 to -21 dB? Going through a splitter/amp, to a splitter, to another splitter/ amp even if they are all functional, is almost guaranteed to give you a problem. Try running the TV in question off the antenna with NO splitters or amps, then add the splitters or amps ONE AT A TIME - removing #1 when installing #2 etc to determine if any single device is problematic - and af all devices are OK start stacking them 'till you get the problem. Could even be a bad cable in the mix.

[TimR]

To this I would only add really look at the connectors. (yeah, bad cable sort of equals bad connectors but you might be able to isolate it)