Not used my USB Freeview receiver for a while, hooked it up because I dug
out an amplified aerial and thought 'heck, why not.' In essense, audio seems
to be varying degrees out of phase - measurably 90 degrees out of phase on
BBC Three and N24. I observed this phenomenon tonight on BBC Three, BBCs One
and Two but most noticeable on News 24. Speech is fine (which is generally
monaural, so yeah) and on other channels it's a bit noticeable in places,
but it's most obvious on N24 and BBC Three where there's stereo music... The
top of the hour buffer (with the countdown) on News 24 is totally out of
phase for its duration.
I'm sure I've not noticed this before, or if I have it's not been that bad,
so I've not really thought too much of it... But with a reference studio
setup I've gotten very used to out of phase audio (I do a lot of mixing and
production for my uni course) and it sounds really odd. Elephant Diaries'
stereo incidental music is also very out of phase.
Is this something anybody else has noticed, or is it just me with this
particular setup? I've got AC3Filter playing back audio at the moment, but
it's doing nothing fancy, just matrixing the audio to a simple L/R config
(stereo in, stereo out). I've got recordings from years ago (Glastonbury
recordings, music recordings etc) and they never sounded wrong... This has
me wondering if it's something to do with my particular setup, or whether
some funky psychoacoustic processing has been applied to any stereo audio.
Mono sound and speech remains perfectly in phase, dead on the axis
Ambient background from in-shot stereo mics sounds like it has a very wide
stereo image (binaural or T-bar mic on the camera?) but it's still pretty
much in phase
Background incidental music and trailers / buffers (N24 etc) sound totally
out of phase
I can see the phase in Audition as I watch a channel, so I have a good
realtime, visual representation - and it tallies with what my ears can hear.
Can anybody else hear what I'm on about? It's been a long time since I had a
good chance to properly listen to the sound on Freeview, but I need a sanity
check on this, because to me, something sounds different. Help!
Cheers
Christopher
