Anyone else have a RCA DRC247N that has audio not working correctly?

[jeff d]

I've got one of these cheapo players for the TV-Guardian feature for use with the kids.

And things work well, except I've been running into a problem that RCA says they've never heard about before.

When a DVD is inserted to play the DVD starts without any audio coming out the receiver.

The DVD player is connected to the receiver via digital coax.

I can turn off the receiver and back on and then the audio works. This is the only DVD player out of the many I own that is doing this. I don't suspect the reciver is at fault.


What I suspect is happening is that the DRC247N is sending some garbage audio stream that confuses the receiver. And the receiver needs to be allowed to reset in order to get the audio back.

The audio cutout happens right off the bat and I haven't figured out if it's any specific format that is causing the problem.

You could say it's the reciever's problem for not gracefully recovering due to this problem, but I don't think that's the case. I really suspect the DVD player is the guilty party.


I also asked them if there are reports of subtitles being displayed by default on some DVDs when the DVD hasn't been configured to display subtitles. THey gave the helpful advice of turning off the subtitles with the remote. WOW?!? Really? Wish I would have thought of that... they just don't understand I'm too lazy to get off my ass to get the remote and press the button twice.

[Krispy Kritter]

Could also be a failing/faulty receiver. There's no way of knowing for sure which is at fault without further troubleshooting. Have you tried connecting a different receiver?

Subtitles (on/off) can be set on the dvd itself, although the standard default is off. Some movies have subtitles whether they are on or off.

[jeff d]

I was hoping someone else could confirm my findings and make my job easy. =)

Yeah I agree with the trouble shooting, done that already. Although, it's not 100% reproducable, so moving to another receiver may or may not show the problem.

With 4 DVD players this is the only one that has a problem. That and there's also 2 directivo receivers and replayTV using bitstream audio to the receiver. None of those other devices has ever had any problems. This is unique to the RCA player. I guess I could switch to the other digital audio transport (ie from optical to coax or coax to optical) and see if that help. Currently I'm running on digital coax.

From my expereince (with some big names Sony, Onkyo and others) if source misidentifies a stream format the receivers will fail. (ie stream bitstream header is garbled or just wrong) My guess is that this is happening. I've also been too lazy to actually analyze the bitstream out from the player.


RCA wants me to send the unit in for repair/replacement. I didn't want to do that if this is a product line defect. If it's not fixable then why bother.... RCA has a had a dual screen portable DVD player we bought since the month we purchased it. It's going on 4 months with no player in our hands. I'm not to confident in the factory RMA stuff.

[Krispy Kritter]

Since it obviously has a hardware issue and RCA says they will fix under warranty, I would let them do it. No reason to waste a lot of time trying to create a workaround solution for a piece of hardware that is faulty and under warranty. If nothing else, get another one to use while waiting for this one to be returned. They are extremely cheap.

I know where you are coming from with some repair centers. My very first DVD player was a Panasonic which spent most of it's first 3 months in the repair shop being "repaired". The third time it failed (which I could reproduce with a single movie in less than a minute after driving 40 minutes round trip and 10 minutes connecting/disconnecting all the cables) I told the store manager that I wanted a new unit or my money back. He allowed me to get another player (same model) which is still operational (8+ years).

[4194]

I have the same model RCA unit. So far it has surpassed my expectations. I have not had a similar problem although i only have it hooked up to the TV.

I also bought for the TV-G but it doesnt really work so we dont use it.

The only issue that i have had is with DivX/Xvid playback.