NTL Dublin NICAM

bazzer

I was just wondering if anyone has noticed that NTL Dublin's analogue Sky1 is not transmitting in stereo, it's coming up as single-channel NICAM. It's been like this for past few weeks.

On another point, I think it's also high time E4 had NICAM, but I suppose with the concentration on the digital service, the analogue isn't being given high priority.

Mossy Monk

are the analogue channels in Waterford still mono? on their promo channel ntl listed one of the great advantages of digital tv was that it had stereo sound :rolleyes:

zilog_jones

All the analogue channels in Limerick are FM mono except for the 4 Irish national channels (which I assume they just relay straight from Woodcock Hill).

Even worse is with half (or all) of them they seem to just take one stereo channel from the other channels, so some songs sound totally wrong and sometimes when there's someone talking off-screen in a program you can barely hear them at all. :mad:

watty

The analogue on cable sometimes does not have enough bandwidth for the Nicam. The FM mono sound is 6MHz away from VSBM video carrier, but Nicam carrier is 6.5MHz spaced. Older Analogue headend gear may not pass the Nicam signal.

zilog_jones

There's also the issue that they'd need their own equipment to generate NICAM for all the channels that aren't taken from terrestrial analogue broadcasts, as everything else will be MP2 or AC3 or whatever. I assume this would cost a bit to do as I've never seen a RF modulator on a VCR, games console or whatever that generates NICAM - they're always just mono FM.

bazzer

The Mark 2 Cryptovision decoders used by Cablelink/NTL (manufactured by Pace) actually passed the Nicam from the channel selected through the UHF modulator.