September 26th, 2009:  Charter Cable and WAKA Channel 8

 Ah, Football Season...  Living in an SEC state has it's strong points:  Not one, but two big football teams within a two hour drive of here.  Of course, I prefer to watch the games on televison rather than go to the stadium, and usually it's a better experience.  I didn't have to sit through torrential rains last weekend, or this weekend, for that matter.  The Alabama game was on CBS, which meant an HDTV football game, however the sound is perpetually screwed up at WAKA for some reason.  They keep slipping back and forth between Dolby Digital and Stereo Audio.  My audio processor was having fits with it, and sometimes the right channel would go out completely.  During local commercials, WAKA's audio is evenly split between being in phase and out of phase, which is a little disorienting and terribly annoying.  Add to all that, the fact that CBS will air a commercial, then watch the players set up for another play, then go to yet another break at the snap, and watching the game almost isn't any fun.

 Now I understand that Auburn had an amazingly bad season last year, and we'll be paying for it with bad schedules for a while, but come on.  The game was on FSN this weekend, which (for me) meant no HDTV.  Charter DOES carry FSN in HD, but only in a special (and even more expensive) tier, so I don't have it.  I can live with SD video, except that they show it here on Channel 27, which has always had horrible video, and even worse sound.  Green shows up as near-yellow, and the audio is very noisy, and only comes out of left channel, not even in stereo.  The video is always too hot, so players in white sparkle a little, and the artificial blue line is green, and the yellow is very pale and difficult to see.