Low batteries in DTV remote created weird Surround Bar 6000 problem

gdmedia

I had a Polk Surround Bar 6000 installed on the wall under our new Sharp TV, in mid-September. We have DirecTV (DTV) and I synced the Bar with the DTV remote. All worked well, at first. But pretty soon, the Sound Bar started exhibiting an intermittent problem: sometimes when I would attempt to change TV channels using the DTV remote, the Sound Bar would stop working. No sound. I tried everything I could think of but the problem kept happening, about once or twice a night. I finally found that I could get the sound back by turning the Sound Bar off and back on. But then, I would have to re-adjust the sub volume using the Polk remote.

I called Polk a couple of times and talked with tech reps, who were very helpful but only came to the same conclusion that I had come to -- that something must be wrong with the Sound Bar. We made arrangements for me to send it back to Polk in California for replacement. But then I was enlightened.

Then, during the process of trying to reproduce the problem for someone, the batteries on the DTV remote went completely out. I had noticed that the response of the TV to the remote had been slow sometimes recently but it had not been enough of a problem to cue me that my remote batteries were weak. Anyway, I replaced the batteries in the remote. And the Surround Bar problem just stopped happening. (The response of the TV to the remote picked up nicely, as well.)

I delayed sending the Sound Bar back to Polk to see if the problem had been fixed -- and it had. Now, after 6 weeks have passed, I have never had any problem again. The Sound Bar works perfectly!

So, apparently, the problem was that weak batteries in my DTV remote caused the channel-change signal to the TV to somehow tell the Sound Bar to turn itself off. And nobody at Polk thought of this possibility. Nor did I or my installer -- until the batteries went completely dead and were replaced, fixing the problem.

One of these days, this will happen to somebody else. Maybe they'll find this posting.

disneyjoe7

Good to Know, and something Polk techs should know.

BlueFox

All my remotes over the years act weird when the batteries are low.