Thanks litzdog911. After posting the original message, I decided to try a couple more things. One thing I tried was swapping the Genie client boxes and to my surprise, the client that had been working in the other room was no longer working and the one that was experiencing the audio problems was now working. I did try the Dolby Digital audio setting in both the on and off positions, but that made no difference. However, your post also got me thinking about something else ... that in that particular room, the Genie client feeds an AV Sound Receiver (Yamaha RX-A3030). It's HDMI out of the C31 into the receiver (which has video pass through) and then from the receiver to the TV set. So, I tried bypassing the receiver altogether and went directly from the C31 into the TV. Audio was now restored! Of course, it was poor audio because it didn't have the benefit of the surround sound speakers, but it proved that the issue has something to with the receiver. I've further since discovered that it appears to be something to do with the HDMI handshake between the C31 client and the receiver. If I reset the C31, audio is restored until I change channels. If I power off and on the receiver, audio is also restored until I change channels. If I simply switch the input on the receiver (lets say from DirecTV to Blu-Ray and back to DirecTV) the audio is also restored until I change channels. So it seems that whenever I change channels on the C31, the HDMI connection between the two is somehow disturbed and I lose audio. Only forcing the HDMI connection to be reestablished (which of course will happen if I recycle either of the boxes or change inputs) seems to bring the audio back.
That still doesn't explain why it's only happening on certain channels, and why it started all of a sudden. (It's been the same connection for nearly two years now.) Also, my Blu-ray player which also feeds the receiver is *not* experiencing any audio problems.
So now I have two more tests to run. I'm going to try a different HDMI cable and I'm also going to switch the Genie client to a different HDMI input on the receiver. I'll post back once I've had an opportunity to do that, but in the meantime, if you or anyone has encountered such a problem before, any thoughts or advice would be welcome.
- Tom