[Emily1]

I have an old (at least 10 years) Zenith television which had been playing DVDs with no problems. Then about a week ago, I inserted a DVD and got no sound. Figuring the DVD player had simply played out, I purchased a brand new Phillips DVD player. Once it was connected. Again, no sound. No sound problems with the television--only when attempting to play a DVD. Where could the source of this problem be?
Please help!
Thanks
EA

[DanielF]

Emily,

Probably the cable connecting the DVD to TV. I'm guessing the TV has only a mono (single) audio input, and the audio cable has gone open circuit. But it could also be something internal to the TV set...

But cables are cheap, so buy a new one first and see if that fixes the audio. These days an audio/video (analogue) cable will have three connectors each end: red and white (audio right and left respectively) and yellow (video). A good quality cable will have a thicker yellow cable, since the video has a special impedance requirement.

If yout TV is indeed mono, just use either the red or white for that (the same colour at each end, of course!). Even better would be to also buy a 'Y-adapter' (2 RCA male to one RCA female) to join the left and right DVD outputs into a single signal for your mono TV.

But if I'm wrong and your TV is stereo (with both red and white cables attached), then it's unlikely both cables would go open simultaneously (in other words, you might lose left ot right sound, but unlikely both together), so this would suggest some internal (TV) fault relating to the audio switching (selection) circuits. A job for a technician in that case.

Daniel

[mikearienti]

I recently plugged RCA cables into both Mono and Stereo on my TV and my DirecTV box because the sound was very hollow coming from only the Mono. I have been doing church audio setups for well over 10 years, so I knew there were ways to get better sound.

I now have the same issue as Emily1. I have tried various combinations of cables, including piggybacking my Stereo audio to the DVD with an RCA piggyback cable. On one setup, this required the DVD to be on to get any sound at all - even when only using the TV. Swapped that and got Stereo sound back on the TV, but not the DVD. I get no sound from the Mono regardless of what setup or what cables I used.

My conclusion: the Mono inside the TV set is fried somewhere (speakers, connection, wires, etc.). This TV is now useless for a DVD player requiring Mono.