So I was playing some NBA Shootout 97 (I'm a huge sucker for old sports games) on my recently purchased SCPH-90001 Slim PS2 tonight, and noticed that the audio was dropping a lot with the announcer. Whenever the announcer would say a player's name, the game would go silent for the duration of the announcement.
Puzzled, I decided to put in GameDay 98, and it was doing the same with the announcing and the QB cadence. I then remembered this happened last week when I was testing Chrono Cross (apparently CC doesn't play well with the 90001 series PS2 during the final battle). The audio would drop out for just a second every now and then in Chrono Cross. The audio also crackles, quite a bit too when recovering from the silence.
A few possible ideas:
My sound bar does not support Dolby Digital at all. Only PCM (The Xbox 360 automatically sets it to Dolby Digital when playing a standard def disc, and therefore no sound. HD DVDs play fine). Vizio has a newer model out that does support DD that I am interested in.
I'm playing my PSX games via an optical cable. Obviously the PSX never had an optical out, so the software is doing something it necessarilly wasn't meant for. Though the same could be said for Component cables on the PS2, but there's no issues there that I know of.
Could possibly be my new powered optical switcher I purchased last week. My Xbox 360, Blu Ray player, and PS2 are all connected to this and have had no problems at all. They sound absolutely incredible connected optically to my sound bar via this switcher.
I'll test tomorrow with my original 30001R model from December 2001, see if that has the same issue. I bought the slim though for it's small design and progressive playback (It's the best standard def player of my three disc players). Anyone else have a similar problem, and/or possibly know what's going on?
Did some more tests with the previous sports games. They sound perfectly fine when playing through the component cable analog audio, and passing through the TV via optical cable (I have a four way optical switcher. Input 1 is my 360, Input 2 is my Blu Ray player, Input 3 is my PS2, and Input 4 is my TV). Though it sounds quite a bit quieter when passing through the TV.
A very minor inconvenience yes, but I'm still curious about this. I want to say it's partially due to the fact I'm playing PSX games via an optical cable?