Buffer over run.
This would be exactly what caused it. Back in the mists of time in the 2000's I worked for Thomson USA who made RCA and GE TV sets. A certain movie played on FOX and at a certain point in the movie all RCA TV's with a certain version of software lost there audio. 3 Hours later this happened on the West coast. Lots of head scratching and finger pointing at FOX network who transmitted a malformed close caption signal which is fed to the micro and over wrote the audio buffer sections of the micro with garbage. Power off at the wall socket and everything reset back to normal. Turns out this was widespread and the broadcasters had lots of garbage in the Close Captions. A VHS recording would cause the audio to go off again. RCA got the broadcasters to tighten up the Close captioning and the issue went away. Close captions = Oracle + Ceefax subtitles on 888.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
