I have a Sony DV PC9 camcorder that's around 3 1/2 years old. Since new
I've recorded around 15-20 tapes, all Sony Excellence.

In the last 2 months I've started getting audio dropouts on playback.
This occurs when played on the camcorder (goes silent) or when
capturing (with nero it goes into digital audio breakup ie wierd
harmonics etc) for glitches of around 1-2s at a time, but repeated
every 10s or so. Mostly the video seems fine.

I've mostly recorded in SP, first time this happened I'd been using LP,
so I swapped tapes & flicked to SP, thinking the problem went away, but
it doesn't seem to -- at least it's occurred on a second tape (although
that was part of the same tape batch).

Playing an old tape seems ok.

I'm guessing it could need head cleaning (never done). Do the symptoms
match? The video is mostly ok, although on one tape I got major picture
breakup whilst videoing some F1 racing cars at Goodwood. Everything
I've recorded since has been slower moving!

If so, care to recommend best head cleaning for Sony's (am inclined to
try a sony tape)

Also, is the error-prone audio stream passed along the DV channel? Any
sw that can try to recover any of the stream?
Thanks
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cherry byte nigel me uk