[Anthony]

Well the dark side of being an A/V handyman is that sometimes you are asked to fix a system that you NEVER would have recommended someone buy. This happened to me last night.

Old friends of the family have Bose Lifestyle system with the VS-2 "video enhancer" module, Samsung 1080p TV, and Blu-Ray player.

The story goes, they got the TV and Bose stuff -- it worked great (Bose unit has a DVD player built in), then they got Verizon Fios with the HD box, that worked, then BluRay, that worked.

Then one day, the Fios box and BluRay would not sync with the TV. Both HDMI signals run through the Bose VS-2 box and only one outputs to the TV. The BluRay gives no picture and the Fios box worked for a little bit, but then kept flashing and flickering and not syncing to the signal.

All units work fine when sent directly to the TV (including the VS-2 switch box, when only fed from the main Bose DVD/amp unit), so I know it's not a TV, source, or cable issue.

I tried dumbing down the resolution to 1080i for everything, even though the Bose is spec'd for 1080p as well, that did not fix it.

So now I'm stumped. I've read about copy protection problems with HDMI switches, so that might be it. The unit itself may have gone bad (although it passes through some signal and I did get it to work for a brief bit last night with just the Fios box), but then when we powered down and back up, it wouldn't sync (flash some video but then flicker off again).

any ideas here? I tried a bunch of different power on/off sequences to see if that's it, but found nothing conclusive.

They are going to swap out the unit under warranty and hope that fixes it -- but it works just enough to lead me to believe this might be something else.

Any advice or experience here is appreciated. Thanks,
Anthony