Audio in the walls
Mark Honeychurch - 12th October 2026
A few days ago I was sitting at home, re-watching an episode of Breaking Bad, when I noticed - during a scene where Skylar White was talking on the phone - that the audio track had a weird background vocal track to it. The vocal wasn’t part of the phone call Skylar was on, and there weren’t any SWAT outside the door ready to burst in on her - so the audio seemed a little out of place. Then the scene changed, and after a little while the voice started up again, which was odd. I paused the show, and sure enough the background voice kept on speaking - letting me know it definitely wasn’t part of the show.
I then pressed stop, quit the Android app I was using (Plex), and listened. After a few seconds, the audio was back. Okay, so this suggested the audio was either coming from Android, or maybe the amplifier itself. My next test was adjusting the volume - if the audio was being injected from somewhere into the amplifier (a Sony home theatre unit), the voice should get louder and quieter as I adjusted the volume. But it didn’t. Interesting.
This suggested that, whatever the source of the audio, it was happening after the amplification circuit in my home theatre. My lounge setup includes in-wall and in-ceiling speakers, with the amplifier close to ground level and the speaker cables running into the wall behind the TV, and then about two metres up to the front speakers where I could hear this rogue voice. My suspicion is that these 2 metre vertical copper wires were picking up a radio signal that induced enough current in them to drive the speakers.
I managed to hold my phone up to the speakers for a while and capture an audio signal. Although I am fairly certain that the audio varied, by the time I managed to start recording the audio had started repeating the same phrase - clear enough to make it obvious that it was human speech, but muffled enough that I couldn’t work out what it was saying. So, I’m going to leave it as an exercise for you readers.
I’ve uploaded the audio to YouTube, after loading it into Audacity and cranking up the gain as much as I could. Here’s the result - I would love to hear if anyone can figure out what it is, or has any plausible theories of what it could be: