Recently, I picked up a 17-inch Sampo LCD television and discovered that every few seconds the sound flips into an ugly buzz, returning to normal after a few seconds and then cycling over and over. Before junking it I (aka newbie) had a brainstorm and hooked it up the Sampo via coaxial to a TIVO box that had been sitting around and, after killing the Sampo's sound via volume control, ran a couple of Radio Shack speakers off the TIVO's RCA outputs. Sound is now normal.
With basic cable, I do not have the luxury of sound ports coming off a converter box. Would it be possible to split the coaxial and run one lead into some sort cheap receiver that will pass along the video and divert the audio to external speakers? How about an old VHS recorder?