Audio issues from mixing board -> ATEM Mini Pro

I'm currently helping get my church up and running with livestreaming using an ATEM Mini Pro.

We have things pretty much in place, except that the sound is really bad when we try to broadcast musicians.

I'm primarily an audio engineer who is just "helping out" with video, so it isn't that I need to know how to mix. I just need suggestions on how to clean up the noise, get the overall level to play nicely with YouTube's automatic compression, and why are the compressors on the ATEM Software Control so bad??

Currently we are sending all relevant audio channels down an aux on the sound board. That aux goes down a 20m cable to the main camera, so that there are no issues with synch. That camera signal goes via HD-SDI back to the sound/video booth, where a Blackmagic SDI-HDMI converter converts it for plugging into channel 1 of the ATEM Mini Pro. Then that sound channel stays always on on the ATEM even when the stream cuts to other video sources.
So, it's a constant sound source, but the comp/limiter on the camera's XLR input + the comp/limiter on ATEM Software Control + the comp/limiter on YouTube seems to be a horrible combination. Piano comes across all wibbly wobbly - one compressor knocks the overall level down, then slowly lets it back up, only to let another compressor in the chain knock it down, and the noise (long cable run?) makes the mix really hissy, even when no mics are being sent down the aux to the camera.

Suggestions? Am I making that signal path more complicated than it needs to be? Or is it too simple?

Finally, is there a way to monitor the audio output to the stream on headphones? I was hoping the operator could monitor the sound on headphones from the laptop, but it doesn't seem to work like that.

Hi, Jordan!
I feel your pain - for most of our congregation the audio is the most-important part - and for others, getting the audio really clean is important for YouTube to be able to produce usable automatic closed captions. Caveat: I'm not a sound guy (not a video guy either, but I guess in COVID you do what you have to do...).. this is what's worked for us (we're a very small church - so I recognize your environment may be a lot more sophisticated).

We are running audio from a small Mackie mixer (taking off the unbalanced "tape" output) and running that into the ATEM mic input (set to "line" sensitivity through the Software Control). The ATEM is the newcomer - so we've put it, like, 3' from the sound board.
You are right - there's a sync issue (audio leads video by about 2-3 frames, based on a simple 'clap' test) - but the ATEM will let you dial in up to 8 frames of audio delay. We have turned off all camera audio: our only audio source is the mixer; so we monitor the audio (using phones) at the mixer. We keep the "Program" audio meter display on the Multiview showing output levels for coarse adjustments (i.e. keeping us somewhere between -5/-30dB) but otherwise we don't worry about it: if it sounds good, and it's not peaking and it's not down in the noise, it's good

Hope this helps...

Tom

Simpler would be to patch into the ATEM directly and set a few frames of delay. Include a hum eliminator in the path to avoid ground loops. Pyle works great. Not sure why the hiss. Is the aux balanced? Either way a short hop from mixing board to ATEM through a hum reducing transformer should give a clean signal.

I've been pretty cheap and short cutting our setup thinking if it works great, if not then I'll clean it up.

We have an X32 sound board with a Y to a AMP next to it, and into a 150' audio cable running to another AMP that I'm pretty sure is not on the same circuit and both are clean audio never have had any issues.

But the AMP level meter has some real issues. What it indicates is always fine for voice, what you see and what your think should be happening, are the same.

For music this is not true. Music in the red area, and never hitting the peak, sounds distorted. Carefully watching this meter its very obvious that the peaks it shows miss a LOT of the peaks in the music. So the actual level is clipping but the meter never indicates it. I've not look close with the recent firmware updates.

We run all audio in the yellow, with slight incursion into the red being allowed. This always gives us clean audio.

HTH

Hey bud I’m a pro audio engineer and hv recently purchased and installed the ATEM Mini Pro into my Church as well. I hv done professional streaming of concerts with great audio. We used a AJA Audio to SDI embedder and sent that into one of the SDI CAM inputs on our switcher.
So I tried the same w the ATEM MP using Blackmagic embedder. But bc the input is HDMI I had to add a SDI to HDMI converter.
The resulting sound had crazy noise and artifacts the rendered it unusable to me.
Next step was to bypass that and try direct out of console into mini 1/8 mic/line input on switcher.
While this works the audio breaks down with large dynamic range of typical worship band. When hitting lows it begins to distort. All gain levels are good throughout signal flow.
At this point I believe it is a problem w the A/D converters in the switch.
BM Tech Support solution is to send it in for ck.
Will update w results.

Thanks, everyone.

So after some further testing (which consisted of bypassing the audio on the ATEM Mini Pro entirely, and plugging a digital input straight into the computer & sending that to Youtube), we have determined that 95% of the issues with our audio is coming from YouTube compression!

So that's cool in that we now know we aren't doing anything wrong in ATEM Software Control... and not cool in that I have no idea how to bypass YouTube's automatic settings.

I'm going to look for answers in more YouTube-specific forums, but if anyone has any tips, fire away!

We are having similar issues and really having a bear of a time sorting it out. One of the things that we encountered is that the cable feeding into the ATEM mini has to be an unbalanced stereo. We had a couple duel xlr to 3.5mm cables and turns out one of them wasn't unbalanced. Because of that we had massive phasing issues with the band. The same signal coming out of the mixer is great when it is just one person speaking, but when we have the band playing the audio level was diving and resuming all over the place. We played with all the limiteds and compressors and such with no solution. Getting an unbalance stereo cable solved the phase issue with all of the band audio jumping around.
We are still having other issues similar to what you are describing. I'm about to just set up a single shotgun mic in the back of the room and see if we can't just pull in a descent live sound that way.

Not sure if this helps, but we had this issue until we switched the Mic 1 input type from Mic to Line.