ATEM Mini Pro ISO - Tinny Sound HDMI but not AUDIO .WAV

For about six months, I have had no issue grabbing high-quality sound from my camera HDMI feed with my ATEM Mini Pro ISO. And then this week, the sound embedded in my video file has a tinny sound . . it is awful. No change to my setup. . . I have everything locked down in my YouTube recording studio.

If I record from my camera. The sound is great.

And if I look at the ISO file AUDIO folder, the .WAV is great.

Since the problem began, I did just upgrade the ATEM software and firmware. Same problem.

Ideas???

I believe I have a "better" solution but not an answer to my original issue.

In researching I learn that the HDMI embedded audio is "compressed" but the ISO Audio folder .WAV is unprocessed and uncompressed. So going forward, I will be using the .WAV file.

Still does not explain the change in behavior, but in the end it is a better project result.

While it is true that HDMI can carry compressed digital audio (typically in one of the Dolby formats, AC3, Dolby Digital/DTS, etc.), I somewhat doubt that is related to the problem you are seeing as I don't think the ATEM switchers have any support for Dolby audio decoding or encoding. So you likely wouldn't get any audio at all in that case.

It's more common for cameras to send uncompressed (PCM) audio over their HDMI outputs and this is also what the ATEM works with (in the case of the ATEMs it is 24-bit audio at 48 kHz). If you were sending HDMI audio in a slightly different format (say 44.1 kHz), then some kind of sample rate conversion would likely be required, which in theory could affect the audio.

But I would also double check the settings of the ATEM Audio Mixer (using the ATEM software) to make sure that you don't have any of the more advanced audio processing enabled (compressor, EQ, etc.) as this could definitely affect the resulting audio signal out of the ATEM in a significant way.

And you could also try switching to a different HDMI input to see if that makes a difference (although from your description it sounds like the HDMI audio into the ATEM may be ok).

For about six months, I have had no issue grabbing high-quality sound from my camera HDMI feed with my ATEM Mini Pro ISO. And then this week, the sound embedded in my video file has a tinny sound . . it is awful. No change to my setup. . . I have everything locked down in my YouTube recording studio.

If I record from my camera. The sound is great.

And if I look at the ISO file AUDIO folder, the .WAV is great.

Since the problem began, I did just upgrade the ATEM software and firmware. Same problem.

Ideas???

I presume you're recording to a SSD via the USB-C port on the ATEM?

H 264 carries compressed audio. Technically the uncompressed wav might be better but not night and day.

Is it possible that you are running dual mono audio?

Summing issues/phase errors with audio can make the audio sound bad/thin.

Look at the entire audio workflow from the microphones/desk/camera input/ATEM input settings. You should be able to trace the issue.

Given you've updated software look carefully at the ATEM audio input - is it set to dual channel or a stereo pair? What's the source? How's that mixed? How are you monitoring the recorded files? Headphones/stereo speakers or built-in device speakers laptop/tablet etc

I appreciate everyone's suggestions and here are my updates.

> Yes, I am recording to via USB-C to a SSD (this Samsung has not changed in a couple of years and continues to work well).

> I did some basic troubleshooting of testing XLR microphones and XLR cables plugging into a separate ZOOM H6 recorder.

>But when I found that the AUDIO folder .WAV file was not impacted, I did stop testing cables . . may tackle the HDMI cables next.

>I did go in and review my ATEM audio settings and I thought that I did "zero" them out; but based on feedback here, I will go back and double-check.

I spent about an hour swapping cables, resetting ATEM Audio . . . all with no success.

I could focus on swapping more cables, but at this time my workflow with the standalone AUDIO .WAV file works perfectly, so I will save my methodical troubleshooting for some future date when I have "nothing" else to do.

What does it sound like when monitoring via the headphone jack on the ATEM?

Spent more time on this.

I did hook up headphones on the HDMI out to a monitor and all sounded fine.

I did swap microphone and still the same issue. I guess I should attach a different microphone to the second camera feed, but it will not be XLR.

At this point, I am ready to settle with using the .WAV file in the audio directory. It does not impact my Zoom calls and I have invested multiple hours into troubleshooting but with a simple workaround, it does not seem worth spending more time.