ATEM Extreme ISO distorted audio ONLY on program output

Hi, has anyone experienced the same problem?

The ISO recording on MIC input is fine. Also in headphones, it was all good. But the program output from ATEM was distorted. I tried streaming directly from ATEM and also via USB-C, all with distorted audio.

Please see this quick video

The only thing that helped was restarting the ATEM, but I had to stop the show.

I am using the latest firmware.

This past weekend I had identical audio glitch that you observed, but slightly different scenario. I wouldn't call that distortion, but some sort of encoding error for sure.

In my case, Mic 1 (set to line input) was the only audio input that was on.

1. I recorded 99 performances across 3 days, each being 3-13 minutes.
2. Board audio + shotgun went to my small mixer which output to the ATEM.
3. Literally nothing changed between recordings.
4. Flow was: press REC at the beginning of a performance, switch the 4 cams, then FTB and stop, and fade back up via FTB>. <repeat>

The problem?

• 93 of my 99 videos had perfect audio.
• 4 of my videos had that robotic (Cyberman!) audio on the PGM output AND the corresponding Mic1 .WAV file (in "Audio Source Files" subfolder) was also robotic sounding.
• 2 of my videos had clean audio, but their corresponding Mic1 .WAV file was robotic sounding?!

I looked at the properties of a good file and a robotic one, via MediaInfo, and they look the same.

I'm running into the same issue. Seems to happen randomly. Anyone know what's causing this or how to fix it/prevent it?

At any point in you audio connection are you going from balanced (XLR/1/4") to a TRS 1/8th jack?

If so is your XLR connection(s) wired correctly for balanced to unbalanced.

I'm not quite sure what you mean exactly, but we have a split quarter-inch cable going from the monitor out jacks in our Rodecaster Pro 2 feeding into the Mic 1 port of the ATEM. I don't know if it's balanced or not. I can tell you that I've never had this problem before when we had the same set up with the Rodecaster 1. And it doesn't happen all the time, just occasionally.

So you have dual 1/4" balanced TRS going into a stereo unbalanced 1/8th TRS?

No other adapters or splitters involved?

The 1/4" connections are balanced - you can absolutely get a properly configured cable to take those into an unbalanced LINE LEVEL 1/8" jack.

If the cables and/or adapters are NOT properly worked then things can go wrong.

Phase errors can arise if the same audio is sent to both L+R (or channel 1+2) and those channels are summed to mono at an endpoint. Basically weird loss of audio and/or choppy noisy audio.

If only certain parts of the mix are being summed out of phase then only those bits will suffer.

Often viewers on mobiles will notice problems BUT not if they're wearing stereo headphones.

Look up audio phase cancellation problems.

It might not be that but it is something to check and eliminate.

So you have dual 1/4" balanced TRS going into a stereo unbalanced 1/8th TRS?

Yes. We've had this set up for a long time and then just recently started experiencing the audio garbling issue in the OP's video. It only happens randomly, but it lasts for the full length of the recording from the ATEM (doesn't drop in and out, the garbled audio lasts the full length of the recording.) And yes, we have it recorded to both the Left and Right channel without splitting it in the settings into a 1&2 channel.

As I said, this issue just happens rarely and it's totally random when it occurs. But I'd like to know if there's a way to prevent it from ever happening because it's really annoying when it does.