Teradek and Bad Audio

Our stake center has a video (Sony camera) and audio from the Chapel fed back to the library cabinet. That is transcoded to HDMI and fed to the Teradek device which broadcasts to the Church Webcasting system.

We've experienced audio issues on and off for weeks. One week it will sound OK, and the next week it will sound like people are talking into a can and muffled.

We had FM come out and they installed the recommended line isolator, but that only seemed to make things worse.

Last week audio was good. This week we tested before the our meeting started and that audio was again very poor, after no other changes having been made. So we rebooted the Teradek device and the audio sounded fine for the duration of the meeting.

• Is this clear enough evidence that the Teradek is to blame?
• Should we just resign ourselves to the "reboot before every meeting" plan or are there any other ideas how to solve our bad/inconsistent audio issues?

TIA for any ideas!

In unclear as to how the audio is getting into the Teradek. I suspect the issue is that sometimes the audio is coming from the camera (via HDMI), and sometimes from the sound system.

I'm also weary about 3.5mm jacks. A balanced audio will look like a stereo connection, but will sound horrible when put to mono.

russellhltn wrote:In unclear as to how the audio is getting into the Teradek. I suspect the issue is that sometimes the audio is coming from the camera (via HDMI), and sometimes from the sound system.

I'm also weary about 3.5mm jacks. A balanced audio will look like a stereo connection, but will sound horrible when put to mono.

Audio is converted from the chapel audio feed in the library cabinet using an RCA to HDMI Converter and goes as HDMI to the Teradek. The Teradek firmware has an option for Analog or HDMI, which I assumed mapped to the 3.5mm jack that is has (which we are not using). Ours is set to HDMI.

So, the video comes in via RCA? Ok, so there's no way for the audio to come in via the camera.

At this point I'd suspect the SD to HDMI converter, or the audio connection to it.

You might want to connect the audio to the Teradek. I'd set it to "line" input and "left only". That should get you around most of the 3.5mm audio silliness that can happen.

srgibbs99 wrote:Last week audio was good. This week we tested before the our meeting started and that audio was again very poor, after no other changes having been made. So we rebooted the Teradek device and the audio sounded fine for the duration of the meeting.

Last week our audio was bad. We rebooted the Teradek and that fixed the audio.

Our encoder is several years old, and I am suspicious it may fail soon, but it has to have been the Teradek because we run our sound out of the audio rack directly into the encoder. Our video goes from rack RCA through SD to HDMI converter to Teradek, so the converter would not have caused the problem, unless its HDMI input was messing with the encoder.

To add to the mix, the chapel system itself glitched this week due to a loose microphone connection at the sacrament table. This also happened last week, and I wonder if sending 0db white noise to the encoder might help to scramble its brains.

Something you might want to look at is how to keep the Teradek cool. The times I've used mine, I noticed the way it was pictured and mounted it so it was suspended off the ground and vertical (tiewrapped to the camera tripod). This allows the heat to flow out the side vent (now a top vent) and cool air to get sucked into other side (now bottom) vent.