Question / Help Bad mic distortion when downmixing to mono

MaverickRPDM

New Member
I am using an XLR microphone with an audio interface and am having serious troubles with audio distortion, but only when downmixing to mono, and only in OBS. I can get this issue to replicate across two different computers, and there are a series of constants.

1. If I set my mic Sound Recording Properties (in Windows) to 2 Channels, the mic audio in OBS (and all other programs) can only be heard in my left ear, but there is ZERO distortion. For obvious reasons I can't only record on the left speaker, but it's interesting because it suggests the problem isn't with my equipment.

2. Regardless of my settings, if I set OBS' Audio Monitoring of my Mic to Monitor, I can never hear any distortion.

3. If I set my mic Sound Recording Properties (in Windows) to 1 Channel, the mic audio in OBS can be heard in both ears, but there is bad distortion. It reminds me of old MP3s that have been compressed too hard. However, for some reason when using Windows 10 Voice Recorder, I can hear myself in both ears with ZERO distortion.

4. If I set my mic Sound Recording Properties (in Windows) to 2 Channels, as in point #1, but then go into OBS Advanced Audio Properties and check "Downmix to Mono" for my Mic, I get the exact same distortion as in #3.

5. If I set my mic Sound Recording Properties (in Windows) to 2 Channels, as in point #1, but then go into OBS normal settings, under Audio, and set "Channels" to Mono, there doesn't appear to be any distortion, but the audio doesn't sound quite crisp either. I would be able to live with this, except that using this setting means OBS is going to pick up my PC audio as mono too, and all directional audio on my stream will be lost, which is unacceptable.

6. Trying to use other software (such as VoiceMeeter Banana) to convert it to Mono does not solve the problem.

I am using a Focusrite Scarlett Solo Audio Interface. I have tried everything I can think of, and everything my googling has suggested, and can't get anything to work. It definitely seems to be an issue with converting the signal to mono, but for some reason I don't have the same issue in other programs (such as Windows 10's Voice Recorder).

Any help here would be extremely useful.
 
Not zero level in channel #2 (dc level)? Downmix to Mono just averages sound data from both channels.
 
Try the first insert I do here to my MIC in EqualizerAPO, Copy, it makes the Right Channel an exact duplicate of the Left Channel which centers it. 3:15 is when i start setting up the COPY Insert...excuse the little errors in the video, I am redoing it later today.

 
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I stumbled upon the answer, although I'm terribly surprised I couldn't find this answer readily available elsewhere. I'm putting it here in case someone else shows up with this same problem: Make sure you've got the CoreAudio AAC encoder installed. It comes with iTunes, although you don't need to install all of iTunes to get it. Just download iTunes, open her up with 7zip or whatever, and install ONLY "AppleApplicationSupport64" (or not 64 if it's not applicable). This solved my problem instantly.
 
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