Yeah that’s bad. At first I was going to say I think it’s a digital to analogue converter clipping somewhere in your signal path.
It sounded like that to me at first, but I look in Audition’s spectral analyzer… Clearly not ordinary clipping.
The distortion sounded like clipping because it goes up and down with the signal amplitude, but the it never goes away.
Even when the signal is almost silent distortion continues. Also the frequency of the distortion is perfectly regular.
There is a pulse approximately every 30 milliseconds.
I am still wondering if you don’t have some sort of electrical disturbance. Alternating current in the US is 60 cycles / sec. That’s 16.7 milliseconds. So the pulse you are encountering could be occurring every second electrical cycle.
If any of this means something to the Cymatic staff, great. Otherwise I would experiment with recording with some power protection on all your equipment. Not surge protection, but actual line filtering to produce a smooth sign wave.
A device like the Furman PL-PLUS DMC Power Conditioner also has a Voltmeter/Ammeter that might give you some more insight into weather or not something is going on electrically.
I bought one of those after I saw a colleague solve problems with a sound system picking up noise from an electric generator. A lower end power conditioner did nothing, but connecting the board & digital snakes to the PL-Plus silenced everything. That was definitely audible, but nothing like what you’re experiencing.
Hope this helps.
