Splatter

An onomatopoeia (word that sounds like what it is). A type of extreme distortion in an audio signal caused by hard clipping of the waveform from a device being overloaded. As mentioned above, the word splatter pretty well gets across what it sounds like. While it can happen in all sorts of audio devices the use of the word comes mostly from distortion caused by overmodulation in AM transmitters where splatter has additional implications.