Media Encoder video often leaves a 10-15 sec or so sound dead audio spot in the middle of video?!

This is getting pretty ridiculous. I'm putting together videos in Premier Pro.. often 30min to an hour or so long... everything filmed with my GoPro 10 and everything sounds great IN PREMIER. I encode the video in 4k 30 fps with adui set to AAC 48000 Hz Stereo 512 Bitrate, queue it up, and let it run.

It's big and 4k so takes a while even on my 3090/5950x PC... Finished up, no errors.. fire up the video.. sounds great, looks great... and BOOM.. I'll find a random 10-15 seconds or so dead audio spot in the middle of the video.. So... I'll check the spot in Premier.. sounds perfect, and is the same type of sound and footage as everywhere else in the video. I'll re-encode the entire thing, many more hours... and BAM... another 10-15 dead spot in another spot in the video, the spot that had a dead sound spot before, sounds fine. Wtf? I'll encode again... entire video sounds fine, no dead audio spots.

This happens in probably half of my videos and is quite frustrating and have no idea what is causing this and the many hours of lost time. Any suggestions? Thank you!