Blue Compass Microphone Arm vs Rode PSA1

hi Gary Cruz with Gary Cruz calm if you're interested in seeing a comparison of the blue compass microphone arm against the road psa1 then watch this video [Music] all right today I'm going to be unboxing and setting up this blue compass microphone arm it's a premium tube style broadcast boom arm I have two microphones set up right now my shure sm7b I've been using this microphone arm for at least a couple years now and quite frankly there's nothing wrong with it I just like the aesthetics of the blue compass compared to those psa1 scissor type arm on the compass website you'll see that you can get rid of the noise of scissor type arms but if we do a quick comparison here that's a Velcro if I move this around we use the audio from this microphone to see if any of the sound transfers from the arm into this microphone here so as I pivot this it's pretty silent so in terms of quality the psa1 is pretty good let's do a quick test of the desk pounding test well first let me turn off the low-pass filter or on the dbx 286s let's I turn it off and here's what it sounds like if I hit the desk you know if you're pretty animated and your podcasts or your video games you might hit the desk and this is what it sounds like when sound gets transferred from the microphone now let's turn on the high-pass filter on the dbx 286s which I highly recommend if you're gonna use this microphone the shure sm7b with a nice arm and of course your videos and here it is with the high pass filter turned on you have some velcro strips that hold down the XLR cable whereas the compass has a built-in channel to route the cable so let's go ahead and unbox this it's a pretty long box [Applause] so styrofoam so everything comes nicely packaged in the styrofoam case here we've got the base clamp see clamp and then with the microphone fully extended so here's the clamp itself so from what I've read the clamp and arm is made of aluminum if I want to roll this out fully extended just extend this all the way actually I don't need to because if you just kind of measure it against this threading here we'll take a ruler so if you interested in the clearance we've got about almost three inches of clearance or the metric-system about seven centimeters so if we take a look at this I'll take a photo so here it is it's fully extended loosen this up a bit and Bend itself like this you can see the natural tendency is to revert to the extended state today the solution is better than ever with die master vibrato you just put it between your knees and squeeze but let's go ahead and get this on my desk and put the microphone on and then we'll test the attention first we'll attach the C clamp here's a video from this angle you can see that it has the road extends out just a little bit more only because I didn't put it against the desk all the way and here's what it looks like a nice okay and I'm curious if this microphone slot would fit into that hole let's try that out all right just for kicks I just put the road PSA arm into the c-clamp of the blue compass let's do the same with the blue microphone arm okay here's the blue microphone arm let's just see just for kicks if it fits in the road clamp well it does and it's pretty smooth although it's odd that it's a different brain clamp but it does fit so it looks like it's the same size alright let's put it in the proper c-clamp I'm just adjusting the tension here and it seems like there's some pretty good tension Springs inside okay so even though I stopped it there we'll see how that goes okay so by default it wants to revert to this extended state like this but let's see what happens if we put a microphone on this okay out of the box it comes with a five and eight inch thread there supposed to be a 3/8 thread 3/8 inch thread adapter but I didn't see it in the box so it doesn't really matter because it looks like it's five and eight five-eighths inch thread on the shure sm7b as well okay so you can see that as soon as I removed now there's some sweet - it's funny as soon as I removed the microphone from this arm it wanted the default to go back up just using like this tool to get this off like this and it's an adapter that was on the PSA one so now it's off the blue microphone arm supports up to 2.4 pounds oops I liked how it doesn't have to use an adapter compared to the road PSA one this just screws right on I took this adapter off the PSA one here I'll just put this back on okay now let's get the cable on the road comes with these small velcro straps akin with I think three so I'm taking three of them off right now and that's the weight you can cable manage on this psa1 microphone arm and let's get this cable plugged into shure sm7b nice so it does have some tension that can remember the spots it doesn't look like there is some kickback or a spring kickback okay let's go ahead and continue to route the cable here there are some snaps that snaps in there another snap here and a third snap in here so it's nice that they have a built in channel to route the cable and there's three more snaps on the back just go ahead and get those open one two and three one two and three okay if we look at the comparison of the lengths of the arm from the back they're very close I mean I don't have them right side by side here the height of the first hinge is taller on the blue because of this but it's nice and it has a nice clean look to it again I wanted the Myka arm Yucatec yellow arm but that is three times the cost and I've got one I mean just I'm just going off looks alone and then in terms of length this is slightly longer on this part of the arm okay so if you take a look at this way just to compare let's put these straight up like this and here is where you can see the difference in height and that matters if you want to have clearance for the monitor right there so you can see this does have some spring back and now you can hear the squeaking of it it never squeaked with the microphone on just as a heads up this arm is actually pretty slick I like it so far it does have a nice tactile feel to it and see it let's see if it's a transferring any noise check one two the microphones on okay have it care my monitor here hit my monitor all right now let's test against the pounding of the desk here first thing I'll do is turn off the high-pass filter and see how much noise gets transferred from the desk through the arm into the microphone let's turn on the high-pass filter again out of the box I already like the tension so right now you can see it's fully loose so that's fully loose if I go down here and tighten it a bit it's creeping very slowly if I tighten it just a little bit more it's perfect and so I can adjust it here same with the bottom one if I fully loosen that so toi loosen if I go down it will creep up just a bit all it needs is just a little bit of tension and get set same with this if I loosen this fully loose you see there's a little bit of play there if I tighten this it should just you should just be able to leave it where you need it to the right amount of tension come here let go and then I go so much because there's some the cables pushing that down but from here if I let go it stays which is pretty nice and the advantage of the road psa1 is that there is no tension that you need to adjust you let go and it stays right and I'm only believing this pop arm here only because it needs enough weight to keep that tension so in terms of a scissor arm and the least amount of hassle you'll get that out of the PSA one with the blue you'll just need to adjust it accordingly but it looks like once you have the settings dialed in you don't have to worry about it I would never use it at that height so that doesn't matter to me so as long as I get it to the appropriate height here there we go so far so good this concludes the unboxing an initial setup of the blue compass arm and a comparison against the road PSA one microphone arm I have no real complaints with the PSone maybe against the the name itself PSA one microphone arm I don't really have any complaints with it because I've used it for so many years in fact I have to the other one is holding a shotgun microphone and the main thing is really just aesthetics because on my wish list I had the mica yellow tech arm and that was just a little bit out of my price range the other thing to consider if you're looking at the mica tech or the mica microphone arm out I'll put an overlay is that the XLR cable you have to splice that yourself to according to your length and at least with this one I can route this in here it's not as slick as the mica and also doesn't have the read on air light which really doesn't matter because I'm by myself so I don't need to know if the microphone is on or off but I get to use my own Mogami cables here that I like really much so if you liked this video please hit the like button and a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button on the way out thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Gary Cruz Dot Com

Views: 32,433

Keywords: Blue Compass, Microphone Arm, Heil, Rode, PSA1, Shure SM7B, DBX 286s

Id: XJ-CNXasraQ

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 30 2019