Elgato's New USB Mic.. may have KILLED the GoXLR

[Music] [Music] let's let's talk about what you just saw which by the way is something I've been keeping a secret since January at at CES in Las Vegas where they took me algata took me into a back room and they're like hey check out this microphone and then they used their voodoo witchcraft just you know also called an NDA to swear me to secrecy and I had to pretend it didn't exist for like five months and that killed me because this is something that I am I'm actually very excited about I didn't think I would be at first and the more I've gotten to play around whether they sent me a prototype a couple months ago it is I'm very excited about this the elgato wave is a USB mic that comes with free software that basically turns it into a go XLR a hundred and thirty dollar mic is now a go XLR and I don't say that lightly by the way you you guys know how much I've loved the go XLR and and how much I tout it is like my favorite device for streamers this really gives the go XLR a run for its money this the functionality of the mic app combo is not like kind of like a go XLR some of the functionality that Elgato has added into this is stuff we've been asking for go XLR to include since launch and they haven't yet and they put it in this I'm very excited to do a side-by-side comparison I don't have a go excel on my other hand it's it's all plugged in over there I don't like pulling it apart but a side-by-side comparison between this mic and they go XLR let's go over a brief overview of what it is how it works its functionality so you can see the app let's do a mic quality test compare this thing to maybe another popular USB mic and maybe the go XLR combo so you can kind of hear the difference there and then we will decide if this thing really is a go XLR killer because being real with you for a certain group of people might be but before we get any further I do just want to remind you that I stream on Twitch every Monday Wednesday Saturday so if you have any questions about this microphone that maybe I don't cover interesting thoughts you might have about it feel free to jump into my chat link to that in the description down below let's jump into unboxing this thing there are two versions of this microphone the wave one that is $129 and the wave three which is one hundred and $59 and being very straightforward with you there is very little difference between the two the front knob on the wave three is a little bit more functionality on the wave one all it does is control the headphone volume and then you click it to mute on the wave three clicking the button actually switches between three different functions the first one being microphone gain the second one being headphone volume and the last one being a balance knob between your system sound and your microphone sound and then the wave three also has a capacitive mute button on the top of it and the only other real difference which very few of you are gonna actually utilize is it has the capacity to record at twice the sample rate of 96 thousand Hertz rather than 48 thousand Hertz which is what you're gonna use in OBS anyway so unless you're trying to like record professional audio it just it doesn't really make a big difference they also made a shock mount for $39 and a pop filter for $29 that are both made directly for this microphone they're actually kind of nice if that's something you're looking to add to your whole microphone rate but the unboxing experience is pretty standard for Elgato there's a tiny little box in the front inside that box is the USB cable and this little knob thing that allows you to unscrew this stand and instead it's an adapter for this hole to go on to some kind of you know arm mount so you don't even you don't need the shock mount to mount it to a boom arm and just shock mount provides a shock mounting shocker hate myself once you have the microphone unboxed download the wave link software from the elgato website and plug in your microphone and you're kind of ready to get going now this looking at the app here's where you start to notice it looks and functions kind of like to go XLR however there are some differences that are very much worth noting but let's stop talking about it here let's actually let's do it let's go over there where we where we have the microphone setup okay so we got the hole shebang goin here we got the the microphone hooked up here even unplugged my whole microphone setup we kind of went full send no regrets that did take a long time though but this is the wave 3 with the shock mount and the pop filter on my boom arm so you can kind of see what it's looking like but let's take a look at what it would be like to use this mic in your stream setup and how configuring it would work is there are a couple of really cool features one of them one of them was my idea by the way so hang on to that you can see just like the go XLR we have multiple software inputs so that way you can split up your game chat from your discord voice chat from music playing in the background you can even set your browser as a separate source you have a ton of inputs and right off the bat you already have one advantage over the go XLR which is it's starting off with 5 when you have four on the go XLR but on top of that you can add another input if you want to so for example if I wanted to add the line in to my hold rig here I had a line in and now we have six and I can actually get up to I believe I don't know if 9 is the max but that's what it you know let's just find out yeah looks I can get nine inputs total another thing to note here that's worth talking about that I'm very excited about so here I have my five different inputs I have my voice I have my game sound I have my music I have a browser if I open up YouTube and play non DMCA stuff and then I have my discord voice chat I control the volume with these guys which is what your next question probably is why are there two faders on each one this this is a big deal sub mixes and if you don't know what a sub mix is let me explain what's going on let's say you're playing a game that has a lot of downtime a lot of awkward silence and you want to have music playing in the background but if the music is playing too loud you won't hear footsteps maybe you're playing escape from tarkov or but pop G or something so you want music to be playing loud enough for your stream to hear it but quiet enough for you that's not really bothering you what you can do is you can turn it down in your headphones lower than sending it to the stream you have two completely separate is between your headphones and the stream and when they showed me this microphone in January originally this was a little lock button right here and when you clicked it these two snapped back together to be exactly the same I told them I don't think I would ever actually use that I can't imagine a scenario where I quickly needed to snap them to being equal again what I would prefer is a ratio law because what often happens on my go XLR is my teammates sound really loud in my headphones but they sound really quiet on string and this is just what happens when you're sending it to two outputs one being a powered output your PC one being an unpowered output your headphones when you're sending them to both of those sound pressure levels just become all wonky I can't explain exactly why but I often hear people say my teammates are too quiet and they are blaring loud in my ears so what I can do is in voice chat I can turn down the headphones a little bit more and keep the voice chat in there and when I lock these when you move one and move them both so any adjustments you make adjust both but they remain the same ratio throughout the fader not gonna lie I'm really proud of that idea and then you can see down here these are the two outputs so you have your monitor mix meaning what you hear in your headphones let me pull them in so I open up a stream and I want to make sure anything I open in Chrome comes through browser which it is right now they give you this nice little shortcut button up here that takes you right to your app volume in the device preferences so I can see that Google Chrome is coming through the output of wave link browser which is what I want if I were to open Spotify and start playing music here you would see Spotify up here as another app here and under output you would change this the wave link music and it would pop up right in here now you can see my headphones are a lot lower than the stream output and that's entirely because of this you can see as I bring them up to the same volume now they say the same if I turn down browser you can see less of it is coming through the headphones that are coming through the stream output and what they've done is they've given you these little ear buttons so when you're done mixing all your different outputs properly you can on this and I can hear out my stream years now go back to this I go back to my own mix that way you can make sure your headphones are exactly what you want to hear and you're sending your stream exactly what you want to hear so for example maybe I go listen to the stream output and I go oh the browser is way too loud it sounded great my headphones it's way too loud in the stream mix let me unlock this real quick lower this down lock them back up now if I make any adjustments they stay the same the biggest thing to me that this software is lacking right now is any presence of vsts vsts meaning virtual studio technologies or like for example on the go XLR you have compression you have EQ you have a noise gate none of those things exist in here yet however I have been told this is something they're working on and they'll be releasing things like noise gates for your microphones in some really soon upcoming releases it's not a huge deal if you're on a single PC server because in that situation is you have one of your audio inputs be your main stream you have another audio input be your microphone and then you make sure that you mute your microphone from the stream mix that way you're still getting the microphone input right here and anything else like a stream is gonna come through the main stream mix and then you can just add some filters onto this one you can add a noise gate manually in OBS just to the microphone mix here because you've separated them in OBS the place where this became difficult was on a two PC setup where you send everything over to the streaming PC already mixed together or it's called sping sums together and you can't put a noise gate on just the vocal track you'd have to put a noise gate across everything and that's gonna sound terrible you don't want to do that so I look forward to them adding vsts into the software itself that would solve that entire problem which leads us to the next exciting thing which is adding your stream deck to it in the stream deck software they've added a brand new app called I mean of course wavelength and there are a lot of things you can do there is one thing you can do that they go XLR can't do and there's one thing that I wish they would add in I feel like they forgot most of these are self-explanatory in fact it actually comes with two wavelength profiles basically what el gato felt is the default most helpful setup right here so a couple cool things to note if you want a mute input button for example if you want to be able to mute your teammates from your headphones so let's say you want this mute input button over here right let's put it on the bottom you want to mute them from your headphones you don't want to mute them from the stream you would change this to voice chat to mute your teammates and you'd make sure you have monitor mix setup that way it's gonna mute it from your monitoring mix in your headphones it's not gonna meet it from the output and one of the nice extra functionalities that they've given you is it shows you on here the percentage of the volume of that input so that way if your wavelength software is behind your game plates it's covered you can actually still see what all the levels are at on your stream deck itself you have adjust an input volume which is very helpful so again let's go to voice chat and you can choose in what increments this changes so you notice if I go to negative it automatically makes as a minus symbol so we can actually do this twice let's give it a plus 10 and a minus 10 and now you can see when I press those buttons that fader goes up and down and increments of 10 now this is the problem that I have with it is because these two are locked if I move it manually here they move together but if I move it with a stream deck and moves by itself I locked those two this button should move them both 10 percent not just the monitor mix and it's interesting because when I click it the they click back to the same ratio they were at before so let's see if that gets fixed soon that was bothering the earlier if you really wanted to you could just set up a multi action that had both the monitor and the stream mixes in there so it changed them both at the same time that just kind of ruins the whole point of having a ratio lock so anyway I'll get off my soapbox about that but another neat thing that's worth noting you can do is not just adjusting the volume but you can actually set the volume so let's put this in between them there let's say I have two standard teamate volumes there is teammates when I'm alive and playing and that's at full volume so let's set this up to a hundred and then we've got a smaller one for maybe I'm in a battle royale and I die my teammates are still playing I want to talk to chat I wanna still be able to hear my teammates but I want to have them lower so I have a lower volume setting down here so that way you can see when I hit the hundred percent it goes all the way up to 100 you can see when I hit what was that 28% it goes down to 28 so you can have preset volumes that you just jump to that when you have your different settings for different points in the game you can just click a button and it's gonna fix everything you can mute and adjust outputs the same way you meet and adjust input so for example if you want to change your headset volume you do that with adjust output volume you can also adjust your stream output through that don't know why you'd want to change your overall stream volume but it's there and essentially you turn your stream deck into a makeshift go XLR I'm pretty impressed with what they've been able to do with this software other than a couple hiccups that I brought up and I'm hoping they'll fix soon but this is a very high functioning system here they've also let me know that they plan on making a third output so for example if you want to set another output to disc or then you'll be able to use the mute functions on your stream deck as Dischord mute buttons toggle mutes press to mutes I look forward to that update but let me grab some other mics and let's test the audio quality I haven't done a side-by-side comparison yet so let's listen to them together alright I found some competition here we've got the blue Yeti X which typically goes for what 169 when it's not being price gouged because of the pandemic and then we have the HyperX quad cast which I believe went for 139 although I've seen the price drop a couple times even down to a hundred dollars now since I only have one boom arm we're gonna take these one at a time I'm gonna hold it next to the microphone I'm gonna speak into them both and then you guys will be able to choose which one you like most we'll let you know which ones being heard so right now what you're hearing is the elgato wave but right now what you're hearing is the HyperX quad cast and then back to the elgato wave so you can hear what that sounds like compared to the HyperX quad cast over here and then if I get a little further away this is what the elgato wave sounds like and then again at the same distance this is what the HyperX quad cast sounds like again back to the elgato wave and then back over to the HyperX quad caste and now we're gonna swap out the competition so what you're hearing right now again is the elgato wave but what you're hearing right now is the Yeti X and again back to the elgato wave so you can hear what that sounds like against the Yeti X so you can hear what that sounds like compared to the El Dorado and if I get a little bit further back you can hear what the el gato wave sounds like and you can also hear what the Yeti X sounds like again back to the elgato wave and then back over to the Yeti ax and just being real with you guys I have almost no good way of listening to those until this video is edited so we will basically be hearing what those sound like compared together at the same time though I might just be getting a little lazy it's 7:30 in the morning I've been testing and filming all night you're gonna have to give me a pass on this one all right so after after all the pomp and circumstance wave versus go XLR where are they standing let's start with situations where the wave wins number one price we're talking 129 or 159 compared to a two hundred and forty nine dollar go XLR plus a microphone a cable potentially a pop filter we're talking about up to $400 at pretty much the cheapest less than a third of that if you want to go with the wave one instead of the wave thirty number two submix is something everybody has wished for for a while being able to change what you hear versus what the stream here's number three the fact that it's software based means that it can be improved over time they can just push out a free update to you and suddenly you have vsts in your software number for price again it needs to be said again that that is just massive number five stream deck integration and I know you're gonna say go XLR just release stream deck integration did you try that that was the most disappointing release I've ever seen that they gave you two options and they were like halfway designed and they couldn't even be bothered to give a full res x-shaped image here look how low res that is well they're not asking for a lot 72 by 72 and that's all they gave them so proper stream deck integration is massive what are we at number six now yeah I think number six yeah the fact that it's the full package the go XLR won't work unless you have a microphone attached to it this is a microphone and the interface in one thing and number seven price we're going with price again let's go to the strengths of the go XLR now the first and probably biggest strength of the go XLR is that it is a professional XLR device you can plug in any professional mic it will sound amazing you have the ability to choose the microphone you want so much more control over your sound that's the big one that people are still going to pay for if they want a nice shure sm7b that sounds professional they're gonna they're gonna go with a coaxial on number two and another very big one for the go XLR is the i/o on the back of it the inputs the outputs all the hardware routing that goes on there making it incredibly easy to set up a to PC setup without the need of weird software like voice meter I got this working on a two PC setup just fine maybe I'll go into a whole tutorial on it down the road if that's something you guys want let me know in the comments down below but it required both the elgato software and voice meter running both of them routing audio number three for the go XLR physical faders physical faders will always be a huge advantage they're convenient they're easy they make sense I love the physical faders and they go excel it's probably one of the biggest things that's gonna keep me on the go XLR instead of jumping over to this and number 4 the built-in vsts the fact that inside the go XLR there is EQ compression noise gate and even a de-esser on the full-size go XLR right now that's an advantage until I've got o add those in however even when they add those in it's important to know that that processing will be done by your PC and will take up some of your resources on your CPU or GPU whereas on the go XLR all the signal processing is done on an actual processor inside the go XLR so it's not putting any extra load on your PC so does this got another one right yeah there we go does this thing kill the NGO Excel are giving you a full honest answer the fact that I came up with four very strong arguments for the NGO XLR means it still has a place in the market it's just that that place in the market is now for people who want to spend a couple extra hundred dollars more than they actually need to what I think this microphone will do is not so much kill to go XLR but change it it used to be the really the only device of its kind the only thing with this functionality kind of the only option for people who wanted good audio that's not the case anymore now there's something for a third of the price that can do sometimes more than the go XLR can do and this mic will change the go XLR from being well it used to be the only option now it'll be the premium option if you want to upgrade from something like this you want to spend a couple extra hundred dollars for that extra i/o for that extra versatility you'll go with the go XLR but that's gonna about wrap it up if there's something you think I missed or a question that maybe I didn't answer again feel free to jump into my twitch chat I stream every Monday Wednesday Saturday linked to my channel in the link down below I hope this really helped and as always happy streaming what are those walls doing that was I don't like these little zombies

Channel: Alpha Gaming

Views: 505,721

Keywords: Alpha Gaming, Stream Doctor, OBS, Tips, Streaming, Harris Heller, Alpha, Gaming, Live, Overlay, Design, Stream, Twitch, Doctor, How, To, How To, Help, Mixer, Youtube, Broadcast, Alerts, Streamlabs, youtuber, growth, stream, streamelements, harris, heller, money, monetize, income, full-time, full time, career, audio, sound, voice, mic, microphone, usb, hyperx, quadcast, blue, yeti, yeti x, project, wave, project wave

Id: OqQX25t6FOQ

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020