How to sound treat your streamer space | NEW STUDIO Moving Vlog #7 | Elgato Wave Panels Review

welp we have a problem it's been pouring the past two days well mostly the past day and the carpet by the door is soaked i had a little bit of problem we knew about whenever it rained before which it hasn't much because it's winter so snow where the extra like thin pieces i put up against the door itself would get a little wet as rain hit the door and kind of slid down and would get on it but the water has come multiple feet into this door this carpet is soaked and it's like this at least somewhat in there i haven't checked that box but the bottom of my diablo standy was sitting in the water now it's not ruined necessarily and it's not even super soaked but it got wet and all those cables were sitting in the water i was moving this stuff out of the way to try to hang sound blankets so i could talk about the sound treatment video honestly it was a mess to get here due to the issues i ran into with the garage door seal we'll talk about that in a moment this video just so you know what's going on here is set up to be both a moving vlog a educational video about sound treating your space as well as a couple product reviews all jammed into one which is why this week has been completely dedicated to catching you all up with the moving vlogs so we can talk about the new space and talk about how i am sound treating it because otherwise it'd be out of order and not make a whole lot of sense and there's water so that's gonna be a problem i'm running all night and crank the heat up and the carpet is mostly dry other than right up against the wall but i just pulled a piece up and i'm gonna have to re-tape all of this now but the difference from here to here is significant i'm gonna have to pull up all of this carpet and dry out this whole area so it's drying very quickly the concrete is the tiles will still need to dry but it made it two and a half tiles in and it keeps going that way so i'm gonna move this entire shelf and it keeps going that way that's not good so we kind of just had to go go go and i didn't get to film as much as i wanted which is fine because that's not what this video is supposed to be about but i wanted to show what our fix was so the problem we were certain we were going to run into and did run into is that the strip that i bought the new garage door seal that i purchased was not the correct one the track that is installed on the door and you can't really buy replacement tracks uh was a bead end this one was a t end on both of the ends and it's just a piece of rubber that folds in half and slides on the track and this one also has an inner tube so it's really nice it has plugs on the end but i had the wrong end and you can't really buy these locally some of the local stores had the t ends but none of them had the bead ends and no one sold tracks this long this is a 16 foot door and so what we did was we found at menards they had nine foot tracks for the t end and so we bought two of them put them side by side cut off one of the ends because it was you know two feet long and then put the seal that i bought in but we also bought a new threshold seal which you can buy which just glues to the concrete here with liquid nails so that we had double protection so we have a new seal which should have been enough in the first place but now we have the threshold seal as well so we've got double sealage and this has like an uphill slope so that water doesn't come in so we've got double steelage there and then we saw a couple air gaps here where the side trim that the extra insulation was installed in has kind of separated because this wood's pretty weak and since i'm not going to open this door forever at least until we fix some stuff next year we went ahead and caulked up any of the air gaps here with silicone caulking on both sides and now we should have the most sealed up garage door that ever exists and i just don't open it for now first and foremost let's talk about sound treating your recording space there are the obvious things you can do to reduce background noise artifacting whatever in your recording space be it a studio a stream room a bedroom whatever coming down to turning off the heat while you're recording although mine may kick on while i'm recording closing your windows shutting your door all of those things but then you get into the actual physics the acoustics of it i actually posted a video that did really well for my channel back i believe two years ago now maybe three talking about the things you can do for the most part without spending money to make your audio better in your streams and those principles apply here most of what people struggle with when it comes to noise in their microphones aside from the technology of having bad hardware comes down to the physics the acoustics when you're speaking on camera into a video with a microphone you have a couple different things happening at once the big thing that everyone struggles with is the reflection points the points at which your voice is projected into the space it bounces off surfaces and comes back into your microphone the first reflection points whenever you're at a desk setup or things like that are typically the the wall in front of you or the walls next to you the desk itself the ceiling and the floor additional reflection points are after it's hit those first points you know literally the first thing it makes contact with bounces around hits other things and then comes back typically unless you're going for a completely sound isolated vocal booth at which point you can build those out of some sound blankets and pvc pipes i'll point you to a video from mike delgadio over at booth junkies about that unless you're trying to build a completely sound isolated space you don't want to get rid of all of that what's called wetness of the audio because you still want some of that to be present because it provides a layer of realism that actually makes it seem like you're in that space and then plenty of situations when you're recording completely dry over a lot of time is spent in post-production actually adding that back in because you really want to make sure make it sound like your recording is happening in the space that you're actually in which is why right now if it sounded like i was in a closet it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense so building out my new studio if you saw any of the clips that i recorded within the original space because this is a garage that i have turned into a studio it's basically a concrete and wood box the echo and the reverb was absolutely horrendous coming at you from my new studio space which doesn't look like much of anything in fact i'm currently mopping concrete right now that's how riveting things are going no getting around it the obvious first things you have to do with a space is to tackle some of the obvious sides of you know what your space is struggling with so for example again this is a garage a concrete floor was a big reflection point concrete is actually a bit more echoey and reflective of audio than wood is what is you know porous and kind of absorbing a little bit and so one of the big things we did and actually in the first moving vlog that went up this week is i covered my floor and carpet now i could have went and done a whole subfloor and then done a proper carpet pad and everything like that but neither myself nor my dad who was helping me with the bulk of this work have experience laying actual carpet and that probably would have been pretty expensive so instead we went with a local place that sells surplus carpet tiles that way anytime they get stained or damaged or anything like that i can pick them up and move them but they do provide a nice soft layer that both absorbs sound makes it nicer on my feet but still allows me to roll around all my video hardware that i'm using here this combined with just putting stuff in my space made the biggest you know if we're talking about a curve of like diminishing returns on sound in my space made the biggest impact in do sound treaty in my space which was why i always laugh at videos i see of people who spend thousands of dollars on their audio and their video gear to get these high-end setups and then are in this empty white room with hardwood floors and they sound like they're in a cave because they've invested their time and energy into the wrong things and so getting a layer of softness on the floor is one step one if you can't cover your floor or you're not willing to you can buy sound blankets or even a thick kind of fuzzy rug put it on the floor around where your microphone and your speaker will be that is a very common solution and just keep it there or lay it down every time you go to shoot that will make a huge difference that won't save the secondary reflections that are bouncing around the room but that will make the biggest difference for what's actually hitting right where you're speaking again step two is getting stuff in your space empty walls empty rooms are not conducive to high audio quality recordings and it really sucks to see and just by getting the carpet down we made a lot of impact here and then actually filling it with stuff so it just wasn't an empty room there was stuff to actually break up the sound reflecting off of the different surfaces giving it you know it disperses every time sound hits something it reduces the impact and it disperses into smaller and smaller sounds which is why a giant empty cave is going to have a huge echo but a you know a building with a bunch of different doors and hallways and nooks and crannies is going to sound a little bit more dampened so that those two steps made the kind of biggest impact overall however even as you could tell from some of my earlier videos where i was doing voiceover for ad spots or whatever in the space at my desk the sound still quite wasn't where i wanted there was still this air of kind of wetness to it where you could still hear a lot of high end just like rattling almost and this is actually caused by two parts and we'll tackle this in a moment but part one was not necessarily using the best microphone for the space i was using a shotgun microphone mounted above my setup as that has been ural's preferred way for me to do audio it's not how i'm gonna do it at the desk moving forward for now but i can go back to it but i am using a shotgun mic now and it shouldn't sound quite that bad but also because i still had an entire untreated surface ignoring the walls for a moment because we did have a lot of stuff on the walls if not sound foam we had an entire untreated surface that everyone forgets you see the number one ignored first reflection point that makes a huge impact on your audio is the ceiling no one touches their ceiling and then you know for people who rent or people who don't want to destroy things or whatever it seems like a scary thought and i understand that however every place i've rented i've been able to do whatever i want as long as i clean it up afterwards so not a big deal for me but i understand why people are hesitant to it but a lot of people just don't think about it they don't even think about their ceiling doing anything but realistically that ceiling is reflecting a heck of a lot and in fact the reflections i get off of my ceiling when i'm trying to do audio especially in some of the places where things aren't sound treated are some of the worst kind of i'm going to call them artifacts even though that's not the right way of calling it but you know some of the worst sounding side effects to your audio it gets this kind of wobbliness and almost like metallicy twanginess as sound literally kind of skirts along your ceiling or bounces on the higher parts of your walls and hitting the ceiling as well and has nothing to diffuse it a good example of this is if you've ever been in a stairwell my apartment had this then it was obnoxious but you've ever been in a stairwell where there's nothing on the walls to absorb the sound but there's also that high ceiling where it's really hard to dust at that just kind of is in the stairwell and you talk into it you get the sound reflecting so harshly that it creates this really weird like kind of sound effect that's what's happening on a lot of people's ceilings and they don't think about it and of course there's the obvious one the walls walls are where most people put their sound treatment but not a lot of people think about it and the walls are something that you need to tackle as well so we're going to talk about solutions for both the ceilings and walls today however i wanted to mention one that i listed originally that not a lot of people think about either and that is what's actually on your desk if you're facing your desk and doing a normal kind of desk streaming setup that is a source of so many reflections of your audio into your microphone from different surfaces you have your desk in all likelihood your desk is a hard surface that is reflecting sound the easiest solution i have found which is kind of obvious but you know they've only kind of risen in popularity in recent years but a full desk sized desk mat instead of just a mouse pad makes a world of difference it both absorbs the impacts of your typing and anything else you're doing on your desk a little bit better but it provides that soft porous surface that helps absorb some of your reflections and doesn't help create a box because essentially what you have right here at this desk is a box you've created an echo box or a reverb box right up next to where your microphone probably is and that's a terrible idea secondly of course are your displays your monitors especially if you have multiple lined up like this it creates a big reflection surface obviously you can't put sound foam on your monitors but adjusting the position of them giving them gaps between them things like that can help out as well and then of course it comes down to mic positioning you don't want your microphone right here literally creating a box with your monitors because that will cause a bad time if you've ever looked at the polar pattern or the pickup patterns for microphones you can see the leer especially most of them are cardioid that you're going to be using they have this kind of little heart shape of where they pick up and then they reject on the sides and then the back and the sides of the back they still pick up a little bit and if you are forcing which we discovered with the chaotica eyeball review i posted a few weeks ago or i guess a month or so ago now when you put something hard and reflective right up against the back of the microphone it picks up actually quite a bit more than if you space it out so having your microphone coming in from the side or from up above can make a huge difference so in terms of my journey trying to tackle this echo box of a garage we've have a few steps that i've taken carpet on the floor makes a world of difference putting stuff in the space that segments it out breaks up and you know disperses the sound reflections desk mat on my desk check helps with that i do it everywhere even on desks that i'm not necessarily recording at just to keep them from being that kind of surface but then since i am specifically in a garage i had a unique situation where i have a giant 16 foot by 8 or 9 foot garage door sitting basically acting as one of my walls and while it is it's actually an insulated door so it has r6 inch insulation through two layers of it feels like maybe aluminum or something it's a little less reflective than a proper metal garage door which is just thick steel or aluminum that really like reflects and rattles and stuff from sound so i i'm a little bit advantageous there because those kinds of doors are way worse but it still does reflect a lot of the sound here and in these kinds of setups i am facing mostly my garage door and while i have stuff in front of it it still would be a source of some pretty gnarly sounding reflections so what i chose to do is use something i already had but i have recommended for years and these are the producers choice sound blankets which i got from vocal booth to go they're a little bit of an investment but not as expensive as other audio treatment options i bought a six pack of them back in i want to say 2017 when we moved into our second apartment and i had started at the time any of my recording spaces i would just hang these up on the walls and turn it into basically a giant vocal booth and these things completely dead and sound this however brings us to a kind of difference between a vocal booth kind of sound blanket and sound foam sound foam or acoustic foam or acoustic treatment even the homemade panels are designed to allow these sound waves to kind of hit them and this style specifically allows the waves to kind of hit between them and introduce more points that they get absorbed and then the thickness of them kind of controls how much they block the sound sound blankets on the other hand don't really necessarily do a whole lot of reflection control they just stop the sound entirely so sound foam although this is just cheap amazon stuff and not a good representation of what the actual product should be sound foam is designed to absorb and diffuse sound sound blankets just completely block it to try to create a completely sound isolated room and so again i wouldn't recommend unless you're going for that sound or that purpose building your whole setup out of it but even just putting like in our living room set up at the apartment it was not great looking but we covered one of our entire walls in the middle of the room with one of the sound blankets and it made a huge difference to how the sound was other uses i have found for them again putting them on the floor to help with replacing carpet basically to absorb sound from the floor i've even covered some of my unboxing tables because that's one of the worst setups i've struggled with with audio as i'm doing an unboxing at a big flat table that's reflecting my voice like crazy the audio sounds way more tinny using the sound blanket as a just an all-white surface while it shows a little bit more fuzz or my cat hair or whatever it makes the audio a lot better and then instead of just having not a reflective surface you actually have an absorbing surface and so you get that nice crisp audio so in this case i did a little bit of a diy we have the bar that has the spring on it to pull the garage door up i actually just got some bungee cords i found some that have the right size hook to hook over that bar perfectly however they were a little too long since the blankets i have are freaking massive uh and so i drilled a hole kind of in the middle of them and just moved the hook up and dispersed them i have them double layered because i had so many blankets and nowhere else to put them i tried in another location it just didn't look right to me so i just have them like double and in some cases triple layered completely blocking the garage door this will help block outdoor sounds because there's lots of those i live in a pretty noisy neighborhood it kind of helps with temperature regulation as well again the door is isolated or insulated it's not a huge deal but it does help with that and it turns that entire wall into a giant sound blocking wall that just keeps from being a reflective point at all and that has helped quite a bit as well that brings us to tackling my walls and my ceiling now i had a giant tower of sound foam from my previous places some of the sound foam i've had since 2013 i actually took a whole bunch of i bought a couple of those 30 amazon packs of 12 by 12 1 inch sound foam and super and hot glued them to a sheet which i hung over my curtains in my bedroom that i was recording at my parents house to help reduce some of the sound my goal at the time was actually to reduce my computer fan noise thinking that it would help absorb some of that that's not what this is for it doesn't work that way but i've kept some of that around a lot of that got destroyed because glue eats up foam and then i bought more over the years just because it was the most economical solution it a lot of people will say that this kind of stuff and this kind of stuff doesn't do the job at all and is worse than having none you know no sound absorption at all and i completely that's some elitist bull crap building your own sound foam ty or your own sound tiles out of rockwool and wood framing and all of that stuff is a great idea it's in in a sense a more economical idea depending on what your objectives are and for proper you know professional looking setups it's absolutely a requirement but it's not at all the only way to go and i can't stand people who push that narrative this stuff does absorb stuff now you do have different grades of like quality of sound foam these go up to like two inches on the spikes this one is barely an inch on the spikes it is flimsy as hell and barely absorbs anything you can literally see light through it well you can't but i can see light through it because it is so thin this stuff isn't super great but i have found use for it because it's so easily bendable putting it up under my shelves where i basically have a little right angles to reflect sound i have had luck putting them there to help absorb some of that sound and it makes a difference the thing is though that i think a lot of people get mistaken with and almost get sticker shock from when they're looking at the prices of this stuff is you don't actually need to cover your entire surface well yes you could cover every wall floor and ceiling with sound foam and get the podcast radio in your closet like feeling that's not what you need to do you just need to create cover a good chunk of your recording space with some sound foam so that it absorbs at the main reflection point so for example if you have one of these you don't need every you know one square to fit every single chunk of your wall you just need like a little middle pattern where your voice is actually going to be projecting if if you have room around it that's fine and in fact you can even space them out so it's like a checkerboard pattern where you have one a gap and then the other obviously you should use the same kind but you know where you skip a square and then you do a checkerboard pattern with them to be more efficient with your spacing of them which can make a huge difference now throughout most of my studio since i already have stuff on most of the walls and i'm not recording in a lot of the space anyway and i had this tower of sound foam to work with i've actually used thumbtacks you could use 3m strips whatever thumbtacks have been the most effective for me minimal damage to the ceiling in most cases um and was actually required when i was at my apartment and had textured ceilings here i don't have textured ceilings but it's more or less the same is i just put them up with thumbtacks and have them in certain chunks of the ceiling in throughout my space and so in the four corners of the room i have them put up in square chunks and in different shapes and things like that to help absorb the main points where i might be recording and then i have this longer column here which leads up to the attic entryway that was especially reflective it still created that kind of twang like you can hear the reflections moving around that i really hated and so i just made basically like a big x with them to kind of eat up some of that space and it makes a big difference now the ceiling looks a little goofy i'm not going to deny it the ceiling looks a little goofy because you got this kind of patchwork job going on but theoretically the camera is not going to be pointed at my ceiling very often like you don't see my ceiling here you don't even see the tops of my you barely even see my shelves nevertheless the ceiling depending on your use case that may be different i think for a lot of people that is totally fine and again while these aren't the best sound things in the world they do a really good job and if you focus them specifically right above where you're going to be speaking or where you're going to be projecting to you don't have to use a ton and you can still have great results that being said a lot of people are going to recommend building your own and that's totally fine you can basically build a two by four well you'd want thinner wood than that but a big wood frame put some rock wool in it and then you get uh acoustically transparent fabric to put over to make it look nice and neat you can build them that attach to the wall you can build what are called acoustic clouds which basically hang a little bit off the ceiling so that the reflections have time to hit the ceiling but then they get absorbed into the cloud so to speak and that can help a lot with that kind of thing and long term i'm probably doing that for the ceiling like i'm not bowing out of building my own but i am at the point where i have been moving for three almost four months now trying to finalize the studio i don't have the tools on hand the truck to you know bring the stuff over here i've already overused my uh parents favors a little bit and so i don't have the capacity to do that at this point in time and this was the most i was using stuff i already have and the most economical and realistic solution for me and for a lot of you who don't have the craftsmanship the time the patience or the space to cut up freaking wool insulation and all of that there's no shame in using acoustic foam when you need it that being said different companies are trying to build out different products i get reached out to by acoustic professional acoustic companies trying to send me their super professional audio foam all the time or their other acoustic solutions and specifically we're talking about one here today from a familiar company elgato so this is the product review part of today's video because i ended up it was just perfect timing that elgato had told me you know under nda that this was coming and i was all i was right at the stage where they could send it right as i was trying to finish sound treating my space so the hexagonal shapes you see behind me are not a jab at linus tech tips but rather a new product from elgato these are elgato's new wave panels they are acoustic sound panels made out of both fiber and foam that aim to provide yet another product to streamers that kind of are built specifically for streamers in mind which comes at attacks as i mentioned this is elgato moving further and further into apple territory which comes with pros and cons but so far i've actually been impressed they are expensive though and i won't hide that fact and i understand that there are a lot of people as with everything elgato releases that look at that and say wow i could pay 20 bucks and have the same thing you can pay 20 bucks which this is the argument i make every time for the green screen the lights all of it you could pay 20 bucks and have a similar thing that serves a similar purpose but you don't get the same thing that being said i do kind of think these might be a little over engineered here it's one of those weird things where you have to want it and know that you want it for it to make sense and if you're just like oh hey should i acoustically treat my space and you look at these and see the price tag you're probably gonna be like nah so just get it out of the way because i know this is where people are gonna get mad anyway uh these come in a six pack for 99.99 so a hundred dollars for a six pack although they are roughly 24 inches by 24 inches so instead of one foot by one foot they're about two feet by two feet it's a little awkward to measure because they're hexagons instead of squares but they're roughly double the size so i'd say you get 12 of these in a pack for 30 ish from amazon sometimes 40 or 50 depending on pricing and times and you get six of those for a hundred bucks so but what you're getting is a very like i said almost over engineered solution catered for streamers you pull them out you get as i mentioned six sound foam tiles in the box and on top you get a bunch of different accessories so the thing is when you buy cheap sound foam from amazon they come in a pack and that's all you get they are shrink wrapped you have to let them decompress for 24 to 48 hours and then it's up to you to figure out how the heck you're gonna attach them to anything depending on how much you hate yourself or your space you could use adhesive spray good luck scraping that back off afterwards you could use 3m strips you could use uh thumbtacks like i suggested someone suggested these little like tea hairpins but those were absolute hell for me to get in and i never want to try that again i put like three of them in before i said hell no never again uh and you know you have a few different solutions there with the elgato option they actually include the full assembly process and it's kind of cleverly designed if not a little obnoxious they come with these frames and so you have to build the frames out of each piece so you have six sides and you have to snap them all together and then you set the sound foam in it and it's just kind of held in place by friction there's no real securing method but then they give you either screws for textured surfaces or adhesive strips for flat walls like mine to then attach them to your wall or what have you set up was pretty straightforward if not tedious to get them lined up and then of course you build out your pattern using the hexagonal shapes to figure out you know what kind of shapes or designs you want to make with it which admittedly the shapes are a little bit restricting imo you can kind of see here i had to move my play button all the way to that corner i might swap it with that light or whatever but i had it up here but it no longer fits with how i wanted to do things because you're limited to connecting them kind of however you want and to keep the flow of the actual design on the flow foam going you have to make sure the sides line up perfectly otherwise it looks a little weird so that was a little disappointing but whatever but it is a specific shape if that's not the shape you want to go with you're kind of out of luck with these but the frames then attach to your wall and you use either the adhesive or the screws to attach them imo they did not come with enough adhesive at all you only get two strips per frame and while currently that's holding i would feel a lot more comfortable especially comfortable with kind of changing my design after the fact if they include more but however you can use any size any kind of like double-sided tape or 3m command strips or whatever and i always have a horde of those on hand so i just went with that instead once you get your frames lined up then they include these little clips which actually secure the frames together and these help kind of support the weight and distribute the mounting pressure since you do only have limited mounting points if you're using the adhesive strips at least so what i aim to do with my build is i usually put the two adhesive strips in the opposite corners and so i'd put one you know top and side and then the connecting point wherever i had two pieces touching only one of those would have an adhesive strip so the other piece has the adhesive strips supporting its weight this one has one at the connecting point so the clips are then right there and the weight is balanced out so that worked out pretty well and then you just slide the foam right onto it and you are good to go which is pretty cool and also made my before and after testing a little bit easier despite the results we'll talk about that in a moment um and overall it's pretty neat currently they're only available in this dark gray or black color scheme they are supposed to have blue coming soon i am going to blue is kind of what they're trying to launch with as well however imo if you're going to make this product as something that's for streamers and not just for people who are bought in on the elgato branding and ecosystem you need uh for other color options because you need your product to adapt to streamer setups not streamers to adapt to your branding because that's that's getting way too apple for me imo and that is a problem in terms of the foam itself it's actually kind of cleverly designed i can't speak scientifically to wither the logic of how it's supposed to work actually checks out but they have instead of just the spikes they have a little ripple design which they're calling ripple foam which is the first layer and it's about half an inch to three-fourths of an inch thick and then behind that they have a thicker high density fiber layer that is three-fourths of an inch thick that actually connects to the pieces and so it's two layers of foam to provide kind of double advantage of how the foam is supposed to work so you have the ripple layer which distributes the sound has the little design with nooks and crannies for the sound to get into and be absorbed by the more porous foam and then the backing to it actually blocks and completely absorbs the sound to keep it from going through which helps with kind of absorbing some possible sound from annoying your neighbors as well that's not really what this is supposed to serve but it helps with that on top of the fact that it provides both like just you know dispersing diffusion and blocking both together and that's pretty neat i so far i have found it to be effective we're going to talk about that in a little bit but i think it's a kind of unique approach that at least among the cheaper options i have not seen so i recorded a couple before and afters with different microphones uh i did originally my shotgun microphone which i'm using now which i was using in that space and i feel was the wrong microphone for the job and so while i can hear because i'm specifically looking for it and used to this sound to know what i'm looking for i can hear the difference i don't know that you will be able to and that's the issue with a lot of these is this is the kind of sound that once you're messing with post-processing once you get past the basics which is why i kind of introduced this in the way that i did once you get past the basics of putting stuff in your room carpet on the floor you're no longer in an echo chamber it gets harder and harder you're higher up the curve of diminishing returns it gets harder and harder to notice the difference however i'm pretty sure any veteran content creator who messes with and tweaks their audio and has looked for solutions like this knows that when you're really trying to fine tune your audio get your mic positioning right and mess with compressors and post-processing and stuff you start to pick up on this and it really drives you wild and this helps deaden some of this so i'm gonna play the sound samples and then we're gonna talk about it so before i get too far ahead of myself this is what my shotgun microphone sounds like at my desk right now since the last video at the time of recording which you may see this at any point but since the last time i recorded a video at the setup i have since added some sound foam to the rest of the studio on some of the ceiling points on the opposite side of the garage now this is what everything sounds like with the sound tiles installed on the walls and i have to say i didn't expect to be impressed but i am impressed the this is something that's very hard to convey in video and i don't have the tools to accurately measure this as i've probably explained but the sound level when i am talking into my microphone here hearing it bounce off the walls is usually more exaggerated to me than to the microphone and i can hear just how much more deadened the sound is alright this is a test with no sound dampening at all on the ceiling or the walls with a dynamic microphone the electro voice re20 i'm only going to apply a compressor onto the audio which you pretty much always need while you're streaming so you can hear any potential room pickup that's going to be done although the dynamic mic here is going to pick up the least out of any of the mics we are testing and then we're going to swap between them three rings for the oven kings under the sky seven for the dwarf lords and their halls of stone nine for the mortal men doomed to die one for the dark lord on his dark throne in the land of mordor where the shadows lie this is a test with the sound foam on the walls and the ceiling with the electro voice re-20 dynamic microphone three rings for the elven kings under the sky seven for the dwarf lords and their halls of stone nine for the mortal men doomed to die one for the dark lord on his dark throne in the land of mordor where the shadows lie so this is what a condenser microphone what i generally consider to be kind of the worst kind of microphone to use in a desktop streaming setup would sound like with the no sound treatment on the ceiling or walls this is the lct 440 pure three rings for the oven kings under the sky seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone nine for the mortal men doomed to die one for the dark lord on his dark throne in the land of mordor where the shadows lie this is a test with the condenser microphone the luit lct 440 pure with sound foam on the walls and the ceiling test test one two three three rings for the elven kings under the sky seven for the dwarf lords and their halls of stone nine for the mortal men doomed to die one for the dark lord on his dark throne in the land of mordor where the shadows lie yelling i'm yelling real loudly ah and this is what a small little dialogue microphone a cardoid microphone the octava mk012 sounds like just out of frame again with no sound treatment actually on their walls three rings for the elven kings under the sky seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone nine for the mortal men doomed to die and one for the dark lord on his dark throne in the land of mordor where the shadows lie this is a microphone test with the octava mko12 uh cardioid dialogue microphone test test123 all the sound foam is on the walls three rings for the elven kings under the sky seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone nine for the mortal men doomed to die one for the dark lord on his dark throne in the land of mordor where the shadows lie as you can tell by the hair color changing my original sample recorded with the shotgun microphone was done first and then i played it back and i was like wow that sucked you can't tell any difference and that's because my shotgun microphone was dropped right here getting reflections off of the monitors right into it which especially with these longer shotgun microphones that causes a huge problem for their audio which is why i think it was better to try it with one of the little pencil dialogue microphones rather than a full shotgun mic because they're not really designed for this scenario secondarily you may notice i included a test with the ceiling yes of course as i had tackled the rest of my you know studio ceiling with the cheaper foam i actually used my third pack of elgato sound foam tiles on the ceiling they can technically be used for that i don't think they're built with that in mind i think that was an afterthought or not a thought at all and so i don't have full confidence that these won't just fall down on my head at some point and that is because of the way that they're designed when they're designed to sit on the wall they literally they just have plastic parts of the frames that come out and sit inside holes in the foam and so the gravity does all the work of keeping them on the frame because they have no reason to fall off of it whereas when you have it mounted vertically initially the friction fit kind of works but if you do any shaking of it or whatever eventually they'll fall off and so i think over time gravity will actually pull them down and either you'll come into your studio one day and they'll be on the floor or they'll just fall on your head at some point so to try to get ahead of this i just took whatever scrap sticky stuff i had so i had a bunch of 3m strips and some older style 3m adhesive that i had in a drawer and used two per piece of sound foam and put them on the inside of the frame and then when i put the foam up on the frames on the ceiling i then you know tried to make sure that the foam was also adhered to that to try to give it a little bit more longevity before they start falling on my head qualitatively thinking about this since i don't have tools to measure noise levels or reverb or anything you know i'm not built for that i will say that first impressions at least they deaden the sound significantly more than when i had these on the walls because i was messing with it before and especially on the ceiling i actually had these on the ceiling up here i got mostly what i wanted for it but i can tell maybe because of the density again i have two packs that's one pack that's one pack and so i have two packs on this on the walls alone and a third on the ceiling that's 300 worth of foam keep in mind although i have certainly 300 worth of this to distribute throughout the rest of my studio anyway you kind of acquire it over time i will say it does a better job of deadening the sound just due to the density i can actually tell that that second layer that denser layer is actually doing a much better job and i can appreciate that it's almost impossible to convey that over youtube and there are plenty of people who are going to say well if it's not a significant enough difference for me to hear it's not worth the money and if that's for your take that's fine for me but for me it did a better job whether it's worth that much price difference of a better job i don't know it depends on your budget your goals your pickiness about sound this sound is something that i obsess over so for me it was 100 worth it if i could somehow record in a vocal booth and make it look like my full studio with full control over that i would do that because i prefer the vocal booth sound but not everybody does and in fact part of my move over the past year or so to the shotgun mics and things like that comes from the point of so many people saying that they didn't like that it sounded like i was in a closet and wanted a more natural sound so with that in mind of course i just want to remind you that microphone choice and microphone positioning matter just as much as the well not just as much but it matters significantly when it comes to getting the audio you want out of your space it's not just treatment it's not just positioning it's not just microphone it's all of those things together right tool for the right job that's why gear does matter doesn't matter how expensive your gear is but you need the right piece of gear for the job or you're gonna have a hard time so when i was first setting the sound panels up i realized that elgato really missed an opportunity to capitalize on yet another audience of streaming kind of trends and visuals and that is the nanoleaf crowd but thankfully in the box they also included something pretty cool they are selling led strips as well you can see them turned on behind me some of them are kind of out of camera these are the official elgato light strips [Music] these come in packs of about six and a half feet of strip for 60 which is honestly not a terrible price for what you're getting they are flicker free and i have tested this all the way up to the highest shutter speed my cinema camera supports which is one over 2000 shutter speed there is no flicker you actually see at the maximum shutter speed a little bit of flicker at the bottom of the screen and that is from the leds on the back of my monitor flickering but the led strips from elgato do not flicker at all they supposedly get up to 2000 lumens and have full rgb and rgbw so they're pretty cool they have much more impressive adhesive than most of the generic led strips i have throughout my studio and the fact that most of my other led strips are not flicker-free at all these are it's pretty nice um my only complaint well i have two complaints about these uh just because i don't really have much to say about an led strip it looks cool it's stream deck controlled you add it through control center control it from your phone or from your stream deck looks great in that regard i have two complaints though and one of them they're kind of solving the first one though is that the leds are pretty far away when you look at them even compared to the leds i have running my ceiling here which are just mostly generic led strips they are very separated and that is because they are also they are full rgb w or ww strips which means that you can come in here to them and get full white range as well so you have 16 million colors rgb but you also have 3 200 kelvin to or 3 500 kelvin to 6 500 kelvin so you get the full white range with what's supposed to be a decently high accuracy color accuracy for whites as well and so that is something that affects where the leds are because you have the rgb leds spaced out with the proper white leds however it does mean you can very clearly see how spaced out they are and the hot spots of them which is certainly not desirable to everyone the second complaint i have is with regards to actually connecting them most led strips you will buy on amazon the power supply for them has two prongs so you can connect two strips right away and then they're daisy chainable and at least with the ones i usually test you can usually get about two strips daisy chained per prong that comes off the power supply before you start getting power drop-offs there's plenty of them that are much worse than that but the ones i have used that are at least of good quality you can get the two strips running off of there and then you can get another strip daisy chained off of that before you see any significant decrease in power or before you get you know weird color changes or whatever these are not currently set up for that they do have a daisy chain plug on the end however they are selling extension kits later which i would rather them just be daisy chainable out of the box set up like normal rgb strips in the first place than to have to buy a entire extension kit to make that happen that feels a little too money grabby to me or a little bit too controlly and for those looking to buy a solution to fit their needs right off the bat they're kind of out of luck until the extension kits come out and so i have actually illustrated that in two different sections here they sent me four boxes of led strips i've only used three so far the other one's going in a different spot over here which you can't see i have in b-roll but over this section of sound foam i actually have two led strips chain daisy chained together i had to solder them to do this so i kind of messed up the epoxy that's over top of it it's one of the messiest solder jobs you'll see on youtube because i'm i've got shaky hands i'm just not great at it i'm working on it but i'm not great at it but they do expose the pads on the bottom of the strip for you to be able to solder to so i split off some you know some of my soldering wire and soldered them together now they are flipped because the receiving end that receives power has its own little ribbon cable that comes off to plug into their power supply and so they they only run one way and so i had to cross over each of my cables because they're reversed in order to daisy chain them butt to butt but then i just daisy chained them together cut off the power supply end of one and i got it to strip all the way around here now on this side i started on the bottom and could only get around to a certain point because i can't daisy chain them for now so i'm going to wait until that extension kit comes out so i can hopefully connect it but i don't know how much that extension kit will be or how far that will extend it i can confirm from my initial soldering test here that you can at least get two strips daisy chain together without any power issues or color issues but i don't know how far that can go and i don't know that they won't try to give you a shorter extension for the extension kit they should have just included a little six pin adapter in the box in the first place imo so this has been my journey sound proofing a garage home studio which started out as an entire echo chamber and is now fairly confident competent in natural sounding for videos using both common sense kind of physics practices as well as cheap and more expensive sound foam and sound blankets i wanted to also mention if tackling the ceiling is of your interest and you don't want to do full sound uh clouds the sound cloud that's funny uh the vocal booth to go sight that i got my sound blankets from actually sell just kind of little banner ones that are cut to like a foot i think six inches tall that you hang from the ceiling and then they act as these little flags which help sound that's bouncing across the ceiling and just kind of break those up and i think those would be really effective my plan was actually to get those for here and it just wasn't in the budget yet so i haven't sorted that out but if i do get them assuming i can recreate the sound issues in video which i clearly struggle with here i may make a video on them because it's pretty cool but i wanted to mention that as well this has been my journey sound proofing or sound treating rather my home studio for youtube videos voice over streaming and all of that as well as a talking about quite a few solutions including elgato's new one that just launched yesterday at the time of releasing again i had to get all the moving vlogs out to get you all caught up to this point before i could really release it so i missed the embargo day unfortunately but hopefully it was worth the wait coming at you from my new studio space which doesn't look like much of anything and at last after three months from that original sample being recorded here is what the exact same camera and microphone used to record that original echoey hell sample sounds like with the new sound treatment it's pretty good hope you enjoyed the video if you did hit the like button subscribe for more tech education and stream guides i'm eposvox your stream professor i will see you in the next one come join us on discord we just had another discord community game night it was halo the master chief collection it was a freaking blast i streamed it on twitch we'll be doing a lot more of those 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Channel: EposVox

Views: 20,117

Keywords: elgato wave panel review, elgato wave panels, elgato light strip, elgato light strip flicker free, elgato led strip, elgato led strip review, elgato wave panel setup, elgato sound foam, elgato wave panel vs cheap sound foam, sound treatment for home studio, acoustic treatment grarage studio, home studio acoustic treatment, sound foam for streamers, sound foam for streaming, reduce echo, reduce reverb, audio tips, moving vlog, ultimate youtube studio, new studio 2021, moving

Id: _mX5IvKNmBI

Length: 45min 15sec (2715 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021