I Used The GoXLR For A Month.. Is It Actually Good??

yeah audio is hard and a lot can go wrong throughout your signal chain signal chain by the way is the path in which an audio signal takes starting from your microphone all the way through to your end goal which in this case is your stream let's take for example this mixer let's say your microphone is plugged into this slot right here and you by accident turn up the gain a little bit too high you hear what's now called clipping and it doesn't matter if you try to compensate by turning the level down and the only way to avoid this is to really understand the signal flow which is complicated but Helicon gaming claims they have the solution to all this enter the go XLR you go XLR is touted as an all-in-one device with a multiple input mixer sound sampler voice changer and a bunch of other really cool features along the way I picked up one of these devices a little over a month ago I've been using it on every stream since have a lot of opinions about it and if I'm going to share a device like this with you we are going to talk about the four essential categories that make up a solid audio device quality intuitiveness functionality reliability so we're gonna go through this device in all four categories I'm gonna rate them on a scale of one to ten that way you can decide if this is a device worth spending $400 of your own money and if you're enjoying this video make sure you hit the like button and make sure to subscribe get all these fancy videos in the future and if you want to see the go XLR in action make sure you follow me on Twitch I stream every Monday Wednesday Friday sometimes Saturday mornings link in the description below cool oh and by the way my name is Harris Heller I am your stream doctor and well let's just jump into it and just to give us something to compare this to this was the previous device I used as a Yamaha mixer it's the mg 10 we're gonna use this as kind of like a control in our experiment right and if I were to rate this device I'd probably give it a 10 for quality for streaming of course in terms of functionality I'd probably give it a 4 of 5 it's got multiple inputs and outputs for routing it's got solid compression eats you to make your voice sound great but on top of that it doesn't really do anything special for reliability I'll give it a 10 it's never given me a single issue but for intuitiveness I mean honestly I'm gonna have to give it a zero you guys aren't audio technicians most of you have no idea what these knobs do and this is very overwhelming to look at there's a reason a lot of streamers have audio issues because they're all trying to use stuff like this so now that we have something to compare it to let's move on to the go EXO on short answer quality's fantastic as good as you'll ever need it to be there's something important you need to understand about quality especially when it comes to live streaming there is a definite price threshold and once you pass it everything sounds pretty much the same if you watched my last video which I'll link to in the description below I compared three mics a $32 mic $100 mic and a $2000 mic and the $32 mic to the hundred dollar mic was an incredible difference but once you passed that hundred dollars and we jumped up to the $2000 mic this one right here actually there was a nearly indistinguishable difference in quality and especially after everything's gone through twitch and the compression and the live-streaming and most people are watching on phones you can't hear the difference and the same thing goes for audio devices like the go XLR you take a cheap audio interface like the cheapest one I recommend which is this behringer it's like 70 or 80 bucks compare it to a Yamaha one which is about 150 there is a night and day difference but going from the hundred and fifty dollar equipment up to the $400 equipment like the go XLR you can't really hear any difference at all at the end of the day if you're spending more than a hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars on audio devices it's all pretty much gonna sound the same to your viewer so I would rate the quality of the go XLR a 10 in my opinion the intuitiveness is the magic behind the go XLR audio is hard and the go XLR software makes it almost impossible to screw up no matter how dumb you are for example do you know what phantom power is and did you know that if you have a condenser mic like this one it is required for the mic to even function but if you have a dynamic mic like the shure sm7b it's not required at all in fact you shouldn't turn it on I bet some of you knew that but I bet most of you had no idea at least the first time you got your set up that if you didn't press this red button your condenser mic wouldn't work the go XLR doesn't even mention phantom power but when you set it up for the very first time it asks you are you using a condenser mic or a dynamic mic if you click on condenser mic it just turns on phantom power in the background things like gain and compression and EQ are incredibly complicated but if you can use them correctly they really add some top-notch quality to your vocals for each one of these parameters the go XLR has some very simple settings for you to adjust and try out and if you're a little bit more experienced in the audio field you can open them up to the more advanced editor and really tweak them yourself even the sampler which is a brand new feature for almost anybody streaming is incredibly simple to use you want to record something you hold down an empty pad test you want to play it back you tap on set bat test test you don't like what you recorded you had the Clear button and then the pad that you'd like to clear it's the most intuitive thing I've ever seen Helicon gaming managed to find the perfect balance between advanced functionality and simple intuitive nasai to give them a 10 in this category but speaking of functionality this is where the tens are gonna have to stop look if you love your go XLR and you want to go on believing that this device is perfect I recommend you turn off the video I just don't know if I'm ready to be the guy that ruins this for you and hurts you this way but it needs to be done we need to talk about it look the functions of the device are amazing six voice changing save slots with on-the-fly modifications for each one a ton of i/o a voice sampler audio routing like the list of functions of this device goes on and on but there are some missing features that I have on my other devices that I missed the top of my list is something called a sub mix essentially one mix that I hear and a different mix that the stream here is because there are certain situations where you need to change the audio of what you hear without it really affecting what the viewers hear for example if you want to play with music on and you want to turn down the music in your headset so you can hear the game well or maybe you're in the middle of a fight and your teammates are kind of being obnoxious and loud you want to turn them down a little bit but you want your stream to still be able to hear them just fine that second one's kind of a big one for me which is why I still actually use my Astro mix amp in conjunction with the go XLR because I can crank down my teammates and still hear the game just fine I spent hours tweaking my stream mix decibel by decibel so that my voice and my gameplay are mixed and balanced perfectly and you can hear my teammates but they're slightly quieter than me so you know who the subject is and so I'm afraid to touch the faders on the fly because I don't want to screw that up now I actually spoke to a Helicon representative about this and his response was when we talked to streamers they said what they wanted to hear was exactly what the viewers hear so they know what their stream sounds like and I totally understand that and I even agree with it I think if you're trying to sell a product like this to the masses of people who have no idea how mixing works and adding a sub mix feature is just gonna throw a lot of people off no this was the solution I suggested to the Helicon rep add a hot key into the go XLR so maybe if you crank down a teamate during a fight you double tap both the outside mute buttons and all the faders since they're already motorized they slide right back into place the way you had it before it reverts back to its default that you've previously set up that way you can make on-the-fly adjustments based on your situation without worrying about screwing up your mix and this really brings us to my main issue of the device which is the go XLR hardware requires the app to even function the run at all in fact if you don't turn on the PC that it's plugged into or you don't even have the app running on that PC it basically turns into a brick that does nothing more than route your audio for you yeah the mic will still work but all the buttons become frozen none of the mute buttons work and the voice changes work the sampler doesn't work the only thing that maintains its functionality is the faders now lucky for most of you guys this is designed to plug into your gaming PC so this really isn't a huge issue but because I have a guitar plugged di and I had to route audio a little bit differently and mines plugged into my streaming PC which means if I want to jump on and play some games with friends off stream I have to fight both pcs just to be able to do that and there is one more massive flaw that when combined with this really makes it almost useless at certain points half the time I can't get the app to launch I have no idea why but sometimes when I boot up my computer and I click on the go XLR app the app won't launch it's not in the task manager so I can't end the task the only way for me to get the app to launch is to restart the entire PC and because sometimes I don't notice this until I've already started the stream my only solution to even have a functioning go XLR it's for me to restart my entire stream shut down the stream for three minutes restart my pc to fire everything back up if I have a hundred and fifty viewers in my chat I'm not gonna do that and so I'm resigned to having a stream without a go XLR I've had a couple streams like that and it's really disappointing another software issue I've noticed with this is whenever I reboot the app for any reason whether it's restarting the whole PC or just rebooting the app the noise gate and the compressor actually reset their values so by default the go XLR noise gate is much too high so if I speak too quietly my voice gets cut off and I have to crank that down to twelve well every time I restart the app that automatically goes back up to whatever the default was and you can hear nice by noise gate but if I move the dial up and down real quick back to the same spot there's no problem at all those values even though they're showing at the values that I set I have to move the knobs and then put them back in place for it to reset the values that I have the really weird bug now Helicon did just push out a brand new update earlier this week and so far it seems as if it's fixed the unable to boot bug I just installed it last night and so it's really hard for me to tell if it's a permanent fix or if I'm gonna start having the same problems again in the next couple days but the bug with the noise gate and the compression still seem to be there so if we were to throw up the scores for the Yamaha and then compare them next to go XLR we gave the go XLR attend for quality a 10 for intuitiveness and 8 for functionality I was gonna give it a 4 for reliability with the app not being able to launch but I've now launched at about 20 times and I haven't had a single issue yet so I'm gonna raise that up to six or seven since there still are bugs in the app and the device requires the app to run I can't give it any more than a seven but let's look at this objectively every one of my issues with this device has been a software issue something that they can fix in the future and my impressions with Helicon and how they've connected with their community and listen to their users has been incredibly positive and I'm super optimistic that this will become pretty much the ultimate streaming audio device in the coming year and when it comes to the value of a product like this is it really worth $400 absolutely yes if you were to try to buy every single device that's in this from a mixer with motorized faders to a voice changer to a sampler and all the other things in between you'd have to pay well over a thousand dollars the fact that they're selling it for $400 is a huge bargain what really matters at the end of this review is whether or not I recommend you actually spend $400 on it or not and look I made a whole video on this a couple weeks ago about what order of upgrade you should make on your setup and something like this in my opinion should come pretty late it's not that it's not an amazing device it's just that it adds more to the experience to the streamer than it actually adds to the experience of the viewer sure the voice changes are awesome and if you can get creative with the sampler you can do some really fun things on stream but if you're penny pinching and you have $400 to spend on one thing I would probably recommend you work on branding your channel make sure your stream is enjoyable to watch for the viewer and then spend on something like this now if you're an adult and you have a good job and you have the money to spend by all means get this device it is an incredible piece of machinery just make sure you don't get overexcited and spend the only $400 you have and the viewer doesn't really notice much of a difference if I were to give three different suggestions for audio setups on three different budgets I'd probably recommend these three if you're on a tight budget I would recommend the toner mic that I talked about in the video with the behringer mixer that I'm gonna link down below the total will come out to about $100 it will sound fantastic and you'll be able to upgrade each part individually as your budget increases if you're looking for one step above that a mid-range audio setup I would recommend the blue ember Mike that I'm actually using right now it's about a hundred dollars with the Yamaha mixer that I mentioned earlier both of those are pretty significant upgrades in terms of audio quality and it's still only gonna be about $250 of course links to everything I'm mentioning in the description below if you have the money to blow get the blue ember and the go XLR and you will have everything you need for incredible audio except I don't know like a pop filter or something anyway just a reminder if you want to see my setup in action and watch me use the go XLR I stream every Monday Wednesday Friday at twitch.tv slash Harris Heller link at the top of the description down below I hope this video was helpful most importantly I hope I helped you make a solid financial decision on your equipment and as always happy stream [Music]

Channel: Alpha Gaming

Views: 383,553

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, helicon, helicon gaming, goxlr, go xlr, xlr, audio, mixer, microphone, sound, quality, preamp, voice changer, voice, recording, record, review, test

Id: a-6BOV2dFME

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019