RODECaster Pro Review / Test / Explained

greetings earthlings today we're going to be reviewing a portable podcast studio slash mixer slash interface very cool so today we are reviewing this guy the road caster Pro which is a portable podcasting studio or mixer or interface and it may not come with stickers but it does come with a poster size specification sheet what do you think inroad come on but if you do want to pick up this guy it'll set you back around $600 like always links down below and in the sake of full transparency I do need to disclose that rode sent me the rode Castro pro kit for the sake of doing this review now for the majority of this review I will be running the pro caster direct into the road caster Pro with the input gain set at 32 decibels and the fader set to unity which is the fifth notch below the top none of the onboard processing is currently enabled and I won't be doing any kind of post-processing but I may boost it in post so check the dooblydoo to see what I did now let's talk about what comes in the box even though mine came in a backpack and they don't all come in backpacks so it's too heavy to throw of course you will get the rode caster Pro you will get a USB c2 USB a cable you'll get the necessary power cord you'll get a couple of sound board cards so you can note what kind of sounds are on the sound board and you'll get some poster size documentation when it comes to the build quality of this device it feels really well put together and very sturdy the entire face of this device is all-metal which makes it feel premium and like it could take a beating while on the other side the bottom of this device is plastic with some rubber feet to keep it from sliding around on your desk and I'm guessing they did this to save a little bit of weight the headphone volume controls have absolutely no wobble to them and they do have stepped dials which is very nice and tactile the faders on the other hand do have a little bit of wiggle when you move them left and right but I don't think it's that far out of the ordinary and lastly the noahic XLR connectors have almost a no movement to them when a microphone is connected now let's go ahead and walk through every button fader and dial fits on this thing on the top of the device the first thing you will find are four buttons numbered one two four this will allow you to select the microphone that you want to make any adjustments to beneath each of those buttons you will find a dedicated fader for each of those microphone inputs next you'll find a USB computer playback fader you'll also find a fader to control the volume of the 3.5 milimeter trrs input on the rear you'll find a fader to control the volume of the Bluetooth connected device and lastly you will find a fader to control the volume of the sound board on the note of the sound board you do have 8 programmable buttons which you can assign sounds to and change the color of with an app on your computer directly beneath the faders you'll find a set of solo buttons which will light up green but you will also find a set of mute buttons in case you don't want to hear somebody talking now when we move up to the top of the device you will find this very nice touch screen which allows you to make adjustments to your microphones or your processing or the phone input or anything like that next to the screen you will find this very large record button to both start and stop the recording you can see that it shows in very large text how long you've been recording for and it makes it very easy to add markers to your recording next to the record button we got four headphone volume controls and I do want to note that headphone one controls the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on the front as well as headphone output one on the rear of the device and if the last thing that we have is a monitor volume control which controls the monitor outs on the rear of the road caster now as I alluded to on the front of the device you will find a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack in case you want to use 3.5 milimeter headphones and then we got the back of the device and the first thing you will find is a power button to turn on or off the road caster probe next to that you will find the power input to power the device you'll find a USB C port you'll find an SD card slot you'll find a set of monitor outputs to run this to your powered monitors you'll find four quarter inch headphone outputs a single 3.5 millimeter trrs phone input and lastly you will find four nitric XLR jacks which only accept XLR they are not combo jacks then we got the specs but first up I want to address a question that I have received mold both times over the last week this is only a stereo device meaning it does not allow you to record a multitrack to your computer and it does not record a multitrack to the SD card everything on this thing that is being run in is being down mixed to a single stereo track but then as far as the conversion we have a single bit depth of 24-bit and a single sample rate of 48 kilohertz the microphone inputs have a gain range of 0 to 55 decibels they have an input impedance of 600 ohms we got an EIN of 125 decibels and we got a phantom power provided of 48 volts now I'm going to go ahead and measure the noise floor of one of the microphone pries using a method outlined in Julian's video and one of the upper corners and I do want to note that while I am measuring the noise floor I have the fader set to unity gain which is the fifth notch below the top which is something that I verified with Road you now in order to really test out the gain i have the shure sm7b connected directly to the road caster pro my input gain is set at 45 decibels and the fader is set to the fifth notch below the top which is the Unity gain I verified that with Road and this is the level we are getting and this is how it sounds and I will shut up so you can hear the line noise generated while you're driving the sm7b when it comes to the latency we do only have one conversion option at 24-bit 48 kilohertz and with an i/o buffer size of 64 samples we got an 8 millisecond round-trip or 3 and 1/2 milliseconds output when we jump up to 128 samples we have 10 point 6 milliseconds round-trip or 4.7 milliseconds out and when we jump up to 256 samples we have a round-trip latency of 16 milliseconds or 7 and 1/2 milliseconds output now I want to demonstrate the audio quality that you could get if somebody were to call into your phone over a VoIP service like discord and you sent that over Bluetooth to the road caster Pro but I also want to check what the mix - sounds like on the other end of the line alright so now I'm in the other room calling into the discord of voice chat which is then being sent over Bluetooth to the road caster Pro this should give you a pretty decent idea of the audio quality that you would get on a recording if somebody calls into your show using a decent voice client - like a discord and now I'm back in the studio but I am still recording audio on the discord machine that way you're able to hear what your caller would hear when they are calling in so this is the type of voice that they would hear okay so I'm still sitting in the other room running through the exact same audio setup but now I'm connecting my phone to the road caster Pro using a 3.5 millimeter to 3.5 millimeter cable and I'm doing this to show you that if you want the best audio quality you should opt to go the 3.5 milimeter trrs cable route instead of using bluetooth alright so we're not going to walk through every single feature on this thing because Road as a bunch of tutorials on their channel but what we will do is go ahead and walk through all the processing options and show you how it sounds with the road procaster so in order to access the menu you're just going to click on the channel that you want to adjust and this is the first screen that will pop up it gives you the option for a bunch of different presets the road pod mic which is the new mic they just announced the pro caster which is what I'm using or just a generic condenser or a generic dynamic and then if we want to do more advanced settings we will go to setup this page allows you to manually adjust the gain up or down using the plus or minus buttons turn on phantom power if you are running a FET head or a cloud lifter or you can jump into advanced if you want to dive even further so here you can see that I have everything turned off and we will slowly turn on each of them to show you how it effects the sound first we'll go ahead and turn on the compressor and this is how it sounds you can hear it does boost a little bit of the noise floor but it definitely squashes the variance between the loudest and the quietest parts of whatever you're saying into the mic next we got the high-pass filter which is set to 60 Hertz so it's not going to affect the tone of your voice too much but it should help reduce any kind of rumbles or bumps of the desk next up we have the de-esser which is a very useful tool to help you decrease the sibilance or the harshness whenever you say words with S's in them next up we got the noise gate but before I enable that I'm going to be quiet so you can hear the line noise and the ambient noise of this room and now I'll enable it and you can hear that all that ambient noise all that background hiss really drops off now one thing about noise gates is you have to be careful with them because if you start to back away from your microphone the noise gate may think that's below the threshold and cut it off and make it sound very funny so you need to be careful when you're using any kind of noise gate and next we have a ducking feature and if I'm not mistaken the channels that have ducking turned on the volume will be decreased when somebody else is talking and to the last two things that we have are the effects big bottom and the effects aural exciter so let me go ahead and turn on the big bottom you can hear that it really be fins up my voice and adds a lot of lower body to it without getting to Bhumi it sounds really nice and fattens up your voice if you need a little bit of help like I do and lastly you got the aural exciter and as you can hear this adds a lot of clarity and crisp eNOS up top in my opinion I'm not a fan of it I think it adds too much picks up too many mouth noises just makes it sound a little bit too shrill or unpleasant and the last thing that I want to note is that there is currently no way to adjust to the settings of any of these effects currently what you hear is what you get now there is one more page that we can go to adjust the sound of the microphone and that is the voice tab and on this page it allows you to select the tone and the strength of the voice of whoever speaking into that channels microphone and depending on what tone and strength you select on this tab this will have a direct impact on the effects that are being run on your voice so we'll start with deep voice and soft and this is how it sounds we are now on medium voice and soft and this is how it sounds and we are now on high voice and soft and this is how it sounds now we're on deep voice and medium and this is how the audio sounds medium voice on a medium strength and this is how it sounds and high voice on medium strength and this is how it sounds and finally we are on deep voice and strong and this is how the audio sounds we've jumped up to medium voice and strong and this is how it sounds and lastly we are on high voice and strong strength and this is how the audio sounds okay so here we have the road caster Pro app on my Mac this is the app that lets you add or remove or change any of the sounds that you have on the devices sound board in order to change these it's actually very easy all you're going to do is click on it you can choose to clear the pad and then that will allow you to bring in your own audio file and you can also change the color here which will change the color on the actual device and you have three different back styles replay will repeat the audio file indefinitely play will play it all the way through once and to latch is the option that I choose for mine because it allows you to start to play the track on the pad and tap the pad a second time to stop the playback and that's really the only functionality you have on the computer other than the firmware updater now we're just gonna plug a bunch of different microphones in here and see how they sound through the processing because why the hell not okay one more time on the shure sm7b on the generic dynamic preset input gain set at 35 decibels I don't know why it's so low but I have the compressor the high-pass filter and the DSR turned on let's go ahead and turn on the big bottom that should be Finn it up in the low end add the aural exciter I don't like that at all turn that back off I really don't like that setting and there you go and of course we got to try out the electro voice re 20 my input gain is set at 35 decibels on the generic dynamic preset compressor high pass filter and de-esser let's throw on the big bottom that's how it sounds with a big bottom turn it off or al exciter oh that's so that's I don't like that off and there you go now I'm speaking into the rode nt1 on the road nt1 preset but I dropped to the game from 20 down to 10 this is with the compressor high pass filter and de-esser will throw on the big bottom to beefing it up because I am not too close to it I'm not getting much proximity effect and this is how it sounds with the preset now because this is such a popular microphone with voiceover artists I thought I would throw it in the mix and this is the Sennheiser MKH 416 connected in the generic condenser setting my input level is set at 10 that's weird and I have that compressor high-pass filter D s are turned on let's throw on the big bottom there you go beefing it up give you that radio voice even more so than the MKT 416 and there you go that's how this sounds and of course we got a handhold the NOI mantilla hum 103 while we're testing it in the generic condenser preset in level set at 10 let's jump into the processing we got the compressor high-pass filter de-esser turned on let's throw on the effects big bottom there you go beefing it up a lot and that's how it sounds so in my opinion this device was just unapologetically made for one thing and one thing only and that is podcasting but first up we got to talk pros and cons and in terms of pros this thing is just insanely easy to set up you can honestly pull this out of the box and be recording in a couple of minutes which is just super awesome for a beginner podcaster I also think that the soundboard is a really nice feature and it will make podcasting with any kind of bumpers or theme songs a lot easier and a lot of fun because you can even throw in some sound effects and go from there I hate myself I also found the phone connectivity very simple and useful especially the automatic mix - because mix minuses can be very confusing to set up especially when you're just getting started so if you're a podcaster who has a lot of remote guests that's gonna be a huge feature for you on top of all that I just find it very nice to have faders solo buttons and mute buttons at your fingertips in case you need to make any on-the-fly adjustments then as far as the headphone amps they were perfectly capable of driving even my sennheiser HD 650 s which have an impedance of 300 ohms so they are powerful enough to drive the majority of headphones on the note of headphones this thing has five headphone outputs for quarter inch on the rear and one 3.5 millimeter on the front so that eliminates the need for any kind of splitter or external headphone amp which is just awesome I was also rather surprised with how good the latency on this thing is although you're probably not going to be needing that because you're not going to be running any sound into your DAW adding any processing and sending it back out so it's good to have but you're probably not gonna need it another really big Pro for me was the meters on the screen of course I would have liked to have seen some kind of decibel markings on them so I know exactly what I'm hitting but they are granular enough to get it good idea of what you're setting your levels at and then we get to the cons and the main issue that I have with this thing is that it does down mix everything to a stereo track that eliminates your ability to make any kind of adjustments to individual tracks and post or if you wanted to adjust any kind of processing and post you're gonna have to apply it to the entire track and it will also make editing a nightmare if anybody starts talking over each other another really big turn-off for me on this device is the inability to adjust any of the settings for the effects that are built-in that is something that I personally would love and I think would make it a lot more useful I did email rode and they said they currently have no plans to open it up but I do think in the future if they do decide to open it up it would be easily fixed with a software update another big issue that I have is that this thing has no quarter inch inputs meaning there's no way to run any kind of outboard gear at line level if you do run any outboard gear you're gonna be running it through these preamps which will add additional noise and coloration and it's just not an optimal setup but additionally that lack of quarter-inch inputs means there's no Heisey inputs so you can't connect any instruments to this thing and then I have a couple of nitpicky cons the first one being that I was unable to find any kind of data transfer mode meaning when you have this connected to your computer over USB there's no way to transfer the files from the SD card slot you would have to remove the SD card put it in an SD card reader and transfer those files to your computer that way and lastly there's no sound libraries or presets for the soundboard so if you have multiple podcasts you can't say recall podcast one or recall podcast two right now you would just have to manually remove and add in every single sound that you want when you're switching between podcasts but again I think that would be a very simple fix with a software update and finally would I recommend this portable podcast studio mixer interface yes no and maybe and of course we'll walk through the use cases first up if you run a multiple person podcast and you livestream it to the internet or if you prefer not to do any kind of post-processing then 100% I would recommend to this thing because I honestly don't think I found a better for plug-and-play podcasting but on the other hand if you would like to make any kind of adjustments to individual tracks and post whether it be adjusting the level or adjusting the processing or if you want to run any kind of outboard gear then unfortunately no I wouldn't recommend this for you because it doesn't allow for any of that third if you're a musician no absolutely not this is not designed for you it doesn't have instrument inputs it doesn't allow for multi tracking this is not for musicians I think that at this price point you would be 1,000% better served with something like the Universal Audio arrow or the apogee duet so go check that out and do not buy this thing and lastly we got game streamers and for them I am a big solid maybe but with that being said I think the feature set on this device is nearly perfect for gamers with the noise gate the compression the faders the mutes everything it's what a game streamer would need but the thing that's not perfect is the price and the abundance of inputs the reason I say that is the majority of game streamers will just need one microphone input and here you're paying for four of them so if rode came out with a condensed version with one or two microphone inputs at a price point of two or three hundred dollars then 100% I would recommend that for gamers but at this price point is just a maybe because it really comes down to the individual and what their budget would allow and there you have it that is going to wrap up this marathon review of the road caster Pro I hope you enjoyed it if you did go ahead and give me a thumbs up because this took three or four days of work I don't even know anymore but if you hated it go ahead and give me a thumbs down if you want more videos like this you can subscribe a logo beneath me you can also become a member by clicking that blue join button beneath the video if you want to hang out in the discord server I'll throw a link in the description and I will see you all next time thanks for watching thanks for listening bye [Music]

Channel: Podcastage

Views: 144,214

Keywords: podcastage, podcast, bandrew, scott, microphone, review, audio, sound, test, demo, rodecaster pro, how to, streaming mixer, rødecaster pro, rodecaster review, rode microphone, Audio Interface, USB Mixer, Portable Recorder, Walkthrough, Setup, Explained, Tutorial

Id: dxqNq3xifyQ

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TimLSD]

No multitrack is so annoying though. it would make recordings a million times better

[u/classroombrew]

Thanks for posting. Been wondering about investing in this bad boy. Seems like such a perfect mixer on the surface level, once they announced its impending release however long ago.

[u/DocHolliday31]

Pretty sure I’m buying one of these next week. Found it when someone posted the new mic a couple days ago. I’ve watched every YouTube video I can find. I’m obsessed. Hoping to win my fantasy championships to pay for it

[u/Chouston3]

This video satisfied my curiosity.

Thanks for posting it!

[u/DocHolliday31]

I have. That’s what i was planning on purchasing. But with the hot keys. built in headphone amp and others it just checks every box. Bluetooth phone/computer seems awesome.

Honestly I haven’t watched the attached video yet. Was waiting until I got home. Just started it a couple mins ago

[u/ThaBromar]

Might need this to improve my podcast. May eventually start inviting guests.

[u/BangsNaughtyBits]

I am glad the Rode Twitter account was wrong when they told me the max gain was 45 dB. The Rode YouTube account has consistently stated that the gain was 55 dB.

!

[u/devillaceration]

This looks SO dope. Awaiting a price dip, but can't wait to buy one!

[u/wittiestphrase]

Love Rode products. Used two Procasters when we were podcasting and continue to use them for voiceover work for training videos. Use their on-camera mic and wireless system for videos.

My only consistent issue with their stuff has been the quality of some of the seemingly less critical components. Like included cords or windshields. Otherwise tremendous value at the price point.