RODECaster Pro Review

in this episode we'll take a look at the road caster Pro [Music] I'm currently recording with the road caster Pro and an audio technica at2020 like and in terms of the settings here we'll go ahead and put those up on the screen now who is this device for let's start there really obviously it's made for podcasters can use it for other things like music production you could I don't think it's really suited for that but I think it's really good for podcasting panel discussions and things of that nature now first of all thanks to be an H for lending this unit to me for the review nobody's paying me to do this review Road didn't give this to me I can say anything I want and what I'm going to say is that I like this device so much that I am planning to buy it myself so I'll be sending an email back over to be an H and say hey you're not getting this one back how do i how do I submit my payment so what is this thing anyway first of all it's a mixer and it's a recorder for podcasters in every way that I can really see this is made to simplify the process of recording podcast you can record to an micro SD card you can record directly to your computer via USB it has faders and very simple controls for managing the audio in every way it also has the ability to play back up to eight different sound effects or musical jingles or whatever it is you want to do so for example here's one of the built-in music effects [Music] and of course it has others but you can load your own sound effects on here as well it has over 500 megabytes of storage so you can just upload whatever sound effects you want here they've included some cheesy ones which you may find helpful or maybe not what is also very nice about it too is that you have very high quality preamplifiers for your microphone inputs XLR inputs so you're going to be able to connect up your professional-grade microphones and get a really great sound you have four headphone amplifiers for four different people to listen back you also have a fifth headphone output a 3.5 millimeter output on the front on the back they have the traditional quarter inch outputs for the you know again high quality headphones and you also have the ability to connect your phone so if you're going to dial someone into your podcast you can connect that via 3.5 millimeter or you can connect them via bluetooth so that bluetooth can also connect to your phone if you just want to play something back from your phone if you have sound effects on there things of that nature so it gives you a lot of flexibility to do the things that you need to do very nice layout very nice hardware all-metal top at a nice touchscreen the bottom is plastic but it seems like a high grade plastic seems like a very durable piece of equipment the screen is very easy to use very large easy on the eyes you can add markers while you're recording let's just roll through some of the settings here so you can hear what these sound like I want to first of all I'm going to turn everything off this is me without any sort of processing on the road caster okay all the settings are off right now first let's do them one by one first of all we have the compressor the compressor will make your overall voice louder this is probably my least favorite setting on here it works okay but I did find that in a lot of cases it really kind of emphasizes the breaths because the way it's compressing the peaks and pushing everything louder for those of you that need to broadcast live this might be a better choice or if you are insistent that you're not going to do any sort of post-processing this could be a good choice but again I don't like how it kind of emphasizes the breast that's kind of a normal thing with and sometimes it sounds a little pumping like it's just sounds a little processed so it's not my favorite setting it's there if you need it now it's back off okay next up is a high-pass filter in most cases I think this is a good setting to use you probably couldn't hear a big difference it's a fairly subtle high pass filter and really all its going to take care of is if there's any sort of low frequency Rumble in your space where you're recording I think it's a good idea to turn it on that's what it sounds like moving on to the next setting de-esser I have an incredibly sibling voice and you've probably heard hear whenever I say the letter S there's a lot of sizzle and it can be really grating and not sound great over time the de-esser will help to remove that I've just turned the D s or on so you now you can hear what that sounds like it mellows it out just a little bit without taking the crispness away so actually I was surprised the de-esser works better than I expected now I'm going to pause here for just a second so you can hear what this room sounds like now let me apply the boys gate okay now the noise gates on now when I pause you might be able to hear less and it opens the gate back up as soon as I start talking this works better than I expected now if you're having problems where it sounds fluttery this is where you need to go back and change the voice settings and make sure you dial it in for your voice changing the tone and the strength of your voice too and you have to be honest about things if you have a strong voice you have a strong voice that's fine if you have a very soft voice just change those settings and you'll see that the gate will work differently and it won't do a lot of that fluttering where your voice cuts in and out really quickly ducking essentially just makes the other people quieter when the host starts speaking next up the two effects number one aural exciter the aural exciter is especially useful for people who have what I would call dark voices that is a lot of low end and maybe mid-range but not a lot of high frequency so they can start to sound a little bit muffled naturally an aural exciter will really help those types of voices let me turn it on on my voice it's not a good fit it's going to sound horrible now the aural exciter is on and now and actually I'll turn the DSR off this is going to be potentially very rough on your voice or your ears that's what the aural exciter does so again it's good for people that have a really kind of low end voice not a lot of high-frequency stuff coming out of their voice it gives them a little bit more clarity and crispness crispness on my voice bad fit okay turn the DSR back on turn the aural exciter off now for the big bottom I have had that off the entire time let's turn the big bottom on now the big bottom is on you can hear that again and gives that kind of really broad caste sound that you're used to hearing on kind of traditional FM radio for a lot of voices of the DJs and things of that nature so there's a run-through of the different effects on the road caster let's give you a demo with multiple people okay we are recording here I'm on channel number one and you can see my setup here I have the gain set to forty one out of fifty-five I'm using the electro voice art no I'm using the audio technica at2020 [Music] I go back to setup here you can see I have the DSR turned on I know it still sounds somewhat sibling but believe it or not that's just how it works without it I sound something more like this we'll see if that makes a difference can you guys hear a difference so here's the DSR off and here's the DSR on it actually does make a difference huh I also have the noise gate on I don't have the other things on at the moment so that's where we're starting we're gonna go ahead and get Danny set up here so Danny go ahead and talk to us a little bit here your she's talking on the electro boy sorry 20 yes okay how's it going today great great thanks for joining us on our podcast today so she's set up at a forty one out of fifty five game level that's a no that's a dynamic microphone as well very gain hungry in terms of effects the only thing we have set up on her as a noise gate for the moment and in terms of voice we have medium tone and medium strength so we're good there next up for Emma high off mic good thanks for coughing off mic that's great okay on you we just have the noise gate as well and then for voice medium and medium we tend to have medium voices yeah you sound very roomy really yeah okay is that better I think so okay okay all right do you mean echoey when you say I'm hearing a lot more room and reverberation and stuff like that is that is that what you're hearing as well until you put the mic closer yes okay all right so let's run through a couple of other things here really quickly so first of all the fifth line down one two three four five rode tells me that's unity in other words zero so that's kind of basically where you want to keep things unless you need to fade somebody back when you don't want them to be talking or if they're not going to be talking for a long time and you know it you can fade them back so that that way you're not picking up any room via their microphone the meters are pretty nice they I think we're I don't know whoops you're my chair there yes okay I have a microphone for muted because we'd have nobody on it and we have the fader pulled all the way back same with the USB and the phone for this one and Bluetooth we don't have anything connected I can go ahead and mute that and then we have our effects over here the effects are controlled by this fader here let me just give you an example here here's a jingle I can press that one again to turn it off now you have a couple of different options here when you set these up you use an app on your computer to set these up and load the sounds in you connect via USB and you have a few different options of how each of these buttons can work why don't you can set them up so that they will play until they'll play the sound one time through or stop if you press the button again that's one option second option is they will loop until you press the button again third option is they will play through all the way one through once but if you press the button they will start over at that point that's why I'm not going to press this one this is a bunch of laughter that goes on for seemingly a couple of minutes yeah it seems like it so here's some other effects happy happy crowd I can of course fade it back if I want it in the background we have a couple of kind of gag things here rusty tickets rusty crickets the good studio musician okay here's the laughter that lasts for about two minutes we're gonna go ahead and pull that back you'll notice there's no mute button on this but you can pull the fader all the way back here so there are some options here of course a big huge red record button it's more intense red when you're recording it's less intense red when you're not recording we have our monitor output if we had speakers connected to this we could use that to play through you know control the volume of the speakers and I think that's basically yet let's just go around the table and get a just a last little sample of your voice so Emma tell us what's your favorite pastime in the summer uh well I do a lot of drum corps in the summer do you mean like that yeah yeah that's how I spend my summer months okay that's her on the electro voice re fifty L which is an interview microphone and then Danny over here on the electro voice re twenty what's your favorite pastime in the summer or winter it depends what's going on so when Emma's doing drum corps I like to volunteer okay partly just to help out and also partly because then I get to see some of the shows I also like to do paleontology fieldwork with the Natural History Museum that's in Salt Lake City and I also like to play music excellent okay all right there's a sample with the road caster for a three-person podcast we should have applause for good band parents applause and here's a demo with a phone I dialed my brother up on my iPhone 10's max I wanted you to tell people because it really I think at the end of that day you were feeling a little on the frustrated side but what so what I see in the picture is I see you wearing a harness with a sound bag attached attached to you you're operating two separate cameras if I'm not mistaken at the same time uh-huh and sound are you like holding a boom pole as well I couldn't tell ya but that's a little hairy yeah it's hairy to operate all that yeah I set up all the lighting and we get we get to a place that never been we have to we have to people like have a pop-up set that doesn't look terrible and then you know I'm di teen and it gets unnerving because I think that's gonna get lost and so they're coming out before they've actually been really good humoured about it that they're finally gonna start giving me some cream we're going to India with the audio guy and I have actual DP awesome so the layout has very simple controls there's basically this huge record button and that's great because it keeps things simple you can't accidentally you know press the fast-forward button or something like that they don't have other transport controls but you can go into the menu afterwards if you want to play things back and hear exactly what it sounds like you also have outputs for monitors so if you have studio near-field monitors speakers that you want to connect to this they have to be powered speakers but you can hook those up making this actually a very good USB computer audio interface and in fact I find this just surprisingly good I wasn't expecting the quality that we're getting out of this both in terms of the recording quality the effectiveness of the effects and also the quality of the outputs I'm a little surprised for $600 at the time of this review which is the current pricing Wow I've actually pleasantly surprised to test the preamplifier what I did is I did just a basic recording and then I stopped talking and measured the noise floor there I game things up to 41 out of 55 on the input menu there I assume that refers to decibels of game but I'm not positive on that and in any case when I stopped talking between I measured that loudness and what I found was it sat at about minus 78 dB even after we allowed NIST normalized so to put that in perspective that's very good that means that you're going you're not gonna have to worry a whole lot about lots of noise floor in your recordings up it speaks to the quality of the preamplifiers for the microphones and also the noise gate which is very effective as well so overall I find that the noise gate actually works better than I expected as well it doesn't sound as obvious but yet it doesn't allow a lot of noise to come through it basically kind of auto mixes your podcast for you so if you have multiple people the people that are not talking their noise gates gonna be engaged so you're not getting the room sound you know the noise bouncing off of the walls and coming back into their microphone which makes it a lot easier in post now one of the potential downsides depending on how you're looking at this again this device is really made for people who are not audio engineers and want to be able to record content and produce podcasts without a lot of fuss that's really who it's aimed at however once Road released it and it came to light that you can only record a stereo recording you don't get to record the individual microphone channels some people were a little upset about that I understand that I'm I consider myself a little bit more of an audio enthusiast so for me being able to record the microphone channels separately from me each other and then be able to mix him in post was pretty important so I was a little disappointed but with all of the people that have spoken out about that road has decided to go ahead and add that feature and that feature is coming in an update for the firmware in the month of February 20 19 so we're on the 23rd 24th now it hasn't delivered yet as far as I'm aware but should be here in the next few days we'll come back and test that in more detail when that becomes available so just to put it in perspective this device is really really good for those people that don't want to do a lot of fussing so here for example if I come into the menu and the advanced menu and I set up all of these different settings like the compressor high-pass filter so on and so forth I also come over to the voice menu and this is how I essentially fine-tune those settings because when you turn a compressor on normally there are a variety of different settings you have to change to really fine-tune it and make it sound right you don't have all those settings instead what you have is the ability to set up basically two parameters number one the tone of one's voice whether it's deep medium or high-pitched and then the strength of one's voice whether you're kind of a soft speaker medium speaker or you project really loudly and strongly and once you set those two settings that sort of essentially fine-tunes all of those other settings like the compressor the noise gate and and so on and so forth so it's kind of an interesting approach you do have some ability to change some of those settings a little bit but not in the traditional way that audio engineers are used to doing it so is that gonna make this a frustrating product to use for those that know more about audio engineering and are used to using traditional mixers possibly it might not be their favorite way to work for me because of the quality that I'm getting I'm actually willing to bend my mind and work that way I think it works really really nicely so no no issues on that front for me one thing that I think some people will ask is well can you record to the micro SD card and to your computer at the same time and the answer is yes you can which is pretty awesome another question will come up can I record a Skype call from my computer with this and the answer to that is yes you can do that as well again all of the faders that we have on the device here the first four are for the microphone inputs then you have one for USB that's how you would record a Skype call from your computer you have one for your phone if you're hardwired into your phone using a 3.5 millimeter input and one for Bluetooth and then a final one for the sound effects now how does this compare to something like a zoom f4 zoom f8 mix pre 3 mix pre 6 from sound devices I think if you're recording podcasts my personal preference would be for the road caster personally not because I don't like those other devices this just seems better suited for that purpose this is also I think better suited to be an audio interface than any of those devices just because of the layout you have to have some desk space obviously so if desk space is not at a premium I would much prefer the road caster as a day-to-day audio interface connected to my computer and driving my speaker's my studio monitors then I would a mix pre or a zoom f4 or zoom f8 the controls are more accessible when they're sitting on a desk than it is for either one of those devices those are really made to be put in a bag for recording in the field and that's why I think this one is a better fit for those situations now are there any cons with this device yes no device is perfect what are the cons here well I think first of all the way that you can fine-tune the settings for the effects is not ideal I would like a little bit more control but on the other hand that's perhaps a positive for those that are not really audio engineers and don't want to fiddle around with that kind of stuff so you don't get a lot of chance to change those but on the other hand they work pretty well kind of out of the box and just setting those two parameters for your overall voice tone and how strong your voice is the audio for our call in participant via phone he reported it wasn't amazing but I'm not sure if that's the phone the connection we had or how it connects up to the road caster I think it's probably just the phone in the connection we had but he did say he was getting a little bit of warbling he said he could totally understand me but it wasn't the most amazing experience on the other hand it's really nice that this automatically sets up what's called a mix - now if you're not familiar with what that term means when you have someone dial in to your podcast they need to be able to hear everyone that's in the podcast but what you don't want to do is have them connected to your podcast recording setup then as they talk also send their audio back to them because it'll just sound really disorienting because it there will be some latency you know like they'll say something a second later they'll hear themselves back that's really really distracting so what mix- fixes that it makes it so they can hear everyone in the podcast except it doesn't send their audio back this does this automatically that can be a challenging thing to set up for someone who's not an audio engineer on a traditional mixing board so that's a really nice feature as well and then finally I don't think I would have chosen microSD for some of you that's not going to be an issue again I'm being nitpicky here I don't have a micro SD reader I don't really like that size of media card it's just too small it's easy to lose it's easy to break my first choice would have been SD over micro sd but can I live with it yeah definitely I can live with it so overall there's a look at the road caster pro the new podcasting mixer and recorder from Road I am really surprised at how much I like this thing I did not expect to like it this much and in fact I only did this review because I had multiple requests for it but I liked it so much I'm sending an email to be an H ask you know if I can go ahead and purchase this so overall I think it's a really great device especially for those who are not really interested in becoming full-fledged audio engineers they really just want to get their content recorded and they want it to sound great so you will need to spend some time learning how it works but the learning curve is going to be a lot shorter than a traditional mixer and recording setups so overall hope that was helpful for you if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below in the comments and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound or video you later [Music]

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 135,025

Keywords: audio, sound, video, film, podcast, podcasting, RODE, RODECaster Pro, RODECaster, Record, Recorder, Mixer, Audio Interface, PC, Mac, USB, Review, How to

Id: BMfsjXASlgQ

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/bisticles]

We're hoping to get ours next week. Thinking it'll be nice to have everything in one unit, instead of the mess of boxes stacked on the desk I current have.

[u/[deleted]]

I just got mine but haven’t had an opportunity to use it yet. (Renovating the condo.) I’m looking forward to checking it out and raising our podcasting game.

[u/DocHolliday31]

I’ve used mine twice. Still haven’t had time to go through all the settings. But it is pretty awesome.

[u/DocHolliday31]

That’s one of the reasons I’ve kinda waiting on messing with it a lot. Figured I’d have to do it again when the firmware came out. I’m leaving for over a week on vacation so figured it would be done when I got back

[u/adadto9]

Thats the best review I've seen. Ive had my rodecaster for a week now. Haven't recorded a podcast on it yet, due to people cancelling on me. I have done a couple voice over reads with it and the quality is way better than in my Soundcraft Notepad 12fx. For me it works great and will be even better when the multi track firmware is released. Its already March in Australia so they missed their deadline in my books, but thats just me being grumpy.