Shure SM7B vs Rode Procaster - Value vs Performance!?

welcome back folks this is shane we're going to compare this short sm7b up against the road procaster now firstly a massive thank you to everyone who subscribed to the channel we just clicked over 16 000 subs so thank you so much in 2021 i'm gonna be doing a lot more audio and video tutorials and reviews so if you like this kind of content you're not subscribed please do so hopefully get some value out of this when i was researching which microphone to buy for my podcast i didn't know which one to go for these are so expensive in australia and the road stuff is far more affordable and it's still a professional microphone i use a lot of road microphones when i record bands live as well as shotgun microphones all kinds of stuff but i really just thought man am i going to be blowing my doe buying a short sm7b and if you must miss my review i'll leave a link up in the cards i'm very very impressed with this microphone overall as i'm very impressed with the rode pro caster so let's talk a little bit about value for money so in australia the short sm7b is somewhere around 800 australian dollars right so it's expensive i'll leave links to sweetwater and b h and so forth in down below if you live in the us but these are far more affordable and i don't think there's a massive trade-off in audio quality with the exception of one thing the plosives are sometimes completely unusable on this microphone whereas the shaw clearly because of the windsock on the front has far less problems with that so we can accommodate that by just using a 2.95 windshield putting it on the front of the pro caster and we're good to go now in my headphones there's a difference in the audio volume the short sm7b actually requires more gain to get the same amount of volume that the rode pro caster does which means you do need some inline pre-amps whether that's a cloud lifter like this i only had one of these so i didn't want to use this on one mic and something else on the other so i'm using two se dynamites on both of these microphones to boost the gain 28 decibels into the preamp which i'm using my steinberg ur22mk2 so you do need these for both of these microphones you're not going to get any real usable gain out of either of them just plugging them directly into any sort of home consumer level sound card now while i'm running both of these microphones through the sc dynamite i have the gain on the road set to 10 o'clock whereas the gain on the shore sm7b is set at one o'clock plus the inline preamp system so that's how much gain you'll need with this microphone over here now if you're doing a video podcast for example the visual is also important now we all know joe rogan and a million other podcasters use these microphones and that's because a million other podcasters use these microphones they all see people using them they go i get a short sm7b because xyz is all using them so visually these have a look about them that looks really great on camera the matte black finish i like the fact they're fairly short and the mounting bracket is really cool the mounting bracket on the rode pro caster is really nothing to email home about it's not very good it does the job but it's nothing special i kind of wish it was a little bit more like the rode pod mic which has there's that plosive right there the pod mic that uh has this bracket which is very very similar to the short sm7b but it's a small criticism and it's not that much of a deal i actually in a way i kind of prefer this visually because that looks really cool i'm not saying it's a you know there's anything wrong with that while this doesn't look as robust it's more visually appealing you don't see just mike's you know mic stand sitting right in front of you it's a lot more or it's a lot less distracting in my opinion having just this generic sort of microphone mount but everyone has different opinions on that so let me know what you think in the comments below in terms of visually let's compare the proximity effect on both of these microphones so this is me right up close on the microphone now trying to get that big chesty broadcast kind of sound just by getting up on the microphone the closer you get to most microphones the more enhanced that proximity effect will be and this is how that sounds and now over to the rode pro caster checking out the proximity effect so let me know if you like the sound of this one a little bit better over the shore or whether you prefer the proximity effect of the shore i think this just sounds a lot more uniform whereas this has a far more modern sound to my ear more low end more top end and if you're talking across it like this the the plosives aren't too bad plosives plosives plosives but you're gonna hear more obviously without having a windsock on the front up next i wanted to check out the off axis rejection so i'm gonna turn both microphones around and talk and isolate the audio from one of them here we go this is the shaw sm7b with the microphone facing away from me this is the rode pro caster with the microphone facing away from me hopefully you could hear that now when it comes to the technical specs of both of these microphones this actually made me laugh the shaw sm7b has a frequency response of 50 hertz to 20 kilohertz so it goes all the way up to the high end of human hearing and rolls out a little bit of the low end now when it comes to the rode pro caster it has a frequency response of 75 hertz to 18 kilohertz so technically this is supposed to have less low end and less top end but to my ear it feels like it has more of both i'd really love to know what you think and what you can hear through this if you're listening on a phone like a little crappy speaker on a phone you might not hear the difference but listen with some headphones or if you've got some studio monitors or decent speakers and let me know what you think to me this just sounds a whole lot fatter to my ear or at least in these headphones whereas this still has that low end but it doesn't sound as prominent at least that's how it sounds in my headphones so let us know what you think of the sound quality between these which one is best for you is going to be subjective based on which one you like the sound of the visual of it and which one you can afford so when i put most of my podcasting equipment together i didn't want to spend 800 bucks on a microphone so i got two of these and one of these and that was still cheaper than that guy so that might be a deciding factor the other reason why i went for the road mics is you know they're made locally here in australia but that aside i wanted something that was visually different to everybody using the short sm7bs but i gotta be honest i really love the sound of this so yeah hopefully this video has been helpful let me know your thoughts links to these microphones and all the gear will be below thanks again oh it peaked there thanks again catch you soon see ya

Channel: Geeky Nerdy Techy

Views: 32,548

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Id: ccbgX7rClNA

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020