The BEST PODCASTING MIXER??

yes the tascam mix cast 4 is new if not a tad late to the party but the real question here is is it better than a road caster pro and i think i can answer that but let's go over the details first in case somebody calls me a shell okay i have the sm58 plugged in and the gain is set to unity just so you can get an idea of its performance now we'll take a look at the game quality a bit later on in the video the build quality on this thing well it's all plastic but while a lot of people don't like the zoom plastic on the p8 this is nothing like that at first glance i thought it was an aluminum chassis and even after i got my hands on it i was a bit thrown off it feels fantastic and does not feel cheap in the slightest the faders and knobs on this thing feel great as well no issues whatsoever the pads and the buttons however well i really like the feedback from the sound pads very much the same as the road caster pro but the other buttons they're a tad mushy i'm it's not really a massive complaint though i do like a bit of click while i'm pushing my buttons the inputs are fantastic as well very little play and feel secure and on that note i just have to say i love the new fad of these power cables being attached with a nut nothing that's going to loosen over time or get kicked out at the wrong moment very nice feature on all the newer podcasting boards now this is how the two boards match up side by side just in case size is an issue on your desk all in all though i'm very impressed with the build quality of the mix cast 4. now with that out of the way let's literally take a walk around the board starting off you have your four xlr faders usb pass-through followed by the trrs link for the phones as well as the bluetooth connection and the fader for the sound pads yes that means you can actually have a total of seven voices with this thing including the three channels for guests very cool now we're gonna come back to that big screen in a few but let's go to the top left hand part of the board each channel has a mute and a solo button not buttons that will be used all the time but definitely a massive bonus when you need them and the one huge inclusion is the talk back button now a lot of people don't understand why you might need this but it can be a huge bonus if you have a separate producer who isn't on the podcast it gives them the ability to communicate with the hosts without going over the air so to speak then you have the three buttons at the top the mark button stop button and record pause now the latter of the two are obvious but this mark button is awesome and it can be used to mark part of the audio that you might want to highlight for later or perhaps a way to mark false starts or obvious edits above that you have the monitoring section looking at you zoom this one knob knocks you out of contention for best board the ability to mute out your monitors what a concept and of course you have the four headphone controls around the back you have your four xlr ports a choice of the trrs or left right quarter inch jacks for a line in which is a nice touch left and right monitor out in the usb port headphone jacks over here with an sd card slot and the power and power button one thing to note you can plug in the main headphones here in the back or around the front as well kind of a cool little feature now let's take a look at the meat and potatoes of the unit the touch screen the first thing i love is when you start up the unit it's here to remind you of what you need to do do not dismiss this screen please because it's going to bite you in the arse trust me it's a very simple ui and honestly a nice change from the mixed bag that was the podrack p8 let's start out with the main home screen here you have all the levels nicely laid out and personally i kind of like this main screen over the road in the zoom that said when you start to dig into the settings just by using this button here things start to set this apart from the competition well kinda honestly when walking through this i think it's just as robust as the road implementation though maybe not as slick now this first button lets you adjust all the settings for each channel yes this thing has all the trimmings just like the road caster i do like how the settings have a manual mode as well just so you can set up your own compression and such without the basic two-pronged approach i know the road has this as well now but it didn't launch so it's nice to see it here as for the other processing we're going to take a look at those when we do the side by side with the road caster pro the usb trrs and bluetooth each have their own settings as well mostly just eq depending on what you're running either voice or music the playback button is pretty straightforward i have to say when it comes to the customization for the sound pads this thing's awesome fully customizable and unlike the zoom once again the settings aren't spread out over multiple areas of the menus now from there you have the hardware settings where among other things it allows you to choose pre and post fader listen for the solo buttons now i don't imagine most people are going to be bothering with most of these settings but it is important to note this is where you turn on the mix minus a necessary step for phone calls getting into the sd settings pretty straight forward though here's one of my first complaints about this unit you will notice in the bottom right of this screen the version of firmware now the only way you can update it is by loading the firmware update on an sd card and inserting it kind of weird and far too many steps for most people this thing connects to a computer via usb there's absolutely no reason in the world you shouldn't be able to do it through your computer please tascam fix that and yeah i do have a couple other complaints which we'll get to in a bit don't worry a quick look at the specs for this thing it has eight channels all of them 24 bit 48 kilohertz it has 14 by two connectivity individually addressable phantom and it takes storage up to 512 gigs on top of that a really cool feature it does work with mac windows ios and android and it does actually come with its own editor or daw which leads us to just that the included daw and this is where the board kind of separates itself from the competition and i mean when i say separate i mean by a lot sure it's just a daw but well it's also free and in that spirit it also blows any other free dog completely out of the water now i'm not going to get into the basics of the daw because it's well just a daw but let's just say it sells the board more than the board itself it's a stroke of genius and honestly it's a better add-on than any other kind of processing you could hope for now just to back that claim up a bit and i know i'm going to get the questions the dot is a multi-track daw and it has support for all the bells and whistles including vst plugins for the tascam pretty simple the eq profiles on this are pretty basic you can go in deep mid bright or you can set manual and then the manual you can go in with high shelf and low shelf not really necessary with this i do have a bit of a deeper voice and i can eq it in post if you're not going to be eq'ing in post maybe you can choose one or you can go and set your high and low shelf yourself i'll just go with deep as for the compressor well let's go in and turn that on all right so this is the manual this is the soft compression this is the hard compression and personally i prefer the manual compression so that's what we've got so far with the eq the compression and now we're going to get into some of the other processing we'll turn that on and here's i'll turn this noise suppressor off now this is the de-esser okay this is with the de-esser off and de-esser on now this thing is just a threshold and frequency scenario the threshold is how loud do the s sounds have to be and the frequency is where the s sounds so you can actually go through this and you can find the s sounds at any different frequency i'll set these around 4100 4200 and those are the s frequencies we're trying to stomp down a bit if you crank the threshold beware you're going to start to get rid of other sounds as well now let's look at the noise suppressor i do have my air conditioning going on behind me let's turn off all of this processing and with the processing off let's take a look at the sound of the preamps when we ramp it up okay okay so here we are in the roadcaster pro and we're gonna go through the processing on this one so we're gonna channel two and we're gonna go through this is the compression uh we'll go through the high pass filter the de-esser we're gonna turn that on and there you go and then we're gonna put on the noise gate you also have the oral exciter this brings up the airiness and the big bottom i'm not as much of a fan of the oral exciter because it uh it messes with my asses so we're gonna go into the voice go tone i'm deep there we go deep tone and voice strength i have a strong voice i do i've got a very very loud voice just ask my wife or my children there you go there's with the audio processing on then you have the threshold attack and release here all of that that's how how aggressive the noise gate's gonna be there you go there's with the audio processing on then you have the threshold attack and release here all of that that's how how aggressive the noise gate is going to be hello ashley how's it going it's your father huh you don't sound like my father oh [Laughter] hello ashley hello hi just uh once again calling you from a different this is now calling you from facebook uh hopefully school's going well for you yeah okay and life is good yeah i i have to uh do laundry now okay the pros they're pretty extensive here this thing does everything the road caster does and a bit more the included daw is just flat-out genius and honestly it's kind of a treat to use i enjoy the experience as much as the road caster pro and well that's saying a lot something that no one else has been able to do yet the live track l8 had issues couldn't overtake the road caster pro the p8 was an even lazier approach this thing is the first to really challenge the supremacy of the road caster pro however that being said here are the cons first of all as we discussed earlier firmware updates should not be a complicated thing that is stupid second is the routing of the channels in multi-track for some odd reason the routing has the first and second channels as a stereo mix of the unit meaning when you are in multi-track and choosing channels to record in your daw input three is microphone one why that's not intuitive at all and not only that when choosing the inputs none of them are labeled i go i had to call tascam to speak to one of their texts just to figure it out and 20 minutes later when we finally did his response well that's stupid now that said he is putting in a request to have it changed though he did say that if you want to change quicker you got to get more people to complain about so here i am tascam complaining about it things like this are the reason people get put off by a product unnecessarily difficult setups on a unit that is supposed to be directed at first-timers with audio it just doesn't work change this tascam once again i'm gonna say it it's stupid that said though one more notch for the pros for both of these companies rode and tascam they both have amazing customer service and support rarely is that gonna be a bonus when you're looking at a piece of equipment but either one that you choose you're gonna know that you're being well taken care of now i've documented it well with my approach to road and how their customer service works but the tech i spoke with at tascam didn't even have to call me back and he told me that on the phone considering i'm in canada not in the us but he saw the call and he's like i'll do it anyways that's the kind of stuff that makes you some very loyal fans i can guarantee please both of you don't stop so then it comes down to this which one should you buy now let me be very clear i think you will be happy with either one of these units the road caster had a bit of a rocky start but honestly rode was literally building this thing out of thin air props to them for actually creating a product to fit a need actually revolutionizing the audio market to target podcasters now tascam has a much better product to start though they were able to learn a lot from what rode did and honestly the two of them are neck and neck when choosing between them the one thing that absolutely tips the scales is the included doll with the mix cast 4. it may very well be the one thing that separates it from the road caster pro and i mean by a long shot so if for that reason you're trying to decide between these two beasts and you don't have a daw or maybe you're just using audacity go with the mix cast trust me if you already have a daw then these are basically a toss-up go for the one that you think best fits the value in your situation i will have both linked below and by the way if you like this video maybe you'll like this one as well cheers guys and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Dark Corner Studios

Views: 5,564

Keywords: Dark Corner Studios, tascam mixcast 4 vs rodecaster pro, tascam mixcast 4, tascam mixcast 4 podcast workstation, tascam mixcast 4 review, mixcast 4 vs rodecaster, mixcast 4 vs rodecaster pro, Mixcast vs RCP, Mixcast 4 vs RCP, is the tascam mixcast 4 worth it?, should you buy the mixcast 4, rodecaster pro vs mixcast 4, rodecaster pro vs tascam mixcast 4, is the mixcast 4 better than the rodecaster pro, is the mixcast 4 better, RODE, Mixcast 4, Rodecaster Pro vs Mixcast 4, tascam

Id: TLZq8Xva0Z8

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021