The Rode PSA1+ Is (Almost) The Perfect Mic Boom Arm

[Music] for almost 20 years the road psa1 has built up a reputation of being one of the most solid and reliable microphone boom arms that you can buy but today i wanted to make a psa about another one plus some of the reasons why the rode psa1 plus actually out does the original psa1 can you believe it [Music] and before we put these two boom arms in a head-to-head battle arm wrestling if you will a few disclosures plus spoilers first disclosure rode did send me the psa one plus for free uh for just as a gift i don't have to make a video about it i'm not obligated to say anything specific about it if i choose to make a video about it rhode doesn't get to have any input on that or see it before i publish it the reason i'm making this video is because i think this is a very interesting boom arm but the psa one has been kind of my go-to i own three of them personally and through jobs that i've had in the past i've used and built studios around like upwards of 20 of these and i just keep coming back to the psa one because it's the psa one and only for me and as much as i'm gonna dive into all the finer points and details literally from top to bottom on both of these arms today let's just cut right to the chase the rode psa1 plus has a manufacturer's retail price of 130 the psa one has an msrp of a hundred dollars so they're actually fairly close in price and here's what i'll say if you already have a psa one you're good don't get rid of your psa one to get the psa one plus if you don't have a boom arm or you're looking to get a second boom arm and you're trying to decide you just get another one or should you get the psa one plus or if you're comparing against some other you know boom arms that are out there then the psa one plus is overall overall the best boom arm that i've ever used and that's why i wanted to make this video it does have one issue though which we'll talk about later well you could probably see what it is and so right now i've got both boom arms set up with heavy-ish microphones on them this is the shure sm7b it weighs 1.6 pounds this is the samsung q9u it weighs 2.1 pounds this one with all the logos on it is the psa one plus and this is the psa one and you can see that in terms of motion they're kind of the same the boom arms are roughly the same size they do something really cool that a lot of other boom arms don't necessarily do which is however you have the microphone positioned so you set up your microphone you get it exactly at like the angle you want when you move the boom arm around the microphone doesn't change position it doesn't like rotate or move around both of these boom arms do that and both arms can take just about the same amount of weight although i will say straight out of the box the psa1 plus seems more capable of accommodating a wider range of microphones meaning that on the psa1 it's pretty much going to handle whatever you throw at it straight out of the box but if you put something a little bit super heavy on it or something super light on it that's where you might have to use this screw here to adjust the tension the psa1 plus it seems like whether a microphone is super heavy or super lightweight it's totally fine and ready to go and as you can see it like it has no problem supporting the weight of a microphone so let's remove these microphones and then do a complete comparison of every part of these boom arms one thing just as i'm taking off the mics the psa1 plus you notice even without a mic on it it's staying pretty well positioned where i put it whereas the psa1 has some aggression that it needs to get out because when there's nothing on it it is very springy and it does that with no weight on it so you still want to be careful with the psa one plus but it doesn't have this tendency which does not feel great when you get smacked in the face with that so let's start by talking about the mounts that come with these because there's a mountain of details to discover as you're mounting your microphone with these mounts anyway at first glance these are pretty much the same and the top part is actually the same except for the size the psa one plus has a slightly larger mounting hole than the original psa1 and i'll explain why that is the case in a moment otherwise they're the same materials they both have small road logos on the front and the back and they're pretty big so they can accommodate a wide range of desks now on the psa one plus they have actually made a few changes the little metal bar here has some rubber tips on it which is great because over the years sometimes you're crawling under desks moving cables i've actually almost poked my eye on these metal things a few times this would still hurt but it's gonna hurt a lot less than this so i'm actually happy about that and the biggest thing which i'm very very happy about on the original psa1 this metal part that actually attaches to your table on the bottom is just a piece of metal and so while it's very firm and sturdy it can actually create an indentation on the bottom of your desk depending on what the material of your desk is made out of and so what i normally do is put these little foamy sticky cushiony pads that i found at home depot on here to protect the bottom of the table the psa one plus mount has a nice piece of soft cushiony rubber that goes all around the top and of course the bottom here is padded as well on both of these but on this one it's a much stronger thicker piece of rubber and that means straight out of the package this is not going to damage a desk you don't need to worry about that or think about that you can clamp it down as hard as you need to and as i've talked about many other times these clamps they position the weight of the boom arm on top of your table most good boom arms will do that cheaper boom arms will position the actual weight of the arm sort of off the edge of the table and that's bad because every time you're moving your boom arm around you're kind of like putting a little bit of pressure here and then it doesn't take too long before it just sort of falls off but that's not it because both of these boom arms come with a second way of mounting them and this is another area where the psa1 plus really outdoes the original psa1 for years now the psa1 has come with this grommet thingy right here so if you want to not use this and attach the boom arm directly to your surface you can just drill a hole that's this diameter put this in here tightness nut on the bottom and now you can put the boom arm right there and it's it's flat it's flush with the surface but the scary part is you have to drill a hole in your desk or your table the psa one plus comes with an improved version of this which is actually kind of awesome like this is an amazing little design piece of engineering here that rhodes should be super proud of at its core it's the same size but this is also the exact same size as the holes you can sometimes find in desks that are already pre-drilled to allow you to pass through phone cables computer cables that kind of stuff a lot of office desks and tables have that this you can then mount on top of one of those and then tighten it up and now this will clamp straight in the hole that's already in your desk or might already be in your desk and and with the original you just have a hole for the boom arm and then you still have to run your cables just across the desk but this has another hole in it that would let you run your xlr cable down underneath the table or the desk if you needed to the thing about this though i don't know how many people actually end up using them they're both great like these are really good devices and really good systems but i have a feeling a lot of people maybe even the majority of people who buy psa one boom arms just sort of have these sitting around and don't use them and especially the new one this is something i would spend twenty dollars on you know if i needed this for a specific setup and i'm wondering if this wasn't included with the boom arm maybe the boom arm could go down in price a little bit and installing each arm is super simple you just pop it into the stand and you're done but if you remember the psa1 plus has a wider mounting hole here and the reason for that is on the original psa one the mount that goes in there is just a piece of metal and it works great it's super strong but on the psa one plus it has this like plastic housing around it and what that does is it fits in here a little more snugly and then this actually helps it to feel a bit smoother and not that this is loud when you rotate it but this is completely silent and then obviously the most noticeable difference between these two boom arms right away is definitely the arm themselves they're both scissor style arms if i pull this little foam pad you can see that the interior of the psa one plus looks pretty much the same as the psa1 but they have just covered it in this it's like a neoprene foam with a it feels like it has something maybe even like just a piece of cardboard on the side to give it some structure and that helps prevent this from happening which i've done many times that's pinching yourself in the boom arm but it also helps to dampen some of the noise and make the movement a little more smooth on the boom arm and as you probably noticed the top of these foam pads have little plastic clips and those are to attach your microphone cable so they can accommodate either an xlr cable or a usb cable the original psa one just comes with some velcro ties and you just tie your cable down this keeps things a lot neater and cleaner but the benefit to the velcro is that as you're moving the microphone around and the cable might need to get pulled or moved a little bit these let the cable slide a bit more these really hold the cable in place so it can sometimes make adjusting it a little more of a process because you have to like unclip the thing and give it a little more leeway and then clip it back in but when it's all clipped in there it just keeps it so perfectly aligned it's really nice the part where things really have changed is the mounting point on the end of the boom arm on the psa one plus they've basically redesigned the entire thing and they've made it so much better this was my only real complaint with the psa1 but i like the arm so much i was kind of happy to just live with it you have these two metal knobs that you turn to then position the mount and the biggest thing was just the length of the part that you mount it works perfectly if you want to attach your microphone in kind of the old-school way where it's hanging down like i had these at the beginning of the video but a lot of times i actually like to position this a little lower and have the microphone coming up from the bottom most of the time my boom arm is off to the side over here and sort of coming in the side of the frame a little bit and it's really hard to do that because this teardrop shape of the head here means that you can't get this perfectly straight because there's this locking nut here and even if you get rid of that there's still not that much space to actually mount a microphone on it which can be important if you're using something like the shore super 55 and you want it to be standing vertically or if you're just using maybe a condenser mic that comes in a shock mount and it needs to be standing up vertically as well what road has done with the psa1 is they've taken the exact same knobs off of the pod mic which are nice big easy to grab and turn knobs and they put them right here to adjust the mounting pin and they've done a couple other really cool things so let me see if i can show you this the mounting pin itself is significantly longer and even though this part has the same shape now the pin can go straight up with a lot of space to spare so it's more easy to mount other microphones on top of it and mount them vertically the locking nut has actually gotten a bit bigger which sometimes i've actually found to be a bad thing because it can block the xlr port even on the sm7b depending on where you have it positioned it usually doesn't block the xlr cable but it can come really close to blocking the xlr cable of course you could always take this off but this is also an area where they've done something really awesome that like i just want to applaud and give credit for certain microphones like the sm7b this is kind of a rare feature they feature a mount where you just put it on the boom arm and then you just twist the end of the mount and that's how you attach it other microphones in fact i would say most other microphones including the pod mic you just have to turn the microphone to attach it to a mount that can sometimes feel a little wonky it can sometimes feel a little dangerous if your microphone's in a shock mount it's really weird so now check this out what road has done if you loosen these knobs a little bit you can position your microphone there and the second knob below the locking nut you can twist that and now that will go into the microphone and you don't have to spin your microphone around so the quality of life improvements that are just found in different points throughout here the fact that it's quieter it's smoother when you rotate it the clamp comes with rubber padding to protect your desk the secondary mount that's included with it is a better quality the pads help to make things a little smoother and quieter and protect your fingers and then this entire mounting point over here has been redesigned to be incredibly usable those are the things that make the psa one plus honestly better than the original psa one but there's one thing i can't not talk about i don't know what it could possibly be oh that's right it's the giant branding that exists on the boom arm i've seen this brought up in other videos there's no way i can make a video about this boom arm without talking about this branding last year i made a video about the shure mv7 microphone which typically shore microphones don't have a ton of branding on them maybe a little logo or a little thing somewhere near a mount and the mv7 had the shore logo real big on the side and this was actually kind of controversial in the comment section to that video a lot of people had opinions about this the psa one plus has a big final road logo on both sides of these so it has four logos total and i found that to be the most controversial point about this boom arm prior to getting one i thought these pads were velcro for some reason i thought you could just undo them and take them off but you can't they're sewn on here so the only way to remove these pads would be to literally like cut the seam or cut them off but i don't want to do that because i think that these really do help dampen some of the sounds on the boom arm plus i'm not pinching my fingers anymore i'm clumsy that's something that happened quite a bit basically it's the first thing i notice in the frame which hello this is the money maker like i should be front and center your microphone boom arm probably actually isn't the thing that you want people to notice first and for me seeing a bright white piece of text probably near the person speaking is really distracting and i asked rhode about this and they told me they're super proud of the boom arm they have found that there's people who really like the logo some people really don't like the logo so you have to make up your own decision about it they told me to address it however i wanted and to just share my honest opinions because i really like rode and the people who work there and rode products and i feel bad being critical of it they also said that they're proud of this boom arm because they spent 16 months working on designing and developing it and that made me remember that when we talk about products and things it's so easy to say like i don't know why the thing does this instead of that and blah blah blah and they should have put this over here forgetting that a lot of people work really hard on this stuff for a really long time and for me just some person with a youtube channel to like be armchair quarterbacking isn't that yeah armchair quarterbacking do you know what the football coach the american football coach said to the vending machine give me my quarterback there's all the armchair quarterbacking we can do talking about how things should have been done and what should have been there but people really worked very hard and i try to be understanding before i deliver criticism of something this is the point of the video where i'm gonna say overall this is still the best boom arm that i've ever used and i really really love it if you've got the original psa one it's also awesome i would not just get rid of this to get this but if you don't have a boom arm or you're looking for a second one that's the point to get this now we're gonna enter the part of the video where i'm gonna tell you stuff that i know is not endorsed by road so do all of this on your own free will and accepting all risks etc disclaimers and things so basically i've got a little pro tip life hack whatever you want to call it for each of these boom arms here i started using these about seven years ago and i've used so many of them and i just have not had issues with them the only thing that's happened with this specific one that i'm using which is my personal oldest one is that sometimes you can probably hear it right now it can make some noises and this doesn't happen very often and it didn't start happening until i'd had it for like i don't know three and a half four years but you might notice your psa one making some grinding noises like that there is a way to fix that white lithium grease which sounds very fancy the important thing here is to not use regular wd-40 because that will actually make things worse this one is specifically listed as a protective grease so i have found that it's really up in here is where the noise starts happening and you just sort of spray a little bit the reason you don't want to use too much is because if you over lubricate the arm then it won't be able to keep tension at all and the microphones will keep falling down if you use just a little bit it will just help keep things running smoothly you'll notice the sound goes away a lot almost immediately and then usually over the next day or so as you're using the boom arm it will start to kind of get even better and now this arm is pretty much silent this sound is normal that's that's just the sound of stuff moving in the arm so that's my psa for getting rid of psa1 creaks and squeaks i've been thinking about what to do with this branding now i've seen other videos where people have put gaff tape on top of it or covered it with stickers and that works but for me when i see something covered with a piece of tape it's almost just as distracting because then i start wondering what was covered up and why was it covered up and if you put a big sticker here that's also going to be distracting the original psa1 has very little branding on it the velcro straps that come with it do say road on it but you could switch these out for any other velcro straps the only other branding is on the base it has the rode logo very tiny on the front and the back otherwise there's no branding on it it's a very discreet not a low profile boom arm but it's a boom arm that keeps a low profile maybe only having one logo here would have been better especially if it were a black logo so black on black you would still see it you'd still be able to read it but it wouldn't be quite so prominent but what i did notice is that these look to be vinyl letters kind of like on custom printed t-shirts and stuff and if you start scratching at them and pulling at them you'll notice you can start to pull them off i found this alba chem vinyl letter removing solvent this is for t-shirts and for removing stuff off of t-shirts this is a chemical that is very flammable so be very careful with it and basically if you put this on a t-shirt it will weaken the solvent and the vinyl letters and then you can peel off labels and things i tried it on here and i was actually able to kind of remove one of the logos over here this was my first time using the product and it's not perfect in certain light you can still see the logo but at least it's subtle took some elbow grease but it did take the letters off and then it also did take the adhesive off for the most part but i think i kind of wore out the fabric as i was scrubbing it so i used a lot of this but it did work and i have a feeling that you know with better technique you might be able to get better results the other thing is these plastic cable clips are actually just coming up through the neoprene sleeves they're clipped to the boom arm itself so on the inside they're clipped around the metal part and then they're just poking up through a hole in the sleeve so in theory you could cut these off you could take them off and still have the cable clips on the boom arm or it could be kind of cool if somebody out there has like an etsy shop or something started making custom ones of these that are like velcro that you can just wrap around it and then you cut this off and you can get a different color or you can get one with your own logo on it or i don't know i'm just brainstorming here but i just thought i would throw that out there and you can do with that information what you will but i think it's worth bringing up because i really really like this boom arm and i've heard and read comments from other people where they're saying that the branding is what's keeping them from getting it and that kind of is a bummer because the arm itself is so so good so maybe there's a way around it where you don't have to deal with that branding if you don't want to but speaking of things i don't want to hide thank you to everyone who helped support my channel through patreon and youtube channel memberships it really genuinely makes a huge difference so boom thank you and speaking of booms if you still have room for a boom and the opportunity looms check out some of these other boom arm videos that i've made and you can find the boom that's right for your room [Music]

Channel: Tom Buck

Views: 45,144

Keywords: Rode PSA1+, Rode PSA1, Rode Boom Arm, rode psa1 boom arm, mic boom arm, mic stand, best mic arm, mic arm review, rode psa1 setup, psa1 rode boom arm, psa1 vs psa1+, rode boom arm review, podcast mic arm, streaming mic arm, best boom arm

Id: SX_zS0hk-_A

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021