USB vs XLR Mics EXPLAINED! - Everything You Need To Know

let's get into it by the way before we start I'm very excited Kensi and I just bought tickets - did he do it did-did-did Sam Sam put something in my hand right otherwise this is just gonna be like really awkward Sam like I want you to put something Japanese here so there's like I don't know if it's a flag or like something really cool yeah Kensi and I just bought our tickets to Japan I'm very excited about that I've been wanting to go to Japan for two years since we had like a 10 hour layover on our way back from Thailand we're finally doing it we're going on October so expect some amazing streams in Japanese places I don't know if you can stream from like the base of Mount Fuji but if you can I'm gonna do it I brought you probably kid anyway let's move on to microphone so people don't like to touch audio and I totally get it it's one of those things that you just want to work you want to plug in your mic and you want it to sound good you like tweaking with other stuff you like tweaking with your designs like tweaking with your alerts like tweaking with your camera stuff that's tangible stuff that you can see nobody nobody likes to deal with the garbage of adjusting oh where is it actually I'm gonna bring out a well nobody likes to deal with garbage like this where one knob is turned a little bit too far and suddenly your voice starts peaking and you have no idea why well luckily for you I'm the guy who studied this studied audio for five years never got my degree how annoying is that I know a lot of people say this but I didn't I didn't actually learn all that much in college most of the stuff I learned about audio I learned from well spending time and audio applications and mixing my own music for YouTube videos and then watching watching youtube videos so here's what we're gonna do I'm going to explain to you every single thing you need to know about microphones as a streamer and I'm gonna do it in under 10 minutes I'm gonna try seriously five years of my life and a hundred thousand dollars in tuition and here it is in a free YouTube video you're welcome we'll talk about the pros and the cons of the XLR s and the USB mics and why you might lean towards one or the other then we'll do a sound quality check a solid USB mic against a solid XLR mic so you can actually hear the difference yourself cool let's do it by the way if you want to hear my audio setup you're welcome to follow me on twitter stream every Monday Wednesday Friday around 6:30 Pacific time sometimes Saturday mornings link down in the description below also if you're enjoying this video make sure you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel check out all the stuff cool microphones let's get into the fun stuff and my fun stuff I mean this the stuff that's fun for me because I like learning weird new tech stuff then I assume if you're watching this video you do too so let's talk about the the three main devices of every single audio setup every if you are a streamer or whatever you're doing if you have a microphone capturing audio these three devices are part of it first you have a microphone second thing is a preamp third thing is an analog to digital converter or an A to D converter and I know you're probably saying oh no I only have a microphone no somewhere in your setup is all three of those things all three of those things are necessary and all three of those things need to be good and let me explain what those three things are the microphone is the most obvious one it's a device that has a capsule in it it picks up your voice or your signal whatever it's miking and it converts it into an electronic signal that can travel through a cable now here's something you may not have known microphones output a signal that's practically inaudible the signal is very very quiet it's called mic level a mic level signal which is why the next device is a preamp that mic level signal goes into the preamp the preamp is specifically designed for taking those really quiet mic level signals and boosting them into an audible signal that we can hear called a line level signal this is whenever you have a device that has a line in or a line out it's basically saying here's a signal that is line level you can't plug a mic directly into a line in because it's expecting a line level signal and you're giving it a mic level signal so you get your microphone capturing your signal you got your preamp boosting it to an audible or a line level but eventually it needs to get transferred into a digital signal which is what your analog to digital converter does it takes that smooth analog waves and it converts it into ones and zeros of a digital signal if any one of those three devices is cheap it doesn't matter how fancy the other ones are a $2,000 microphone going into a $50 preamp is going to sound like a $50 preamp whichever one is the cheapest or the crappiest is the bottleneck you need all three to be generally about the same quality so here's a typical setup to get your microphone going into a mixer like the Yamaha mg 10x you hear directly after the signal goes into your input here there is a preamp built into the mixer then right before it sends it out the USB out it converts it to a digital signal so you have your microphone your preamp and your analog to digital converter in here here's all three if you're confused and you're saying no no no I only have a microphone and then it's going directly into my PC into the mic input yeah you have your microphone your preamp and your converter are built into the sound card of your motherboard and I can guarantee you they're not good if if you're building motherboards I promise you the preamp and converter are not the top priority of the motherboard maker so if you're plugging a fancy microphone directly into your PC it's it's not it's not gonna be worth the money of the microphone which brings us to USB mics so you'll notice that USB mics themself have a digital outdoor a USB out which means that all three of those are built into one device I've never actually opened this before this thing it's smaller than I thought it would be so you have a USB device similar to this blue Yeti Nano here built into this single device single hundred dollar device is a microphone a and an analog-to-digital converter and considering this is a hundred dollar package which is usually that's a typical price for a USB mic and this thing is made of this is this is a beautiful microphone and not Spadina this video is not sponsored by blue this is a nice metal housing I would say I mean you're probably looking at a $20 mic a $20 preamp and a $20 converter the purpose and the strengths of a USB mic is to be simple all in one package plug and play and plug that thing into your PC you just the volume and your your set you don't have to worry about mixers you don't have to worry about knobs but compare that $100 for all three device to $100 for a singular device now this is $100 microphone and it's just the microphone and if you were to plug that into a $200 mixer that has the preamp and the converter built-in well now you're getting a $300 signal maybe a little bit less because this actually has four preamps built into it you get the picture you're looking at a much higher quality signal chain it's just gonna take a little bit of learning to figure out what all these knobs do however anytime something is more complicated and you have more control like this you're always going to get a more quality signal this thing has built into it hardware compressors and hardware EQ which you learn just enough to tweak it right you're gonna make your audio sound amazing so now that you've kind of gotten the basics of what really defines a USB mic versus an XLR mic there is one big thing that having an all-in-one device really affects you see I know it sounds cost-efficient to get a cheap all-in-one device versus something where you have to buy a hundred dollar mic and then a couple hundred more dollars for for the the preamp and the converter but there's a reason that's not always true you see let's say you start off with an XLR and you get this $100 blue amber which I highly recommend and you get a cheaper interface like this behringer Q 802 USB interface now this is not as expensive as the mg 10x you this is about $80 so the preamps and converters in it are going to be a little bit cheaper not as high quality there's actually a noticeable difference in quality going this to the Yamaha but the great thing is you've gone with a little bit of a cheaper model like this you save up a little bit of money you want to upgrade this to either the Yamaha or the supreme device like you know a go XLR he tossed us out the window you keep your current mic and you upgrade the preamp and the converters separately but you pick up a USB device like this the moment you're ready to upgrade which will be soon since you're getting much cheaper components you got to start from scratch you got to throw this entire thing out I know you can use this with like a go XLR a go XLR does have a auxilary mic input and this has a headphone output so you can go from the headphone jack into the go XLR but the problem with that is since this isn't all in one device you're already using this devices microphone and preamp you actually bypassing the preamp on the go XLR because you are using this one by default you can't turn this one off so they're just in general they're really not upgradeable if you want to upgrade your mic you got to start from scratch again and you are now officially the smartest one in your group of friends when it comes to audio which leaves us with one more thing to do let's take a microphone and a microphone let's throw them side-by-side and let's see if you can hear an audio difference between the two of them I'm actually kind of curious about this I haven't done this test myself but this will be fun originally what I want to do this video I was going to compare a two comparably priced microphones one an XLR setup on a USB setup but the purpose of this video isn't to show that one by default has better sound quality than other because you don't basically if you have $100 USB mic and $100 XLR mic setup they're going to sound just about the same you might have a little more control with XLR because usually you have compression and EQ built into your hardware but for the most parts they should be the same what I wanted to show with each one was the strengths between the two the strengths of the USB obviously being its simpleness it's plug and go all in one ease of use the strength of an XLR mic is its potential sound quality so instead we're gonna compare these two mics now this is a USB mic right here this is kind of touted as the high-end USB mic by HyperX called the quad caste this this mic is a solid mid-range XLR condenser mic by Blue Microphones called the Ember but because I have control over what parts are goes into it's going into a relatively high-end preamp and convertor similar to a go XLR and the next couple weeks I will be doing a USB mic showdown really taking a look at which USB mic actually sounds the best but right now the the quadtest kind of has that reputation in its corner so we're gonna use that one so right now I've got them both recording and I'm speaking a sentence and the first time you're gonna hear this it's going to be on the quad caste the second time you're gonna hear this it's going to be on the blue ember so right now I've got them both recording and I'm speaking a sentence and the first time you're gonna hear this it's going to be on the quad caste the second time you're gonna hear this it's going to be on the blue ember or maybe you're on stream and you're playing a game and you get really loud for a second and then you get really quiet for a second what is the audience gonna hear or maybe you're on stream and you're playing a game and you get really loud for a second and then you get really quiet for a second what is the audience gonna hear cool I got that all recorded let's take a listen to it real quick alright so we're gonna take a listen to these on my big studio monitors that I use for mixing music this first one is the quad caste so right now I've got them both recording and I'm speaking a sentence and the first time you're gonna hear this it's gonna be on the quad caste the second time you're gonna hear this it's gonna be on the blue ember I'm actually really impressed with the quad cast that's way better than I expected out of it or maybe if I'm getting a little more animated like I'm getting loud in this one and then I'm getting quiet because I'm in the middle of a game you know my teammates need to hear I thought I heard it in the first section but when I got loud it was really obvious first of all they're both very good which you would expect from the the highest most expensive USB mic I should hope it's good but when I opened it up and I felt the microphone one of the things I noticed about it was how thin the housing was and I thought that might give it some really high resonant frequencies and kind of pushed that high end and I was right the end of this the high frequencies are a little bit crisper and a little bit more invasive it's very subtle if you're listening for it it's hard to hear it it's more something that you feel I'm gonna listen to it with headphones that imagines gonna be a little more pronounced you know a lot of you guys watch streams with headphones on but when you have harsher high frequencies it almost just um it's like a subtle pain in your head very subtle but that's what I'm that's the main difference I'm getting from the quad cast is that the the quad cast has a little bit more harsher high frequencies where the ember is a little bit more well rounded and a smooth tone you get a little bit more lows and mids in the ember let me listen to this with headphones or maybe even that's not headphones yeah if you want to hear what I'm talking about how it's just putting on some serious headphones and listen to the two back-to-back especially during the loud moments when it's more pronounced it just feels a little more intrusive in the inside of your head like someone's screaming in your ear a little bit because those high frequencies are a little bit harsher it's very subtle but if someone's listening to you for hours at a time they're going to subconsciously be kind of over it I'm curious to see if a USB mic with a thicker body or housing has the same problem something like the blue Yeti Nano like this with just a really robust thick housing here which is why we're gonna be doing that video in the future where I'm comparing four different USB mics but for now I have to say I'm very impressed I've got some things to say about the gain on this and how it works we'll do that all in the USB mic showdown so in the end my opinion hasn't changed that much if you're trying to build a professional string your end goal should be an XLR setup it's gonna be higher quality you have more options and you have more control and by control I mean things like compression EQ voice changers all the things you can do with analog audio which makes the purpose of a USB mic a stepping stone you want to upgrade from your headset mic which sounds like absolute trash but you don't have the money to invest in a solid XLR setup yet you can go an inexpensive route get yourself a cheap USB mic which is going to be a huge improvement and to that use it for a while until you have the money to purchase an XLR set up at the moment I'm having a hard time justifying a high end USB experience when that extra cash could go towards saving up for a solid XLR setup but I guess we'll really find out when we test all the USB mics next to each other and if this thing sounds a hundred times better than all the other ones it makes a little more sense either way to help this help if you have any questions or opinions on this please leave in the comments below or feel free to talk to me about it in my stream i mentioned i stream every monday wednesday friday linked in the description below also feel free to jump in the discord we have an amazing community of people who love to talk about these things and discuss ideas link to that in the description below of course links to all the gear that I use in these videos in the description below and as always happy streaming right on me around me yeah

Channel: Alpha Gaming

Views: 649,584

Keywords: Alpha Gaming, Stream Doctor, OBS, Tips, Streaming, Harris Heller, Alpha, Gaming, Live, Overlay, Design, Stream, Twitch, Doctor, How, To, How To, Help, Mixer, Youtube, Broadcast, Alerts, Streamlabs, youtuber, growth, stream, streamelements, harris, heller, money, monetize, income, full-time, full time, career, usb, mic, microphone, xlr, preamp, converter, analog, analogue, digital, a/d converter, a/d, blue microphones, ember, hyperx, quadcast, sound, audio, test

Id: XEpPyTu2Ubk

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2019