ZOOM LiveTrak L-8 For Podcasting

in this episode we'll take a look at the zoom live track l8 from a podcasters perspective [Music] a couple things first off if you are a musician looking at the live track la what we're going to talk about here may or may not be that relevant to what you're trying to do so you're dismissed also this entire episode is recorded with the zoom live track l8 we're using a shure sm7b microphone and we're going directly in to the live track l8 let's talk about all the features and the pros on this piece of gear here first of all we have six microphone inputs they're actually combo jack so you can put an XLR or quarter-inch inputs in the context of podcasting you're almost always going to use XLR now each of the inputs also has a dedicated gain dial this is how much amplification of the microphone input signal it does to get your levels and so you can see here we can go up to a 54 and in fact I'll push it here to 54 this is what it sounds like at 54 now all of this audio is recorded with this and then in post what we did is we normalized it to minus 23 l UF s just so you can hear what it sounds like out of the recorder we didn't do any sort of other processing and I just wanted you to be able to hear what it sounded like in addition to a dedicated gain or amplification dial for each of the inputs there's a single switch that turns on phantom power for all six of the inputs so if you were going to use a microphone that's sensitive or doesn't accept any sort of phantom power like a vintage ribbon microphone you'll want to be really careful with that next up of course we have a few different buttons the red button here right now means that it's armed and that is meaning that it's recording so right now we're recording input number one and we're recording our master mix or stereo mix right here each input also has a fader which defines how much of this microphone input signal is sent over here to the master mix so you can see here as I reduce it here it's not going into the master mix at all but it's still recording to the isolated recording so each microphone input is recorded to its own file independent of the others so you can do a lot of very careful post mixing if you wanted to have that workflow and do a really really careful detailed mix that sounds great in the end on the other hand if you just want a quick turn around and not a lot of post-processing you can always just use the stereo mix here I like that each of the inputs has a nine segment led meter so you know exactly where your levels are at any time and of course the master makes over here the stereo mix if you will also has the nine segment led meter for both channels in addition to the six microphone inputs you also have a 3.5 millimeter trrs input here this is for feeding audio from your mobile phone into the live track yell aid and it comes with a necessary cable here you can see we have a 3.5 millimeter trrs cable comes with that which is nice so you don't have to go searching around for one of those now the nice thing about this is that not only can you feed audio from your phone so for example if you wanted to play some pre-recorded music that you had of your own making or you wanted to Skype somebody and bring a remote host in onto your podcast you can do that here what's nice about it as well is that when the person that is on the phone talks to you they'll be able to hear everybody that's being recorded locally to the live track l8 but when they talk it has what's called a mix - feature which means it doesn't send their audio back to them now the reason that's important if it didn't have that feature when they talked they would get a feedback of their own voice so it would kind of echo back to them I'd be really annoying and distracting this takes care of that your remote caller does not get any sort of echo effect so here we're going to do a little sample with the zoom live track l8 and we have Danny here with us hi how's it going great thanks for joining us today so I'm over here on channel one Danny's on Channel two you're still there yes I am here okay and you are being miked by a your microphone is an electro voice re 20 hi how's it going great okay I think our levels are pretty decent there and then I'm on a shure sm7b this is where our gain is set we're close both of us are close to the top not 54 DB Toth and all the way but probably in the 50 DB range right now I would say so that's what we have there we do have some effects here on channel 7 let's go ahead and play a couple of those okay ready wow those also like get the party started now yeah exactly so the party is started here I'd say we have this also set up here you can see you can actually choose which input to use on on these so you can choose the pads that's why these are lit up so we can use these pads I can't play these pads right now because we have this input set to take an input from a mobile phone so we have a 3.5 millimeter trrs plug here hopefully this won't make any noise okay there we go so that's the tip ring ring sleeve plug that in here like a tentacle sync oh you connect that to your camera if your camera has a timecode input and that was playing back from the phone so let's go ahead and play a moment from the phone just you can see here what that sounds like just to get a sense for the sound quality coming in from the phone camera has a timecode input you connect it to that if it doesn't have a timecode input you connected to one of the audio inputs so you can also feed the audio to the okay that gives us a sense for what that sounds like we have our master fader over here we can apply effects as well the effects can be applied to the master to the to the mix stereo mix over here but you'll also get isolated recordings here for each of your individual microphones so you can do a careful mix in post if you choose to do that let's go ahead and get a remote guest dialed up here we're going to FaceTime with Emma let's see how that goes hi how's it going good thanks alright so Emma's joined us here the FaceTime can you hear us okay yeah do you hear any sort of echo so when you talk to us do you hear you echoing back just you and you're just talking on your phone you don't even have the headset on or anything right right just you in your dorm room yep all right well tell us a little bit about what the exciting things you're working on right now exciting things I'm working on and what was the context for that the context of me asking about IP addresses and I'm not a computer person is that apparently to get tickets to good concerts you gotta not be on the same IP address which I didn't know so do you mean you're gonna have multiple computers or computing devices attempting to contact the ticket seller at the same time that's right okay got it got it all right and tell us what the what's in the lineup for this year at the University what what courses are you takin I mean music theory - and musicianship - so those are my like basic music classes and then I also have trumpet studio as usual and then I'm also doing some gen Ed's some anthropology and ethnic studies sounds good how's the Anthropology class that's a fun one it's online so it's fairly lightweight but it's interesting and it's step further than what life sciences in high school would take you through or like a sociology or anthropology class yeah yes okay good yeah well very good well we would like to offer you our very best wishes on your efforts at purchasing the concert tickets you're after thank you fingers crossed yeah fingers and toes all right very good well thanks for joining us today we'll let you go next up we also have these six sound pads and what this allows you to do is playback various pre-recorded sounds it comes with a variety of sounds that might be useful they're a little cheesy but it might be useful for your particular podcast or you can load the el8 with your own pre-recorded audio here that could be good for intro music outro music any sort of little jingles or stingers whatever the case may be you have 4 headphone jacks here so for different people on the recording can listen yen now that's a little bit unusual because you have six inputs so if you are using all six inputs and you want each person have their own headphones you will need a splitter or some sort of headphone controller for the last two people the inbuilt recorder can record up to 12 channels that's all six microphone input channels plus the 3.5 millimeter input or the pads whichever one you're using now when you do have a microphone plugged in here that essentially takes this channel so these three pads disappear they're not available while you're working with the phone but these three are available and this is a stereo track and this is a stereo track and your master mix so a total of 12 tracks you can record pretty much everything you need to in addition the recorder records out with 44 point 1 kilohertz 48 kilohertz or 96 kilohertz and at 16 bit or 24-bit WAV file formats so you get a very high quality recording here now one of the coolest things about the LA is that you can power it via three different methods first of all on the bottom there is a tray that allows you to insert for double-a batteries you can use alkaline batteries nickel metal hydride rechargeable batteries or lithium batteries and you can also power via USB and that gives you two new options it gives you the ability to power via a USB battery bank like we're doing right now and if you would prefer and you have AC power available it does come with this adapter as well so you plug in the USB cable here and then plug into the wall here and you have AC power in addition if you were to lose AC power while you were powering that way and you had four double A batteries in the power would switch over automatically to the four double A batteries so you won't lose your recording now powering times going to depend on a few different factors it depends on how many microphones you're recording whether or not phantom power is on and what sample rate you use if you go to the higher sample rates like 96 it's not going to power quite as long but as a general rule of thumb you can expect somewhere around an hour and a half to two hours on for double a alkaline batteries you can expect somewhere around two and a half to three hours on nickel metal hydride batteries you can expect between maybe five and six hours on lithium batteries again depending on how many inputs you're using phantom power and sample rate the live track you light can also act as an audio interface to your computer connecting via USB so you connect this to your computer via USB whether it's a Mac PC or an iPad and you can then record directly to your computer and at the same time that you're recording to your computer you can also record on the SD card built into the live track yl8 right back here so you can record to both at the same time that gives you some backup and redundancy another feature that's quite helpful is if you have multiple shows that you're doing multiple podcasts you can actually set up scenes for each of the different podcasts and what that does is it basically saves all your settings so that when you go back to do that podcast again you can just recall all the settings and get right back to where you were so for example here I could say let's save this setup right here to scene number one and then when I needed to I could come back over to scene number two for my other show which maybe has three hosts and go ahead and set up those settings there so I could switch back and forth very quickly and easily makes it a lot easier and quicker to get set up when you're starting a new show recording now there are two balanced XLR outputs so you could also use the live track la not only as a recorder for your podcast but if you were doing the show live you could actually feed this out to a PA system two cameras or whatever you need to another thing that's very nice and is probably pretty obvious based on looking at it so far is that the loom l8 is set up basically like a traditional mixing board so if you know how to use a mixing board learning how to use this is going to be super simple you also do have a 3-band equalizer and a low-cut filter which I think are really useful for podcasting this is just to get rid of any Rumble say for example if you have the air conditioner or heater on you can use that to help cut out some of that noise and you can also fine-tune the sound of all your microphones using the three channel equalizer for each independent input Channel now no product is perfect including the l8 there are a few cons let's talk about those now this may be a little nitpicky but it's not going to be a problem for most people but the headphone outputs are really kind of designed for low impedance headphones so if you have audiophile headphones that are rated at 250 ohms these headphone outputs are going to have a hard time power and actually getting a good strong signal out of them so you're probably gonna want to stick with headphones that have an impedance rating of somewhere around 60 ohms or lower another con is that the live track la does not have a variety of features that are found on some of the competitors so for example if we're talking about the road caster Pro what the zoom live track la does not have is it does not have a compressor it does not have a de-esser it does not have a noise gate or an expander it does not have an auto mix feature so it's not necessarily a con but it can be a little bit of a downside if you're doing live streaming where it's nice to be able to do that processing real time so that your audience gets a nice good strong loud output level and then finally to other things relating to the build quality first of all number one the USB cable that plugs into the bottom of the unit is a USB micro connector and not really sure why in 2020 or well is made in 2019 I guess we're still using micro USB but we are for some people that's really important for me it's fine either way I guess but some people are really particular about that so just so you know it's a micro USB and then finally the build quality here the build quality is mostly plastic you're gonna have to take care of this if you're going to use it on a mobile basis when you're transporting it you'll want to protect it in some way so you're probably want to get some sort of padded case for it I'm not sure how well it'll hold up on the long run time will only tell but it I mean it's decent but it's not as robust say for example as the road caster Pro okay done with the cons now other things that are pretty nice about the unit here is that it is relatively small so the dimensions are here weight wise it's one point five six kilograms three point four pounds so it's pretty easy to move it around if you need to do that if you're going to be recording a podcast on location somewhere so that's great as well now the one question I know we're going to get a lot of in fact I've already got a lot of is how does the live track l8 compare to the road caster Pro for podcasting and I think there's some pluses and minuses on both sides it really depends on what you're trying to do so there's not a clear answer but let's run through some of the differences between them first of all price the live track l8 comes in at 399 dollars USD at the time of this review we're as the road caster Pro comes in at $599 u.s. difference of about $200 now the l8 is really more like a traditional mixer and in fact when I talked to my friend will and had him look at both of them he's not really a sound guy I just had him look at both of them and he basically said my first impressions of the zoom it looks appears just visually like it can do a lot it looks like from a audio engineer standpoint that would be a tool that you know you would you can see that they'd be working with the road appeared more friendly for someone like myself that wanted to start out doing a podcast it just it has that user-friendly look to me and I think that's really true I think that the Zoom la is a really great option if you want to kind of dive in and learn how a mixing board works and spend a little bit of time figuring out how all of this works I think is a great option if that is in no way of interest to you at all and you really just want to get up and running right away I think the road caster might actually be a better option for example here you have an EQ and you can use this to fine-tune the voices of each of your participants in the podcast on the road caster Pro basically what you do is you have a variety of different effects and you can basically just turn them on or off and they're all keyed off of a very basic set of settings like how loud someone's voices and what the tone of their voice is whether it's low or high pitched it those are the only two settings so for example it does have a compressor but you don't set the traditional compressor parameters or settings like ratio attack release so on and so forth so this works much more like the traditional audio gear works the road caster Pro does what everything it can basically to make it as simple as possible and I think that's really one of the key differences between these two that helps most people decide which direction they want to go of course the l8 has two additional input so if you have more people the l8 might make more sense both of them have for headphone outputs but if you're working on the l8 and you do use all six of the inputs you're gonna have to come up with your own solution for getting additional headphone feeds for the last two people so my feeling is everyone should have a headphone feed so that they can hear what's going on because a lot of people especially participants who aren't used to working with microphones they don't necessarily have the best microphone technique so they'll often look away and then their voice will drop off and things of that nature if you put headphones on them they'll start to realize oh I need to talk into the microphone because no one can hear me right now so that's a consideration let's talk about the self noise performance now I want to clarify something first of all what is self noise self noise is noise that's generated within the electronic circuitry of a recording device and that's gonna be the entire signal chain will be the microphone it'll be the recorder so on and so forth one question a lot of people have asked is well if you're gonna use a microphone like the shure sm7b do you need a mic activator something like a cloud lifter or a FET head this happens to be what's called a FET head and what these do is they basically give your microphone some additional gain before they go into your recorder you you plug in the microphone here and then you plug this end into the recorder and let's take a look at that really quickly I'm gonna go ahead and put the FET head in now you saw for example here that we have the input set almost to the very top at 54 DB and you can see here we're not even getting out of the green area yet so let's go ahead and put the FET head in and see what happens okay we're back okay we are back here and you can see now I have it set to probably 25 out of 50 for roughly maybe a little bit higher than that but we're getting the signal that's even hotter now than it was before so we could actually probably drop it down even just a little bit more so that's what something like a mic activator will do for you is it strictly necessary for this case I think where it's going to be helpful is if you're doing live-streaming and you want to have a good strong level right for the live stream now if you're not going straight to a live stream and you're going to do some post-processing it's not a big deal you can do that normal at what's called normalization or loudness normalisation impost but if you are live-streaming you're probably going to want something like a mic activator with a very gain hungry microphone like the shure sm7b or a lot of the other dynamic microphones so that is one thing to consider and that's going to be true for both the zoom live track l8 and the road caster and then I would say the final big difference between the two the road caster and the live track la is that the l8 has a lot more powering options so if you need to be mobile you have options there with the road caster it's really built to be operated with AC power it comes with a power adapter and that's it there's no battery there's no add-on product you can buy to power it via battery you'd have to rig something yourself and it takes a 15 volt input so that could be a little bit of work now for those that are di wires you could probably figure it out but if you want something out of the box it can be powered by battery via a USB battery bank double-a batteries or AC power l8 your choice so I hope that was helpful for you in an overview of the live track l8 if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below 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 for video talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 104,025

Keywords: ZOOM, LiveTrak L8, Livetrak l-8, L-8, Livetrack, audio, sound, recorder, mixer, podcast, podcasting, podcaster, Shure SM7B, ElectroVoice re20, review

Id: HYIJsOg9TPw

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2020