oh my god that was cool so today we're looking at this guy the TC Helicon go XLR which is a mixer
for Windows right now that is mainly marketed to gamers if you do want to pick this guy up it
will set you back around $400 like always links down below for this review I have the rode nt1
connected directly to the go XLR with my input gain set to 20 decibels the fader set to unity
gain none of the effects processing turned on and additionally I won't do any processing and
post but I may boost it so go ahead and check the dooblydoo to see what I did aliy did and because
Jarrell let's go ahead and talk about what comes in the box obviously you are going to get the go
XLR interface you'll get the required USB cable you'll get the necessary power cable and you'll
get some documentation then as far as the build quality the device feels fine but it's nothing
that I would write home about it does seem to have an all plastic build quality on the bottom there
are rubber feet to keep it from slipping around on your desk and the dials XLR port and faders
all have a little bit of wobble to them but it's nothing out of the ordinary now let's go ahead
and walk through all the buttons and dials on this thing on the top of the device you'll find
four assignable faders with associated screens and a mute buttons you'll find six buttons for
your effects presets you'll find a reverb echo pitch and gender dials you'll find three more
buttons for a megaphone effect a robot effect and a hard tuna FET and lastly there you will find an
FX on or off button beneath this you will find the sample pad and there are three banks both a
B and C and if there are four assignable sample buttons and a Clear button to quickly remove any
sample that you've recorded and on the bottom right you will find a sensor button with a one
kilohertz tone so you can swear to your heart's content and you'll find a microphone mute button
in case you want to quickly mute yourself then on the back of the device you will find an XLR jack
to connect an XLR microphone surprise-surprise you'll find a 3.5 millimeter stereo line input
for a phone or external iPad or anything like that you'll find a 3.5 millimeter microphone
input which does provide up to four point nine five volts or so a 3.5 millimeter headphone
output and the master headphone volume control is in the application you'll find a three and a half
millimeter stereo line output for a second PC streaming setup you got the USB port an optical
input for an external gaming console sound and you'll find the power port to connect this to the
DC power supply then as far as the specs of this thing has a bit depth of 24-bit and a sample rate
of 48 kilohertz a gain range of 0 to 72 decibels that is right this thing has 72 decibels of gain
which is ridiculous then according to an email I had with TC Helicon it has a latency of around
7 to 12 milliseconds an impedance of 3.5 kilo ohms and an EIN of negative 128 point 5 DBA or
125 point 6 dB you okay so right now I am going to go ahead and measure the noise of the preamps
on this thing and I am recording the broadcast stream mix as you can see I have everything set
to zero except for my microphone input and thus wearing beep so let's go ahead and measure it
now in order to really test the preamps of the go XLR I've connected the shure sm7b directly
to it the fader is set to unity gain which is all the way up I have no effects turned on my
gain is set at 50 decibels and in Reaper it shows that I'm hitting around negative 9 to negative 6
decibels on my meter and this is how the audio sounds and as you saw out of the 3.5 millimeter
jack we were almost getting 5 volts which is perfect for an electret condenser microphone so
I have the nywhere NW 7000 connected with an XLR to 3.5 millimeter jack connected directly to the
device my input gain is set to 17 decibels on the meter in Reaper I am hitting around negative 9 to
negative 6 DB my fader is at Unity gain no effects are turned on and this is how the audio sounds
right now I'm looking at the sound preferences in Reaper to show you what you can select as your
input device from the go XLR as you can see you do have quite a few options in terms of your input
device you can select the broadcast stream mix which is the down mix of everything on this thing
to a stereo channel you can select the sample pad which would be the sample pad you can select just
the chat microphone which would be your microphone input and that is it as far as input devices then
when you look at the output devices you have quite a few more options you can route reaper's output
to the system which is one of the faders you can output it to the sample board you can output it
to the game mixer the music or the chat fader so you can do a lot in terms of routing out but you
only have a few options in terms of routing inputs so once you download the go XLR app and open it up
this is going to be the page that you see you can see in the upper left-hand corner you have
profile samples and presets this is all stuff that will help you easily recall settings for different
sessions and different use cases whether it be for a live stream or whether it be for a podcast
or anything like that and we're not going to dive too deep into any of that in the upper right hand
side you'll see this software rendition of the physical go XLR and as you make changes on the
physical device it will actually be reflected in the software as well then in the lower half of the
app that is where the real meat and potatoes of this thing lie this is where you're going to make
a lot of adjustments to your microphone sound whether it be EQ compressor gate or de-esser
which we'll cover in a little bit it will also allow you to make adjustments to the mixer like
assigning different sources to each of the faders so for instance on channel 2 if I don't plan on
having any music playing I can select console as the input source once I did that I would jump
over to lighting and I would change the icon to let's say that and then I would change the
text to console and now on the device it will show that that fader is assigned to the console
making it really easy to make adjustments on the fly but also since there are a lot more sources
than there are faders if you don't have anything assigned to a physical fader like the line input
or the system or your actual headphone volume or the bleep you can make all the adjustments to
those levels in this mixer tab then you have the effects tab which allows you to make adjustments
to all the different effects from reverb to echo to pitch to gender to megaphone all sorts of stuff
here and I'm not gonna dive too into depth here because there's just too much and it would make
this video way too long and also he Lacan or TC he Lacan made a video on these effects in their
own channel next you have the sampler tab and the cool thing here is you have three different
banks a B and C I've already loaded up a bunch of samples let me just go ahead and drag a few
here I have assigned this to the top left button I will go ahead and jump over to the top right
ad honk I will jump to the bottom left and AD meow and then I will jump to the bottom right
and milk so on the mixer you can't really tell but there are some very dim lights in the background
to indicate that these do have samples assigned to them so since I added frogs ribbiting to the
top of left if I wanted to hear that I would just hit that button that was the wrong sample
let's try this one there we go so if you do want to play a sample it's very easy to do that but
something that's really cool about this sampler is if you wanted to record something that you're
saying all you would have to do is hold down that button while you want to record it pull down that
button while you want to record it and then you tap the button and it will play it back very easy
to clear that out hit the Clear button delete that and now nothing happens when I press that button
so I think that's a really neat feature and one last thing about the sample tab it does give you a
little bit of function in terms of editing each of the clips so if I were to play this clip I drink
that's fine and all but what if I only want to Daniel day-lewis slurping and I am probably going
to get copyright strike for this but now I can just play that and I can I can grouse everybody
out I am so sorry for that that was incredibly disturbing but that is a really cool feature to
have as well then you have the routing tab which has the routing matrix which makes it really easy
to assign different sound sources to different outputs so if I wanted my game audio to go to
my voice chat out all I would have to do is click that box maybe I wanted the music input to go to
the sampler so I could record it I would click that and that is how this thing works and it is
very easy and lastly you have a system tab which has a tutorial a manual the software update about
your device third party info analytics but most importantly it has the microphone setup so if
you want to change the gain of your microphone or turn on or off phantom power you'll come to
the system tab and select microphone setup and then you get this pop-up window which allows you
to select a dying hammock or condenser microphone condenser will turn on the phantom power and it
does give you this microphone meter telling you right here in this range you're good if you go
too loud it says this is loud and it will give you an error message saying this is clipping lower the
microphone gain so that is a very nice feature to have and hopefully that means we will hear
a lot less clipping in live streams because that is a very serious issue that drives me absolutely
insane now let's go ahead and walk through the effects that are built into the go XLR and show
you how they sound the first thing that we have is the equalizer and we can just go ahead and
crank the bass up or we can go ahead and cut the bass out or conversely we can go ahead and boost
the treble and sound disgusting or cut out all of the treble and sound muddy and just unclear
but if you do want a lot more granularity they have this really nice and full graphic equalizer
which goes from 31 and a half Hertz all the way up to 16 kilohertz so you can go ahead and boost
exactly where you want to boost to some extent it doesn't have complete parametric EQ but it
is pretty usable next you have a compressor which on the cover looks like it just has a single fader
to increase the amount of compression which is not very good if you want any decent compression
but you can dive a little bit closer in adjust the threshold the ratio the attack the release
and the make up gain so if you know a little bit more about compression and what settings
you want to use then there you go they have it which is absolutely amazing to see next up
we have a gate and again on the surface it looks like a single fader but we can dive a little bit
further in and adjust the threshold the attack and the release if I increase this you can tell
that it has a very sharp cut off and it sounds very unnatural something that I personally would
have liked to have seen here maybe they can do this in an update would be the amount of
gain reduction where you only decrease the gated portions by 12 or 15 decibels rather than negative
Finity and that would make it sound a lot more natural and a lot less jarring when you start
and stop talking or when the gate enables and disables and lastly we have a de-esser effect
which will decrease the harshness of your S's your S's so you can increase this I says and you
can tell that that cuts out some of those shrill frequencies which is amazing that they included
that very good job there so I was a little bit reluctant about this thing when I initially saw
the announcement but after having my hands on it for a while I have to admit that it does what it's
set out to do and it does it well and first up in terms of pros I am very happy that they included
a 24 bit 48 kilohertz converter in here that is perfect for voiceover I also love how compact
this thing is considering all that it does in terms of processing another really big selling
point for me is the 72 decibels of gain meaning you're going to be able to drive pretty much any
microphone that I have ever seen on the note of gain even when I cranked it up to 72 decibels
and it showed that I was clipping it seems to be doing some kind of safeguarding to avoid any
kind of excessive clipping or distortion which is really good especially for beginners the device
also makes it really simple and straightforward to route different sound sources in your Windows PC
to your stream which in my experience has been somewhat difficult in a clunky in the past and
lastly you get some really essential processing especially for a live stream like compression
de-esser and noise gate and then in terms of cons my main issue with this is that it is only
compatible with Windows and yes I understand this is a gaming device and Windows is where everybody
games but I would like to see them eventually port this over to Mac so maybe podcasters or people who
do streams on their Mac can use this as well and then to get very very very nitpicky I don't like
that this thing only has a 3.5 millimeter output and it doesn't allow you to select an aggregate
device and multitrack different inputs on this thing in a doll and now would I recommend this
thing yes and no if you are a gamer or a live streamer and you are looking for an all-in-one
solution that is very compact then absolutely the reason I say that is this device does pretty much
everything that you could possibly need to do to your live stream audio and it does all of it
pretty respectably and on top of that it makes it very easy to make on-the-fly adjustments to
levels to censor yourself or if you want to say you don't have to get demonetised so all of that
makes it incredibly useful and an amazing asset or an amazing tool for live streamers and gamers
but on the other hand if you're a crazy person and you're looking at this thinking this would
be a great music device no do not get it or if you're somebody who wants to multitrack with
this thing no do not get it you can't do it with this thing this is a live streaming device alright
well that is going to do it for this review I am almost certain that I forgot something about this
because there is so much to it so if I forgot anything or if you have any questions go ahead
and leave them in the comments down below and I'll do my best to answer some of them in the
coming weeks but keep in mind I am NOT a Windows guy so I'm not up to date with all your cool
person lingo or anything so go easy on me you can also vote for the gear that I review next
by heading over to geeks rising dot-com slash podcast äj-- you can subscribe for more videos
by clicking the logo beneath me you can hang out in the discord server I'll throw a link in the
description and I will see you all next time thanks for watching thanks for listening bye