Anytime a new product comes out
it can sometimes be difficult to separate the hype from the reality.
And one of the biggest claims with the RODECaster Pro II is that you no
longer need any kind of signal booster with it because it has something called
"Revolution Preamps," which are supposed to be revolutionary in terms of
how clean the preamps are and how much gain you can get– how much clean gain
you can get from them, virtually eliminating the need for a booster.
So let's put that claim to the test and see if it's true with the Shure SM7B,
which is I'm shure you might know, is typically regarded as a
pretty quiet microphone that needs an extra boost to really sound its best.
In the past, if you've gotten an SM7B and you've just plugged it into any
kind of standard mixer, even the original RODECaster Pro, for a lot of people,
you might feel like, "This mic doesn't sound as good as I normally hear it sounding,
I wonder why?"
And it's probably because you need a booster of some kind. Currently I'm
using the Earthworks ICON microphone, which is a condenser microphone.
It's running off Phantom Power
and you pretty much never need a booster with a condenser microphone because
they're so sensitive and they have Phantom Power kind of giving them a boost.
But with dynamic microphones, it's often a different story.
So I've even made a video all about boosters before.
There are things like the Cloudlifter, which is a great one.
The FetHead has always been my personal favorite, and there's other
cool stuff like the Klark Teknik CT-1, which is pretty affordable,
And the Coda Stealth, which is specifically designed for the SM7B.
And on other interfaces and mixers, this has introduced so much gain that I
barely had to put the fader up at all because it made things so, so loud.
But Rode's claim here is that if you add a booster to your signal, you will actually
erode the quality by introducing noise because the preamps are really that quiet.
So for this video, I'm not going to have any background music in the back, and
I'm not going to do anything with the audio.
It's just going to be the file straight from the RODECaster
synced up in Final Cut and that's it.
So you can listen for yourself and see how it sounds.
So right now I've got the SM7B connected to the RODECaster Pro II
and you can see it's not connected through any boosters or anything,
just straight into channel one.
And at 58 decibels, I'm getting a pretty healthy gain level.
I am using the SM7B preset, which I'm going to
turn off all of the processing.
So right now all that it's affecting is the gain.
Which looks good.
The RODECaster Pro II deuce– does go up to 76 deucibels of gain.
But right now I think 60, maybe even 58, where it was, is pretty good for
my voice and where I'm at right now.
I don't need Phantom Power or anything like that.
So when we switch over, this will just be the pure SM7B sound.
So now I'm going to turn down this microhpone,
and bring up the SM7B right to the unity mark.
So this is the SM7B with no processing, just straight
into the RODECaster Pro II.
Hopefully if you're listening for noise, you somehow are able to differentiate
line noise versus environmental noise
because I am just in a room.
There's nothing crazy happening in here right now
like air conditioners or fans or anything.
So hopefully you can make a decision on if you think that sounds good or not.
Now I am getting plenty of volume, plenty of gain out of this.
I could boost the fader up even more and then it's going to get even louder,
potentially even start clipping.
If I go back into this channel and I boost this all the way up.
Now we're at– whoa, I guess I could turn that down.
This is way too loud, but now we're at 76 decibels.
Whoa.
With no–
Oh wait, wait–
I could do something stupid.
Now I can do something really stupid.
Anyway.
Wow.
We're at 76 decibels, no boost or anything.
And I can even push it a little bit further.
I'm in my headphones, definitely hearing a bit of noise, but I would never, ever,
ever use the microphone with the setting.
So let's go back down here to where things sound sort of sane.
And then I will bring this back down to unity, dial this in a little bit
to where it's fitting my voice nicely.
And there we go.
So this is the SM7B no processing and no booster.
If I turn on processing, you can kind of hear how it changes
the sound of the microphone.
I really do like the SM7B preset in the RODECaster Pro II
and it does introduce the Noise Gate, which is a lot more effective
than the original RODECaster Pro.
And in that case that I stopped talking, you can hear it does become pretty much
silent after that because of the Noise Gate.
So it's up to you to decide if you want to use that or not, but I'm going to keep
processing off to keep things fair.
So the next thing we're going to do is connect a booster, which is what
Rode says specifically not to do, but we're gonna see how that works.
Now,
I do know to get the best cleanest signal from a booster, you should connect it to
the microphone, not the back of the mixer.
Most of the time I run it into the mixer, because I hate the way they look
coming out of the back of microphones, but I will do everything I can to
give this the best shot possible.
So this is the SM7B with no booster at unity
on the RODECaster Pro II,
and this is the SM7B running through the FetHead at unity on the RODECaster Pro.
So a couple things to note here: one, at least in my headphones, I can
hear more noise than before when it wasn't running through the FetHead.
But interestingly, because the FetHead added so much gain to the channel
76 decibels plus like 26, well over a hundred decibels of gain,
now I had to turn this way, way down to 22 decibels
before it just like destroyed my ears and damaged my hearing a little bit.
What's interesting to me is that at 22 decibels, at a much, much lower level
of gain, there's more signal noise in the chain that we have gained.
If I boost this back up to 58– oh, I don't want to even do that.
This, oh, this just sounds terrible, but this is where it was without the booster.
And obviously there's a ton of noise, which is anoising.
So let's go back down.
I think it's my gain level is pretty much correct
right around here,
23-ish decibels.
So again, this is the SM7B with the FetHead running into the
RODECaster Pro II at 23 decibels of gain.
And this is the SM7B running directly into the
RODECaster Pro II with no signal booster at 58 decibels of gain.
With no processing, of course.
So again, what I'm actually finding interesting, even more than I expected,
is not only is this quieter, but it's quieter at a higher gain level.
So 58 decibels versus 23 decibels.
This is quieter than with this,
so it seems like Rode's claim really does stack up that signal
boosters introduce noise into the signal.
And if you didn't SM7Believe it before,
hopefully you believe it now. Just for the sake of "Science™"
let's try the other boosters and just see how they sound.
I'm just going to switch them out and you can hear samples.
This is the SM7B running directly into the RODECaster Pro II with no
signal booster at 58 decibels of gain.
This is the SM7B with the FetHead running into the RODECaster Pro II
with the gain level set to 23 decibels.
This is the SM7B running into the Klark Teknik CT-1,
I had to boost the gain to 28 decibels to keep my level,
and this is how much noise there is here.
This is the SM7B running into the Coda Stealth,
I had to lower it down to 26 decibels of gain to keep a good level,
and this is how much noise there is with the Coda Stealth.
And now this is the SM7B running through the Cloudlifter CL2
into the RODECaster Pro II at 25 decibels of gain.
So here's the SM7B again, running directly into the
RODECaster Pro II, no booster, 58 decibels of gain.
So I hope you have gained some insight into how good the
Revolution Preamps are in the
RODECaster Pro II.
I think it is an added benefit that I didn't mention in my earlier videos,
if you are somebody who uses a lot of dynamic mics with the RODECaster
and you're thinking, "Oh I don't know if it's worth the money."
The fact that you might not have to spend $400 or more for four boosters for
your RODECaster Pro or whatever mixer interface you're using,
I think is a huge benefit to the RODECaster Pro II.
Some of the other mixers that I've compared
the original RODECaster 2–
wait, the original RODECaster ALSO to, like the Mixcast 4 and the
Zoom PodTrak P8,
those also had 76 decibels of gain, but it was nowhere near as
clean as the gain on the RODECaster Pro II is where
adding in boosters really does add noise to your signal.
So it's not even a case of "better to be safe than sorry,"
like you really should NOT be using these with the RODECaster Pro II.
That makes your setup more affordable, simpler, easier to use.
The whole thing is just absolutely awesome.
Speaking of gain, thank you to all of the channel supporters I've gained through
Patreon and YouTube Channel Memberships.
And if you haven't seen my other RODECaster Pro II videos,
be shure to check them out right here.