- Since it's release the Elgato Wave Mic Arm Low-Profile
has done everything but keep a low profile.
It's become insanely popular.
So today let's see how it stacks up against
the RØDE PSA-1 and then you
can decide if you Elgato get one.
(80's type beat)
As you might know from many of my videos,
the RØDE PSA-1 has been my mic boom arm
of choice for many, many years.
I love the RØDE PSA-1 but I'll be honest
and say that sometimes this doesn't look super great.
Maybe it's not super practical.
And that something like this might
be a lot easier to work with.
Now this is the Elgato Low Profile boom arm.
And I know that it's not a direct competitor
to the RØDE because this is a traditional,
you know, taller boom arm.
And this is a low profile one
and Elgato did release a taller traditional,
I don't know what it's called, a traditional boom arm
but I don't have that one.
I'm more interested in the functionality.
What does a low profile arm get you that
a regular arm doesn't and vice versa?
And so right off the bat, obviously having
a low profile is the biggest feature.
These types of boom arms like the RØDE PSA-1 specifically
have been used in radio broadcasting
and audio production for many, many, many years.
And the goal with these is just to get
the microphone as close to the speaker's face as possible.
So it doesn't matter what angle it's coming from,
it doesn't matter how high up it is.
It's just to position the microphone in front of your face.
But as video has become more and more popular,
video podcasts are a thing, live streaming is a thing
and videos where people just want good quality audio
is a thing.
Now it's a problem if you have a microphone
in front of your face the whole time.
So you've gotta find a way to not have your face blocked.
You gotta preserve the moneymaker over here
if you're doing online content and whatnot.
And that's where a low profile arm can really save the day
because it can position the mic where you want it
but it doesn't block your face.
It doesn't block the camera,
it doesn't block conversation with other people
so there's a lot of advantages here.
There are also a few disadvantages
and we'll talk about those a little later.
So I'm actually going to disassemble this arm
and then we will, I guess it's called disarming it, right?
And then we will see what it has, how it comes together
and the different features of the Elgato Low Profile arm.
So the arm itself is pretty simple.
You get the base and then you get the arm
and that's pretty much it as is the case
for pretty much every other arm.
Now the whole thing is made out of metal.
It's incredibly tough, incredibly durable.
I really love that this clamp part that goes on your desk,
it does what I like, which is it positions the weight
of the arm on top of the desk.
It doesn't hang off the desk like
some of the cheaper arms do, I love that.
It's also really big so it's gonna grab onto your desk a lot
and it opens up quite wide.
And also already comes with rubber on the top and bottom so
it's not going to damage the desk or the table
or whatever you're mounting it to.
The RØDE PSA-1 comes with a similar design
that does have padding on the bottom here
but it doesn't have padding on the little metal part.
And so I always put little felt pads
to protect the bottom of the desk.
But overall I actually think this
is a better clamp than this one.
And if you've been looking at low-profile boom arms for
a while, this might look kind of familiar cause they did,
I think in a lot of ways sort of take some design cues
from OC White boom arms,
which have a lot of low profile ones,
but they're significantly more expensive.
So instead of costing somewhere between 3
and 500 dollars this is $100.
I have never personally used an OC White boom arm
so I "NO C" what the difference is.
However, I'm guessing that this $100 arm probably doesn't
have the exact same quality and fit and finish
as a 3 to 500 dollar arm does.
But it is still a very, very good boom arm.
I done videos in the past about cheap
versus expensive boom arms, where you can see wow,
$13 ones are very different than the $100 ones.
And I've also done videos where I compare $100 boom arms,
and you see there's a lot more functionality
and features in this price range.
It's definitely worth the investment.
The handle has that thing where if you're kind of
like running up against the desk and it's bumping into it
you can pull it out and then reset it.
So it's almost like a ratchet.
If you need to, if you're limited on space,
it makes it easy to still use the boom arm.
I really like that.
The RØDE PSA-1 has a simpler version of that,
which is just this metal thing that goes back and forth.
So if you run out of space, you can just turn it, turn it
and it's kind of the same concept.
But I think the Elgato's implementation
is actually a little more slick than the RØDE's.
And then the arm just goes in there
and you're pretty much done.
The arm has these two main sections
and at the end it has a ball mount, which is pretty sturdy.
And what's interesting is this has a quarter 20 mount on it.
That's something I've not really seen on a lot of boom arms.
Typically they have three eighths inch mounts.
But when you get the arm, it does come with two adapters.
One is a quarter 20 to three eighths inch.
And another one is something I've not seen before.
It is a quarter 20 to five eighths inch.
So right out of the box, you'll be able to use
this arm maybe with one of these adapters
with basically any microphone that you have.
The Allen key can be used to adjust
the tension at different points.
There are at the joints here, there's tension.
So this will adjust the spring tension.
If you're using a light microphone, you can loosen it.
If you're using a heavy microphone,
you might wanna tighten it.
And then there's also little points here where you
can adjust how easy it is to move around.
So you can keep this very loose where
it just kind of like slides very easily
or you can tighten it up where it's gonna
more firmly stay in place where you position it.
There's a lot of flexibility here.
My original plan was to get this boom arm and put it behind
my computer monitor and then have
it come out under my monitor.
And then when I'm done, I can fold the microphone away
because, get outta here, look how small this thing folds up
when it's not being used.
So it can just totally be out of the way,
it doesn't take up a lot of space.
That's pretty awesome.
And then I can just pull it back out under my monitor.
But in the time since I pre-ordered this,
it was back ordered and it finally got delivered,
I ended up putting my monitor on an arm of its own.
So now I don't really need this.
I rearranged my desk and that original plan
doesn't really work the way that I intended it to.
But it's still pretty cool.
If you take this ball mount off, there's a weird thing.
I've never really seen this mount before.
I don't know what else you could put on there.
You kind of need this proprietary thing.
Fortunately, this is very heavy-duty and very strong.
But the cool thing is it's going
to let you position the mic at any angle.
So if you have a shock mount like this
that comes out from the back, you can position it that way.
If you need your mic to go straight up, you can do that.
And the bottom section moves left or right,
the top section moves left to right.
And the top section also moves up and down
so even though it is a low-profile arm,
it can actually still raise up pretty high.
So that's kind of cool if you do need
the microphone to be up higher.
If you have this really low and you're trying to like use
your keyboard or your mouse, it can easily get in the way.
That's probably the biggest downside to
a low-profile boom arm is that
now it's another thing on your desk.
And so by being able to raise this up,
you then open up a lot of space there.
But my question is, if you're raising it up
then it's no different than this?
So I don't know if that undoes some of the benefit.
One of the cool things though about this is each of the arms
has these metal plates, which are held on by magnets.
And then in here is where you route the XLR cable.
And it is a pretty strong boom arm.
So I'm gonna take the SM7B,
which is a fairly heavy microphone mount that on here.
And you can see, it has plenty of, plenty of strength
to position this microphone, wherever I need it.
I have a feeling that unless you
have something completely insane like
a kettlebell microphone or something,
this arm will hold just about anything you got.
And then to set up your cable,
there's a little hole in the bottom of this section here.
You can run your XLR connector
and then you can just plug it into your microphone.
And basically it just goes in this little channel here.
Now you've got a pretty slick, you know,
cable management system.
I've noticed something that's really cool is
this corner over here, this joint, when you turn it,
the arm, it doesn't let the cable get tangled,
which can happen with some other boom arms.
However, as you can probably see right here.
A thing that happens a lot is these little magnet channels,
this is my biggest con of this arm is
it's very easy for you to move the arm in a way.
that's gonna pop these off.
Depending on what mic you're using the SM7B,
this isn't as much of an issue.
The AT2040 has a more traditional rear jack.
And that means pretty much what just happened here
is gonna happen a lot.
When you move the mic,
it's going to pull up on the cable,
which in turn can then pull up on these little covers.
And it just sorta depends how you have your setup,
what microphone you're using,
how much of an issue that's going to be.
But I can pretty much guarantee you,
if you get this boom arm, you're going to have to deal
with these covers popping off pretty much
every time you use it
You could wrap something around it to stop that
from happening but that doesn't look as cool
or as slick as just the arm itself.
It's not a big deal.
It just means chances are when you position the arm
these might pop off from time to time
and you just have to put them back on.
That's the biggest drawback to this arm to me is just that
'cause it's kind of annoying.
Beyond that the only other negative,
which is not anything to do with this arm specifically,
it's just low profile arms in general is the fact that
they do have the potential to get in the way of things,
depending on how you have them set up.
If you're somebody who's going to be using
like your laptop and a tablet and keyboard and mouse,
and you have this thing in the way,
it's going to be difficult, maybe, potentially.
It's all about how you set it up.
Whereas a traditional boom arm's not
gonna have that problem at all.
So for example, let's connect to the RØDE PSA-1.
The PSA-1 doesn't have easy internal routing.
It is possible to route an XLR cable through here
but you basically have to take off the end of the cable.
Like unsolder it, run the cable through
and then reset solder the connectors on the end,
which isn't very difficult
if you're someone who's comfortable with soldering.
But it definitely doesn't make it easy
to switch out your cables very often.
And it's just more of a hassle than
I would personally like to do.
So I would do the traditional thing of just using
the little Velcro ties and running the cable along
the boom arm.
Now in terms of build quality between these two boom arms,
both pretty darn excellent.
They're both gonna last a really long time.
I do like that the Elgato just seems easier to adjust.
You just use a little Allen key to adjust the friction.
You can do the same thing on the RØDE PSA-1.
If you ever noticed that it's too strong or too like low,
you can adjust this screw right here at the top
and that will change the spring tension
for your microphone.
It's not hard to do but it's sort of harder to dial in.
I found the Elgato to be super easy to dial
in exactly how I wanted it.
The RØDE PSA-1 has a more universal three eights inch mount
up here that you can attach all kinds of other stuff to.
The Elgato has this proprietary weird ball thing,
which is fine as long as it doesn't break.
And I don't think it will, but it's just sort of,
it's not as modular interchangeable
as a traditional arm would be.
This is as small as the PSA 1 gets.
And obviously the Elgato gets really,
really small and compact and out of the way.
So which one of those is better
for you is going to depend.
My least favorite thing about the PSA-1
is this shape right here.
Because what it does is it means if you try to turn
this vertically, you can't make it perfectly vertical
'cause this part has like a teardrop shape to it
and you can't get it totally vertical.
What you can do with the PSA-1 is take
this little locking nut off and then it gives you more room
to position the mount so that it's vertical.
But it also then doesn't give you that much space
to actually mount a microphone on it.
So I've noticed when I've done this, the microphone tends
to wobble and not stay on as securely as it should.
So this has been very frustrating.
And the reason I'm bringing that up,
if we look at the Elgato arm and this ball mount,
it's very easy to position something vertically,
which is important on a low boom arm.
But also important if you're using a microphone like
the SM7B or the Super55,
where your mount and your connector
are kind of right next to each other.
To use the Super55 on the PSA-1 and make it so I can have
it like this in front of me, I had to make
this little adapter that has like nine other adapters.
It's a small rig ball mount.
What is this?
This is a three eights to five eights adapter,
a five eights to quarter 20 adapter, a quarter 20
to quarter 20 into the small rig into a quarter 20
to three eights into a three-eights to a five eights.
It's a lot of adapters just to basically let me position
the microphone vertically in a way
that doesn't block the XLR connector.
So here's what I would have to do,
Shure makes these little extension tubes.
Now I've got my Super55 mounted vertically.
I can use the same tube on the PSA-1 but like I said
I can't get it vertical without all those adapters.
It's always gonna come out at like a weird angle.
If you're using a mic like the Super55 or the 55 SH,
something that has this kind of connector,
I do think it's gonna be significantly easier to position
how you want it using this boom arm than a PSA-1.
'Cause really these are made to stand
on vertical mic stands not boom arms.
So it's always a little funky when you're trying to do this,
but this works pretty well.
So I know it's incredibly unsatisfying sometimes when I do
a review or a comparison and I say,
yeah, either one is good.
You can't really go wrong either way.
But it's true, they're just different.
If you need something that's gonna be low,
maybe with a little more angular versatility,
when it comes to actually mounting your mic,
the Elgato is the way to go.
If you just want simple, reliable, easy,
the RØDE PSA-1 is tried and true.
You can't go wrong with that one.
The PSA-1 has more traditional mount here
with the three eight inch.
The Elgato has this proprietary thing.
The Elgato also has this super cool magnet feature
but also this super annoying feature that hides the cables.
But also does not hide your frustration
with the cables from time to time.
And of course, like I said, a lot of it has to do with what
you're going to be doing in front of the microphone.
Do you need a lot of hand space?
If so the low-profile arm is probably
gonna get in the way and get kind of annoying.
Whereas the PSA one can easily be positioned
to still let you have lots of room for activities.
Now much like the most popular store in any mall during
the early two thousands, boom arms are a hot topic.
So if you want to check out some more reviews
and comparisons to arm yourself with the best arm,
check out these videos right over here.
(Thanks for being here!)