welcome back folks this is shane what you're looking at right now
is the christmas present i got myself this is the roadcaster pro this is a podcast studio in one now
over the years i've been recording many different ways including using audio interfaces i've got a
steinberg UR22 mk2 on the desk here i've also got a zoom r16 multi-track recorder that has eight
xlr inputs that's more aimed i guess at people recording and producing music but i've used it
on this channel a whole lot of times but a lot of the pots are starting to go scratchy and spraying
them and cleaning them made no difference so and thought this year i'm going to get one of these
and i should be done for a very long time now i want to give a shout out to one of the youtube
channels that's fantastic he's got a really great deep dive review of this today i'm going to do
an unboxing and then later on i'll do a deep dive review but check out tom buck on youtube he's got
a really great channel i highly recommend checking out his stuff if you're into this sort of thing
and also subscribe to my channel i've got plenty of microphone comparisons reviews all that kind
of stuff so we're going to open this up take a look and see what we get and i want to thank tom
for making really useful videos and it's great to hear someone with a good voice you know like
some of the people that review microphones they make you want to blow your ears out and others
like booth junkies amazing you know great voice there should be more guys like that
out there i'm not saying i got a good voice by the way but yeah tom it was a pleasure
to watch your videos mate if you ever watch this so thank you all right let's get into it
first up we get a quick start guide that's actually really useful lots
of visual aids on there lots of photos and diagrams showing you how you can hook it up
i think that's really cool especially if you've never used something like this before
we also get a key feature sheet as well showing us what everything does and it's all numerically
laid out on the front and it also shows you everything on the back of the unit as well
included we also get an update procedure guide as well which is something i'm going to do to
hook this up odds probably already got the latest firmware but i'll see what that experience is like
hooking it up to my apple mac included we get a usb cable it's usb-c to usb-a so we can use
it to hook this up directly to the computer and update the firmware we'll try that in a moment
we also get a power supply included we also get a handful of these different cards so we can
label any of the sound effects that we store within the big pad buttons
on the top and i'll show you more about that later all right here's the road caster pro
my first impressions is it's a little bit lighter than i was anticipating but
that's not a bad thing it feels very secure on the desk it has rubber feet underneath to stop it from
sliding around and as you can see it's angled down so it makes it easy not only to see the screen
but to see everything it was flat it would be way harder to see the screen so i'm glad they've got
it angled like that in terms of the experience using the sliders they feel pretty solid
there's not a lot of play in them which is good they sort of rattle side to side a little bit but
nothing too bad there these pads feel amazing they almost feel like you don't they've got
there's no play in them at all so i'm interested to see how these respond record button at the top
headphone controls at the top you can hook up to four different sets of headphones and that's an
obviously a master out to your speakers if you've got this hooked up to say some studio monitors
on the back of the device is where we hook everything up i'm going to do a deep dive review
on this but we just want to set this up and see if we can get started with minimal stuffing around so
here we go now while this hasn't been used it's a little on the dusty side which is
kind of strange but yeah it definitely hasn't been used i can tell by the piece of plastic
that's over the actual screen here so other than that it's in pretty good nick let's turn it on
and it lights up on the screen here says rodecaster pro one of the best things about
this and you can see from the overhead shot here is just how color-coded everything is
this i actually saw one of these in a shop i mean i've watched obviously the videos on youtube but
i saw this in the store in a dark room and i went wow this is great everything's so easy to see
i dig it so we've already got it hooked up now i'm going to hook up a couple of road pro casters
which i've just modified and i fixed the plosive issue with them by filling in the cap here with
an additional piece of foam if you missed that video i'll link it up in the cards and you can
check that out because that's probably the only complaint about the procasters is that
little bit of plosiveness that's inherent within them so we're going to hook this up
to that directly we're also going to try it with an SE Dynamite as well which is usually required
this can push these microphones but whether or not it's as good with or without
the SE dynamite i guess we're going to find that out right now and then come back i'm going to do a
full deep dive review but let's see how it sounds while we do this audio test i'm just going to talk
about the setup process and the current setup i've got going on right now so getting this out of the
box and hitting record couldn't be more simple so props to road for getting the user experience
right you simply plug in your microphones plug in some headphones and an sd card on the back
hit record and you're basically in business all you have to do is make sure that
you've got the slider currently active on the channel that you're talking into now i've just
tested this off camera and as you can see in the back of this i'm connected via an se dynamite
which is an inline preamp giving the microphone up to 28 decibels of clean gain so i'm much prefer
the sound of this and i'm going to show you i don't know if this camera over here is going to
show you or not but if it doesn't i'll explain what's going on so if we go to channel 1 i've
currently got the level of the microphone set to 15 which is really quite low channel 2 is set to
37 and it doesn't sound anywhere near as good in my opinion it sounds far more boxy far more boomy
and they've done a good job trying to get the best out of the microphone but these are notoriously
gain hungry mics and so are the shure sm7b of course you can still use it with this but have
a listen again to the clarity difference so the level on this channel this microphone is set to 37
and on channel 1 it's currently set to 15. i think this sounds much much better i'm not going to be
using this device without an SE Dynamite and i'm set to the condenser microphone preset in here
i think it sounds far better to my ear it sounds fuller it sounds less processed
and i still have the same effects on both channels so let's take another listen
this is the other microphone so it still sounds good but you're going to lose the voice a lot
more just by moving away from the microphone or even turning and talking away from it
as you would with this one now that might be a pro or con depending on your particular situation but
i much prefer this so i think overall the audio quality of this thing is great
what i'm going to do i'm going to connect a whole lot of different microphones to this
and we're going to see how they sound with and without an sc dynamite we'll also try
some condenser microphones and then we'll do a full dig dive review after i've had a month
or so with it so don't forget to subscribe and click the bell if you want to find out about this
links will be in the description below thanks again catch you soon see you!