 The new Streamer X from RODE is a really interesting device for a number of reasons, not least because it is RODE's first foray into the world of video, as well as being an audio interface. It is, after all, a video capture device, and I'll talk about some of its capabilities there in a little while. But for me, it's also the positioning of this because, although it is called the Streamer X, and obviously, you know, the live streaming market is going to be a huge opportunity for it, it's also been aimed squarely at people who just want to level up their audio and video quality in Zoom and Teams meetings. And that's kind of one thing that, you know, I'm constantly on about on my channel and in the Take One Tech Academy as well, is helping people to level up their online appearance in their meetings and the way that they present themselves and their businesses online. And when I say that this has been aimed at, you know, partly that particular market, what I mean by that is, as we'll see in the settings, they've got some settings specifically for, you know, video calls, but also they've gone one step further with a really smart move in my mind, which is to have some integration directly with applications like Keynote, PowerPoint and Google Slides, which means that this could well be the one device that you have to give you that high quality video audio and also then actually control your presentation going into your meeting or your webinar. I know that there's people I've already spoken to who have been really considering this, and I've certainly recommended it to some people who just want to either, you know, take that initial step to get that high quality video or audio or even actually just simplify their setup. So I've spoken to people with ROCasters who are saying, well, really, I've only got one mic and all I'm using it for is to just get that high quality audio going into my Zoom meetings. So, you know, pairing it down to something like this, which is a much simpler device in many respects, but still has all of the same onboard processing power in terms of audio is a really smart move. So I think there's going to be a huge, huge opportunity there in that particular segment. Anyway, this is my first two weeks of using the device. I'm going to share my opinions with it. I should have to say that RODE did send me this device for review along with the PodMight USB and also the ROCaster Duo. So I'll make separate videos about those, but this is not a paid video promotion and all of these views are just my own, as I say, my experience of using them for the first couple of weeks. I'm going to run through all of the actual hardware itself, and then I'll talk about the software. And when I talk about software, there are in fact two different pieces of RODE software that you can use with the ROCaster, sorry, the StreamX even, forget the device rights, and that is either RODE Central or also their Unify software. Now, at the moment, Unify is PC only. However, it is coming to the max. So I'll make a video all about Unify when I've actually got that on my computer and operational. But for the time being, I'll just focus on RODE Central. Incidentally, the difference between those two is that Unify is going to give you slightly more options in terms of audio routing and the way that you can use the device. But I'll talk about that a little bit later. I do suspect that for the most part, most people will just be using this with RODE Central because it gives you the sort of easiest, quickest setup and least complications in terms of setup. But let's start with the overall form factor. As you can see, it's a really nice looking device. If you're familiar with the ROCaster Pro 2, which is what I've been using as my primary audio interface for the past 12 months or since it came out, in fact, then it's going to seem very familiar to you. It's got a very familiar look and feel in terms of the side view and so on, some similar sort of design elements. And also, when you take a look at all of the little dials and the little glowing buttons as well, it's got the same sort of nice tactile feel to it as on the ROCaster Pro 2. Another thing that they've bought over from the ROCaster Pro 2 is the quarter 20 inch socket or screw thread, I should say, on the back, which means that you can mount it to things. Now, I'm not suggesting you mount it to a selfie stick to be able to admire it on a regular basis, but it does mean that you can mount it to things like if you want to just mount it up off your desk. This can be used as a standalone device. You don't need to have it plugged into your computer. You may have it plugged into a mobile device, in which case you might have a musical instrument plugged into it even and just have this mounted up on a stand next to you. So having that extra mounting option is really nice. I've personally done that today just so that I can put it up here and have it mounted up here to be able to show you what all of the connectors do. So, first off, we've got this Neutric combo connector here. That means that you can connect either your XLR microphone directly to that with an XLR cable, obviously. And if this is a condenser mic, then you're likely going to need phantom power. It does have phantom power 48 volts here, so you can just toggle this on and off by pressing the button. But because it is a combo jack, it does mean that you can plug in a musical instrument as well. So if you've got a guitar, for example, that can plug directly into the quarter inch socket there in the middle. Next to that, you've got your headphone socket. So that's going to go to your headphones, your in-ear monitors, whatever you're using to monitor your mix. Next to that, they've also got a headset socket. So that's a 3.5mm jack. So if you are using something like the Rode NT-H100M, this is actually the NT-H100, but the NT-H100M has got a boom mic attached to it as well. So that means that you could be using that as your microphone rather than or in addition to the XLR microphone input. Coming back to the top-down shot, and by the way, I'll talk about different mics a little bit later. Coming down to the top-down shot then, we've got the HDMI in, and I should say that my main camera that you're looking at right now is passing directly through the Streamer X and going into my video recording software, which is Ecamm Live. So my HDMI from my camera is going straight in there, and that's what you're seeing right now. You will have noticed that there is in fact two HDMI sockets, and that's because as well as the input, you've also got the through socket there. Now there's a couple of reasons why you may need to use this, or three to my mind. Either you are a live streaming gamer and you want to have your gameplay running on one computer, then you're going to pass the HDMI out that would normally go directly to your monitor, and you're going to pass it through here. So it would go into the in socket, and then the through would go with an HDMI cable from there into your monitor. So then you can actually just be watching your gameplay whilst it's being captured here on your streaming computer. And I'll talk about the specs specifically for the HDMI inputs and through puts and so on in a little while. The other way that you might use this is actually just to use it as a monitor for your camera. So if you are recording and you've got your camera coming into here, as I've got at the moment, you could technically just have a little field monitor or something like that plugged into that so that then you have that as a little monitor of your camera directly coming out of the Streamer X. The final way that I can see that you may want to use this, which is actually probably what I'm going to predominantly do with this, is to actually use this for a secondary computer passing in a presentation into your primary computer. When I'm giving webinars or demonstrations in Zoom meetings, for example, I'll often run my presentation or my demonstration on a second computer, and then I want to bring that into the main computer that's going into my meeting. So similar to the streaming scenario really, but just capturing something different rather than gameplay, capturing your presentation so that you can see it on an actual external monitor. But it is going into your primary computer. So that's how I'm going to use that anyway. Next up, we've got these three USB sockets. The first one over here on the left is a power socket, and it is, as you can see, 5 volts, 3 amps. Now, if you are running this into a computer, actually it can draw all the power it needs from the USB from your computer. So you can see here that I've got just this USB one. There is also a secondary USB, but I've just got this plugged into my computer over this USB one cable, and that is the one that is also powering the device. So when would you might need to use the power? Well, if you are using it plugged into an external device, like an external device, plugged into a device like either a smart phone or a tablet, if I can get my words out. So that's where you might use the power there. But these two USB sockets you can use for a couple of things. So either you could have it connected to a primary computer and a secondary computer. You may want to have a tablet or a phone connected into that second socket and have that going into your computer. Maybe you're bringing somebody in over the phone or whatever. Or it may be that you have both of those sockets attached directly to a single computer to just give you two separate channels there. And we'll have a look when we start looking at the audio setup as to how you might consider using that. But personally with the Rocaster Pro 2, for example, you there have two USB cables that give you actually three separate USB channels, but I have them all going into the same computer generally. So anyway, a few different options there which we'll look at in due course. Now, if we take a look at the actual buttons on the front, and I'll just come back to this shot here, then you can see what we've got. There's first of all two dials over there on the left-hand side. And that is for your microphone and also for your headphones. And if you press the microphone dial in, you'll notice that this little LED above is switching from basically these different inputs. So I mentioned before that you've got the XLR socket there that you can use for your or indeed for an instrument, for your microphone or for an instrument. If you are using that phantom power and you click phantom power on, you'll see that there is an indicator there showing you that it is on. I get this nice and straight. Then you can also click to go to your headset. So if you are using that headset option, that is how you would get to that. But you'll notice there is a third light and that is because as well as those wired microphone options, you can also use this directly with either the road wireless go or the road wireless means. And in fact, I should say road wireless go to the latest version of those. And you can actually pair this directly with the transmitter so you don't need the receiver in there at all. You can just have this paired directly. So if you want to have a wireless mic option, that is a great little feature that they've added in there. Now I should say that if you're using this with road central, one of the limitations of road central is that you basically have to pick which of those input devices you want to use. However, with Unify, you do get access to all three of them simultaneously potentially. So this could then be something that you use with an instrument plugged in, then you could have something wired into the headset potentially for microphone or maybe using that wireless option. So you've got some slightly more options there when it comes to the road central versus the Unify. Also then on here, next to that, you've got the dial for the headphone. And when you press that, what you're actually doing is muting the headphones. So that is to mute your headphones. And down here, you've got a button with a microphone that is going to mute your microphone. Now you might notice this nice little glow around the outside of the dials, which is going to be familiar if you are used to the road caster or have used the road caster. But one thing that is different on these, because obviously there is no screen to give you any visual in terms of the levels. But one thing that is different on these little illuminated rings is that as you turn them down, you'll notice that the illumination also turns down if I change it from muted. You can see there that little blue glowing ring as I turn that down, that would be the level in my headphones would be going down there. And with the microphone, if I go to the mic input, then this is going to be a level of the mic input. So it's nice that you have got that little visual, even though there is no physical screen on it. Now just below the headphones then is a similar button to the microphone, but this is to effectively turn off the camera. And why might you want to do that? Well in gameplay you probably won't, but if you're using this in a meeting platform, it's nice to be able to turn off your camera, just like I've done right now. The camera will come back on. So I don't know if you've been like me before in Zoom meetings or Teams meetings where you're not really necessarily entirely sure if you are on or off camera because sometimes the controls can be a little bit small to see, especially if you are using a teleprompter. So I can see that there's going to be a lot of people who will really like this to just know that yes, they are muted or not muted and they've got that very clear indicator there of that. So next to this then you've got the smart pads and there are four smart pads here with the same sort of functionality as you've got on the Rocaster Pro 2. So these allow you to change your voice, you know add voice effects to it. You can assign audio to it. So if you want to play a music bed or sound effects and things like that, you can assign those to these. They can also control MIDI devices as well. So they can be used as a MIDI controller if you are using software that allows that on your computer. You can also use it if you are using OBS or ECAM Live to actually control the software itself. However, you do generally need to have some sort of intermediary application to do that. So for ECAM Live for example, which is what I use to make all of my videos and my live streams, there is a third-party app called ELMC, ECAM Live MIDI controller. And so in that case, you would be able to use these buttons then to switch your scenes, toggle overlays and whatever in ECAM Live. Now those four smart pads, but you do have multiple pages of these and you can scroll between them like this and you can have up to 64 actions assigned to those. I do think that it might be a little bit tricky to keep track of those. Obviously you can colour-code them, but you'd have to have some, you know, very good memory to remember what all of those different pages are and the different colour-coding on those. But nevertheless, nice to see for those who need them that there is plenty of options there. These smart pads though do sort of have a completely new use case though, as we'll see in the software when used in this new presentation mode because then these are used for advancing your slides. You've also got them for putting up a blank slide or starting or ending your presentation. So when you are in this new presentation mode, which I'll show you in a moment, then this becomes your presentation interface here. So this is what I was talking about with, you know, if you are looking to level up your audio and video and look more professional in online meetings, then here you go. You can easily toggle on and off your audio and video and you can control your presentation from here too. So really great to see that. All in all, the hardware, like I say, feels really solid, just the same as I've come to expect from other road products and a really nice sort of feel and aesthetic to it and a nice form factor too. Let's then take a look at the software and I mentioned before that we're talking specifically about Road Central. If you do come over to the Road Central app and open it up, then you'll find that the Streamer X is over here on the left-hand side. I will say that when you plug this in, I've spoken to a couple of people who have had some issues with the camera being recognized due to the fact that they're plugged into a dock. Now, with all of these devices, be it a roadcaster or a stream deck or any of these sort of peripherals that we use these days on our computers for streaming and the like, you'll generally see it's there somewhere that they'll always recommend plugging it directly into your computer. What can happen is, you know, if you don't have the bandwidth over the, you know, USB channel that your dock, for example, is going into, then it may sort of cause some issues. In all of the cases where, or, let's say, all of the cases, the two cases of the people I've spoke to who have had one of these where it hasn't been recognized or the camera hasn't been recognized, it has been the dock that has been the issue, and so just plugging it out and plugging it into the computer has solved that. So in those cases, though, once again, when you have got it plugged into your computer, mine, by the way, is plugged into a dock, so it by no means all docks, I should say. But in any case, once it is plugged in, then you'll see it show up in the left-hand side. You may see a little indicator here to update the firmware, and I just mentioned that because I mentioned that I've had this for two weeks in that time. There have been a number of firmware updates, so it's great to see that this is still under, you know, ongoing active development as well. And indeed, Road Central's had a few updates specifically related to Streamer X as well. But when you click into it, then you'll see something looking like this. And it's really nice that they've got this quick setup section down at the bottom. I'll talk about that in a moment, though. I'll actually go on to the more familiar stuff, first of all, which is the basic one, which is device configuration. This is just changing basically the brightness of the buttons. So it's changing the brightness up and down of those and the brightness of when they're on or off, or active or inactive. So that's what these two sliders are. That's when a button is basically in its inactive state, and then this is the brightness when it is in its active state. And then you've got device information set to the device there. Going back then, we've got the customized smart pads. And as I say, I'll cover this off because this is going to be very familiar if you are used to Roadcaster. What we've got in here is either you can add sound effects, if I click on one of these, or maybe this one. So this is just the Airhorn sound effect. But you can upload any file to this. It's got two gigabytes of online, of onboard storage. So you can just upload your files when they're stored on the device itself. As I say, you don't need Road Central or Unify Open to actually use the device. So you can drag and drop that. You've got some options as to how you want that to behave. So whether you want it to be that whilst you hold the button down, it plays the audio. You can also have it so that it's one shot. You just hit it and it plays the audio through to the end. Or the toggle is more likely if you've got sort of a music bed, some sort of longer music track, then you can use a toggle to toggle that on and off. Then you've got some options for what happens whilst it's on. Do you want it to loop it the track? Do you want it to replay at the end? And then some different ones that you've got there for those. And you can always just drag and drop things onto here. And you can also export the audio if you need to take it off there at some point as well. Next up, we've got the audio effects. So if I click into one of these audio effects, I'll just choose this one. So the pitch up, there's a few different effects here like the voice disguise, the robot, megaphone, echo effect and reverb. And then you've got the options of either momentary or latching. So latching being that you press the button and then it has that effect enabled until you press the button again. Or momentary is just basically whilst you hold the button down, it's going to apply that effect. Next up, we've got some mixer actions. So if I just come over to a different page, I'll come over to these mixer actions. Here, if you want to play a little beep sound to sensor yourself if you're prone to wearing on your live streams or indeed in your Zoom or Teams meetings, you can apply that there. There is fade in and out. So I mean, that's something that I use on my ROCASTER Pro 2 for my podcast, I should say, when I want to fade in and out the music. And then you can have it so that it excludes the microphone. So maybe you want the music to fade out and your microphones stay audible. And then at the end, maybe fade the music in towards the end. So you've got a few options there and you can change the time that it takes to fade in and out. Ducking is where you are having all of the other audio reduced in volume slightly as you talk. You don't really get much control over how much that, you know, ducking is applied there, the level that it applies to. But it is quite nice to just be able to press that and then, you know, everything else will go down whilst you are talking. So that's typically something that you'll hear in radio, you know, when the announcer, when the DJ, I should say, announcer is going to talk over the top of music it may well just drop it down a little bit behind that. Then you've got MIDI. And that is what I was talking about before where you would need to use some sort of MIDI controller. If you're using something like a DAW, a digital audio workstation, often they are, you know, I've got integration for MIDI so that you can control different aspects of that. Or again, if you were going to control OBS or Ecamm Live, for example, with some third party software, you could use MIDI for that. The one that's really interesting to me though on here is this presentation mode. So if we click on presentation mode, what that does if you click on the little information, it shows you in more detail. But as I mentioned earlier, the previous slide and next slide are assigned to these forward and backward arrows that you've got, which are ordinarily the sort of page turn arrows for the smart pads. Then here you've got this one for a blank slide in white or blank slide in black. So if you just want to put a blank slide up on the screen. And then you've got close presentation and start presentation in there. Now, one thing to note though is that this is essentially just sending the keystrokes. And you can see here the mode I selected keynote, because that's what I use. But you can also choose PowerPoint, Google Slides on Mac or Google Slides on Windows. And what this is doing is it's just sending that particular keystroke, so the W, the arrow key, or the B or the escape or whatever it is. It is sending those to that application. But the application does need to be active. So if you are using keynote and along with a Zoom call, for example, and you've got keynote running, but you're kind of clicked into Zoom. So Zoom is the active application. You just need to be aware that it's going to be sending these keystrokes at the moment to Zoom rather than always going to keynote. There are a few ways around that. So I use an application called Keyboard Maestro. So I can actually just program that to take these inputs from this device only and then send that to a specific application. But just note that if you go into the chat in Zoom or whatever, then, yeah, you may be pressing the little arrow or this one, and it's just literally typing the letter W into your Zoom chat. So that's just something to be aware of. But nevertheless, for the majority of people giving a presentation or a webinar, likely they'll be in the presentation software anyway. So that is presentation mode. Now I mentioned the camera as well, by the way. So here it does mention the disabled camera and so on. And I've already shown you what that looks like. But in terms of that HDMI pass-through, I should really talk about the specs a little bit of that because obviously this is something that's quite important. So the max input resolution that you've got into that HDMI in is 4K 60 frames per second, 2K at 144 frames per second, or at 1080p HD at 240 frames per second. So that's the input that it can physically take. Now, obviously that's a really high frame rate there. But certainly for gamers, that is what is going to be important. They want to make sure that passing it through this device is not going to be reducing the frame rate that they're getting, certainly on their monitor. However, it doesn't necessarily capture in those frame rates though. So let's take a look at this, which is the actual capture resolution. So it's 4K 30. So it means that you can pass through 4K 60, but it's going to be capturing just the 4K 30. Then you've got 2K 60 HD at 120 or HD at 60 for HDR. The other thing that I should mention is this variable refresh rate support, which I understand is important to gamers, not so much to little old me just going into my Zoom and Teams meetings. But nevertheless, it is there, so I just want to highlight it because I do appreciate that that is more important to some than others. We've got all the other specs in there as well. I will say in terms of the audio, it's got the same revolution preamps as on the ROCASTER Pro 2. So if you are familiar with those, you'll know that those are low noise and high gain. And if you're used to using something like a Cloudlifter or a Fethead, so some microphones require this extra booster in line to sort of boost up the gain on those microphones, that's not necessary with using the Streamer X, just as it is not with the ROCASTER Pro 2 as well. So that's something that is just worth noting. And in fact, they say that if you do use something like a Cloudlifter or a Fethead, it'll actually introduce more noise into the system. Now coming back then, it feels like we've gone forward a bit before we come back, but let's go back to that setup because having looked at the sort of device configuration and the smart pads, I just want to come back to here, which is the first thing that you're actually going to see when you get to the device, which is related to audio setup. And it is either you're going to select whether this is going to be for streaming, for presentations, for video calls, or for gaming. And what that's changing is the audio routing. So what you'll see over here on the right-hand side is that along the top, we've got these different options here, these are all the different inputs, I should say. So this is your microphone, and bear in mind that we've got those three options for microphone. Then this one is the audio from the smart pads. So if you are using the smart pads to play music or sound effects, that is what this is representing. Then you've got HDMI, and I've talked about there being four microphone inputs, but just bear in mind that HDMI can also pass audio as well. So if you are using your camera coming into this device, you may well have a camera that's plugged into your... You may well have a microphone, I should say, that's plugged into your microphone. Let me get my words straight, shall I? You may well have a microphone that is plugged into your camera that is then coming into this device. So technically, you could have four different mics that are all coming into the Streamer X. And then we've got these two USB channels, so USB 1 and 2, and those are those two sockets that we've got on the back. And then here on the left-hand side, we've got either the mix or your monitor. So the mix being what's actually going out into your live stream, into your Zoom meeting or whatever. And the monitor mix here, the one with the headphones, that's what you're actually hearing. So it may well be that you want to have something different going out onto your live stream versus what you're listening to. For example, if you've got gameplay, you may want that at a different level in your ears versus in the live stream. So that's what those different inputs are for the outputs. So what you'll see now is as I change from streaming to presentation, when in presentation mode, it is going to turn off those smart pads because, as I mentioned, when you switch into presentation mode, it kind of takes over those smart pads. And incidentally, when you are in presentation mode, if I just come back to my top-down shot, you'll notice that these all turn this out. So it's actually a very light blue color. It looks a bit white on the screen, actually. But if I turn out of presentation mode, those colored buttons back, but turning presentation mode on, you see that they all turn white. So that's kind of like just a visual cue as to the fact that you are in that presentation mode. Now, coming back over to the road central, though, I can also turn on and off presentation mode here. So previously, we were doing that in the smart pads section, but you do also get it here. So the first thing that people see when they're coming in is this quick start guide and presentation. You can toggle it on and off from there, too. Next up, if I go to video call, you'll see that it's changed the routing slightly again. So first off, it has disabled the HDMI audio. So that means that no audio is coming over HDMI. But then they've also toggled off here the USB 1 audio. So if you think about the way that this would be set up, you're going to have your Streamer X audio as an input and an output on your computer because you can feed stuff into this. This is a audio hub that stuff is coming into. Audio is coming into and then being distributed to your headphones and to these different USB channels. So it is both an input and an output. So if you're using this with Zoom, then you would have the Streamer X set to both your mic and also your headphones. Obviously your actual mic is going through this and into Zoom and Zoom is then feeding the audio from your Zoom meeting into the Streamer X and then through the headphones into your ears. Well, what you don't want is for the audience or your other meeting participants even in Zoom getting what they call slapback and they would all call it echo where they can hear themselves back a moment later. And normally we have a feature called Mix Minus to combat that. So that's what we've got in the ROCUSTER Pro 2 and that's the term whereby Mix Minus means that you're taking whatever audio is coming in down a specific channel and if you've got Mix Minus on it will remove that audio from the mix that is going back down that channel. And that's in effect what they've done here. So having the USB1 audio toggled off in the USB1 audio going back because that's what is coming out of the mix here then that means that your people in Zoom won't be able to hear themselves back. They won't hear this echo, this slapback. However, you still will be able to hear them because you can see the little green check marks means that you are hearing everything that's coming in over USB. They've also then got the USB toggled off for both of those. Now I will say this is just a generic setup. It may well be that for your Zoom meeting you actually do want some audio coming from your secondary computer for example and maybe even going into that USB1. So it may well be that you want that active, it just depends. And the same also with your HDMI. I've mentioned that you can pass audio over HDMI and if you're using a secondary computer and you want it to go into your Zoom meeting that may well be something that you want to have checked on. However, we can set a custom setup for this as you can see just down here and we'll look at how to do that in a moment. So just know that these are fairly generic setups. However, it is great as an initial startup setup process for people. Next you've got gaming and what this has done is turned off the mix from HDMI. So this is assuming that you're using this for gaming. You've got your gameplay audio passing over HDMI. Maybe you don't want that to go into the stream but you want to hear it and once again that sort of mix minus effect that they've got going on here as well. I will mention though that if you are using this for streaming and you've got streaming toggled on here if you are using this with your camera as a streaming camera it may well be that you don't actually want this HDMI on at all because if you've got a decent mic plugged into your Streamer X and so you've got that's your mic audio. If you've got your camera plugged in here, you don't necessarily want just the built-in camera on your camera passing the audio through. So you can tweak all of this to your exact specification and liking and if you click on custom it will take you through to how to do that but you can also access that directly just from clicking on this audio setup just up here. So if you click on audio setup now we can see a slightly more advanced version of that routing table that we're just looking at and you can also see those different options for streaming, for presentation, for video call and perhaps you can see as I click through them what it's doing. It's actually we've actually got separate faders here for all of those different things. We've got our mic here but now instead of just a single mic icon as we had in that table you've now got those three mics and in fact if I press the Streamer X button you'll see how it does toggle through which one is the selected microphone and then over here you've got the sound pads or the smart pads the audio from the smart pads, the HDMI the USB one and USB two. But as I say it's not just showing you the tick whether it's on or off. We've actually got individual faders for each one and we've got dual faders because we've got the mix and then we've also got the monitor out there as well. So you can adjust these together like this, just move it up or down there's also a little link icon at the top here. If you break the link then you could maybe set a lower level for your smart pads over here. Maybe you want to have a you know turn off the HDMI completely for your stream but keep it up in your monitors and as you can see just make complete changes there. So when you do make any changes to this it's going to revert to this custom setup. At the moment you can't actually save these which is I think it would be nice to be able to have some different setups that you might want to have saved. At the moment if I click into any one of these others it will pop up a warning to say that we're going to clear the custom mix. Click on continue now you can see we can just go back to any one of those but if I go back to custom it basically just leaves everything exactly as it was on the you know the last setting whether it was streaming, presentation, or video call. So if I change to video call here as you'll see it's made these changes now click back to custom it just leaves it exactly as it was. So it would be nice to see some presets where you could potentially save some presets. Nevertheless really nice to have this audio routing and there's lots of ways to do this you know as I say if you had got both the USB one and two plugged into the same computer then it gives you slightly more control over that and obviously in your computer you could decide you know what audio goes where as well. But Unify is certainly going to give us a lot more advanced audio than that. Now I should say that for the whole of this video my audio has just been passing through my ROCASTER Pro 2 because of all these different changes I'm going to be making tweaking everything on and off. However I will say that the preamps are exactly the same as we have got in the ROCASTER Pro 2 and that means that if you click into the settings here on the microphone then that gives you access to all of their onboard processing and that is really the sort of heart of this that's what you're going to be getting this device for whatever mic you've got you know it's all about how you apply that processing to it and so when you click in the little cog icon there to go and make these little tweaks and adjustments you start off you can adjust the input gain there you can also toggle on and off the phantom power directly from within here as well and then also if you are using that Neutric combo socket there for an instrument and you can toggle this on and off for an instrument now they do have some really sort of I say basic processing it's a basic interface for some really complex processing but they've got what they call VoxLab which has got these three different sliders here you just click into one of them and rotate your scroll wheel here on your mouse to turn that up and down depth is going to add that sort of low end depth to your sound sparkle adds more sort of higher end clarity and punch is going to also add some elements to the sound but what all of these are doing though is effectively tweaking their advanced settings and just as on the ROCASTER Pro 2 you can go into the advanced settings here and from there you've got all of these different onboard processes so the first one is a high pass filter that is going to be used to potentially knock out any low end noise for example from road noise or an air conditioning unit or something like that and you can adjust the frequencies and so on there I'll talk about some of these different elements in here in terms of what all these settings do in a little while next you've got a de-esser which is to remove those S sounds from your voice and you can target and then you have a noise gate so this is going to be for when you depending on how you're using the device like for me I have my noise gate set so that when I stop talking basically no audio comes through and that's how it goes completely silent when I stop talking however you may want to have this set up slightly differently but it basically just eliminates background noise that's going to come through whilst you don't necessarily want the mic sort of open as it were next you've got the compressor this is going to basically help to level out the audio in terms of the volume so bring down the higher volumes in your voice but then potentially also boost up the lower volumes to just make everything a little bit more equal next you've got the equalizer which is actually to add different elements to the high end the mid end or the low end and you can see that that is the three different things you can adjust there and you can adjust exactly what frequencies these are affecting by adjusting this way and there's a few other ways that you can adjust this double clicking on this will actually open up some further control there so you're adjusting effectively the range of frequencies that are being affected by that and then you can move those things up and down like that again I'll talk about these in a little bit more detail then you've got the big bottom and the aural exciter and these are essentially adding either a more sort of richness to the lower end tones in your voice or the aural exciter is adding more of that sort of clarity and sparkle in the higher ends and then we've finally got the panning now I've always found with the ROCASTER Pro 2 and with this and also with the ROCASTER Duo as well that these things here are really the secrets to adding some extra polish I would say to your sound and yet when people go in and try to make adjustments to these you know there's a lot of unfamiliar terms here so what exactly is threshold, attack, hold and release for example so I did cover all of this in a recent live stream where I went through all of these and give some introduction into exactly what they're doing so I'll talk about that a little bit later overall then I think that this is a great little device if you are looking to really level up your audio and video quality going into either your live streams or your recorded videos using Ecom Live or OBS or obviously for levelling up your audio and your presentations in your Zoom and Teams meetings now I've talked so far about the audio using Road Central once again when Unify comes out I'll make a separate video about that that is going to give us some slightly more advanced audio routing that certainly is something that I'm quite interested in as well now when it comes to those advanced audio settings I did mention that live stream so do check out that video if you want to learn more about how to get the most out of the stream X, the ROCASTER Duo or the ROCASTER Pro 2 when it comes to that advanced Apex processing that these road devices have. I hope this has been useful and I'll see you soon in another video