Audio test using Rodecaster Pro

I can get this to work. Well, here's an experiment in audio design. See the setup? Here we go. We've got two. One here, one over there connected to one each to an iPad and right now to a laptop. So in theory you're getting excellent sound both in YouTube and in locals. So sounds great over at Locals I'm hearing. And is the volume nice and loud? I've got the De Esser going on here. Yeah, I think I had a wrong setting or wrong cable or something this morning, but I decided to solve this with brute force. So my long term goal had been this, to have two simultaneous platforms. So I've got YouTube here and the locals platform over here. And I wanted to have only one microphone. Had to be a clip on because I move too much. So I like to move around. But I wanted one microphone going into whatever devices a De Esser and I wanted it to stream to two devices. So the other thing that I wanted to accomplish is that if you use one of the consolidation softwares like obs, you get a delay in the comments, so the comments are not real time. So if I've got real devices, I'm going to have two iPads. But right now I have an iPad and a laptop. I've got a Rodecaster Pro going to each stream, but I've got one microphone with an XLR T connection so that I could have one microphone go to two Rodecasters and then by USB C connection. The only one I found that works goes to the laptop and the iPad. Yeah, I played back the morning podcast and it was way lower than normal. Not sure exactly why. Cut your hair, hippie. Oh, the De Esser is working good. So now I have a De Esser on both sides. And what's the mic level showing? I'm about 3/4 up on the mic level, so it's not quite hitting the orange yet. Sound seems fine. F those YouTubers you say? Well, have I done it? After five years of experimenting, have I finally accomplished the ultimate, which is finding a capable system? Now there's nobody who's getting low sound now, right? Everybody's getting a nice crisp sound. The B Esser has a De Esser. I do. It's louder, persistent. Sounds good. Yay. I think we got it. Now, I've told you before that I'm an autodidact, which means that it takes me 10 times longer to do anything. And the reason is that I try to work things out myself and I'm not qualified. Story of my life. And so what I did was I tried to teach myself enough about audio engineering that I could put together a system that would just work every time for me. And I can't tell you how many times I tried and failed. You should see the pile of cables and hardware and connections and gadgets in my back storeroom. It's just chairs are full of. Because I've got bad storage. But I've tried. If I had to guess how many times I've tried to get this right before getting it right now, I'd say maybe 150 tries, something like that. There's still people saying the volume's too low. Apparently nobody can be happy. Well, my ultimate dream is that I'll know who the trolls are because the sound will be fine. Yeah, sounds perfect. We pay people $100,000 to do what you've done. Part of what I wanted to do here is see if I could through brute force, which means basically paying a little extra money and trying everything. I wanted to see if I could come up with a system that would work for everyone. And. Volume is too medium, so here's maximum volume right there. All right, YouTube, you've got maximum volume. And I'll put up the microphone too. Alright. The microphone and the input are both at maximum value volume. Is that better? Just right. So you like it at maximum value volume. Do you have audio compression? I don't think it's compressing though. Oh, it's better. Okay. Level was good before going to max. So some of you are having a different experience. Locals is all good. Yeah, I tested locals myself and that looks good. How loud are you talking? I'm talking like I would talk to somebody who is, let's say, on the other side of a living room. So I'm giving it a little oomph, but I'm not talking like I would talk. You know, up close. Compression sounds like it would do the fuzz some good. I don't know, would it? So if I get this to work more than once, take the kill shot. If I get this to work more than once, I'll document it so people can figure it out. At the moment, this would cost you about $3,000 per stream. So between the Rodecaster Pro, the dedicated iPad and the microphones, about $3,000 per stream. So that's expensive. I have another way to do it, but it doesn't have a built in de esser. Wait, what time is it? Yes, it's not the morning. Do you ever have that thing where you take an afternoon nap and you wake up and you think it's the morning. But it's really. It's 5pm instead of 5am per stream. Yes. $3,000 per stream. So the setup I have here, not counting the cost of the laptop, is about $6,000. So that's the high end iPad plus a Rodecaster, plus a high end microphone. Volume on YouTube is slightly lower. Okay, so I've got YouTube all the way up. Yeah, one time purchase. That's correct. Audio is going great. Yeah. So current situation is about $3,000 per stream. Now I have a less expensive option, but it doesn't have a De Esser built in. I would have to do a little engineering to make that work. Kevin says it's slightly hissy. Does anybody else have that? The microphone max is best. So I've got both the microphone and the output at max. I think I'll. Oh, I hear somebody say no hiss. Okay. So some of that somebody says feedback. I doubt there's feedback. I've got one microphone. Nobody else is hearing feedback. Right. Sounds a little tinny. I think the hiss is due to compression, but I don't think I have any compression turned on. No feedback and not tinny. So it looks like. Can you adjust screens to look at both YouTube and locals at the same time? Oh, yeah, I can when I'm not doing a test. Let's see what that looks like. So the question was, could I put my screens close enough together that I'm looking at both of you at the same time? And the answer is yes. And I am so embarrassed that somebody had to tell me how to do this. So the first bunch of times I did this, I had two iPads sitting next to each other and it was difficult because the camera's on the same side. So one would be here and then the other one would be on the other side of the other iPad. And I think I used it like that for, I don't know, two years. And somebody said, take the second iPad and turn it upside down and it put the two cameras together. Now, of course, the iPad doesn't care which side it is because it just adjusts to upside down. So all I had to do was put the cameras together, turn it upside down, Listen to both simultaneously. Good. Thank you for doing all this testing, by the way. Yeah, so YouTube is on an iPad and I've got the laptop right now working on locals. The next thing I'm going to do is I have iPads on order. So I have two iPads and then I can get the lighting the same. The same on both. Corey, you're happy with my test. Thank you. Raise your voice in anger. You would do this dream while holding a cat? If I could get my cat to stay still, I would totally do my live stream with a cat. Now let me tell you what I've learned so far about sound equipment. Number one, wouldn't you love to see a big professional looking microphone? They might give you a little extra advantage. But I find it's one more thing to think about. Because if there's a microphone that I have to adjust to, then when I'm doing all of my moving back and forth and grabbing my coffee cup and stuff, my audio is going to be suspect or I'm going to be thinking too much about being close to the microphone. How many times have you seen Joe Rogan where he has to tell the guest to be closer to the microphone? So what you want to avoid in every case is any extra complication, any at all. The Slightest extra complication, you just have to get rid of it because they're massive failure points. So everything about this is just to drive it to the lowest potential failure point. Now what I found was that the a high quality lavalier clip on mic, which might only cost, you know, 20 bucks or something, gives you as good a sound for this purpose as, you know, an expensive desktop or microphone that comes from above. The De Esser settings are too high. Well, the De Esser only has one setting on these devices, so the De Esser is either on or off. And I do know enough to know that some De Essers you customize to your voice. I don't believe the Rodecaster Pro has that option. I think it's just on or off, so it's probably picking some middle ground. De Esser situation. Ask Dave Rubin how he does his sound. I know the answer to that. So I've been in Dave Rubin's home studio a few times and the way he does the sound is he hires an engineer. I could do that. I know how to hire an engineer. But the whole thing is that I do my live stream in my pajamas, in my house, all alone, drinking coffee. That's sort of the whole deal. As soon as I add a staff, it's just not the same show. You should not be too entertained by this. This is a audio check. But I. Since you're here, I thought I'd gab at you a little bit. Host loss, connection, somebody saying, but that must not be affecting everybody else. Mic check. All right. Everything's working great. All right, well, I will see you in the morning at my Official coffee with Scott Adams. And I can't wait to finally get the sound right. The lighting is brilliant. I can do the lighting better, but at the moment. So let me show you over on YouTube. It'll be easier to show you, I think. I guess that doesn't work. There it is. So don't look at my ratty massage chair. So I've got these blackout curtains, which the YouTube folks are looking at right now, but one of them is. These are the battery charged, so it's not closed. And I gotta say, the. If you're trying to do the. Any kind of podcasting and you're trying to get the light right, here's the biggest tip. If your room cannot be made totally dark with blackout curtains, you can never get the right light right. So let me say that again. If anybody's trying to do this, I spent months and months and months to learn this difficult lesson. If there's any light coming from anywhere outside the room, you just can't light it. It just can't be done because that light will always change. It's never the same. The light coming from outside. All right? And that. Why am I making you look at curtains? Doesn't make sense. So here's my device, And then I can program these babies, these buttons over here on the. Sorry, local. So I was just showing the YouTube people something. So on the Rodecaster, right, I've got buttons I can program with sound effects and certain things. So I'll be playing with that a little bit. Is this the best room for you to broadcast? I haven't tried them all. Am I going to program ad libs? All right. Yeah. This is massive. A B testing. You're seeing it live. You know, I've told you before that having no shame whatsoever and inability to be embarrassed, if there's. Inability to be embarrassed is like a superpower. So I've been testing my audio live and failing massively. I've been failing in the live stream, failing in the tests. I said earlier, I probably tested 150 different hardware configurations to get sound right. All right. Little shine off the top of my head. Yeah. The other thing I do is if I get the lighting indirect enough, I don't need to have makeup you can see, unfortunately, with the better lighting. You see that I would need it if I. If I were going to light it. Well, would I like some tips? Sure. Show us the deck again and we can troubleshoot it. Well, there's. There's nothing to see here. I mean, I. I don't have any problem with the hardware or the technology, it's pretty straightforward. The. The hardest part was figuring out which outputs to use, which is why I ended up with two of them, because I can't get one of them to do two outputs no matter what I do. And I tried dozens and dozens of ways to do it, and none of them worked. But this works. Intro music. In the future, maybe. I'm still trying to learn the drums. Am I still in my PJs? No, I'm in my. I'm in my gym shorts right now. Any comments on that Anomaly guy? Well, not today. I think we said what we needed to say. But I've noticed that my critics don't disagree with me. My critics, especially in all the COVID stuff. Those critics, almost universally the people who don't like my takes, didn't. Didn't understand them. So if you subtracted my critics who simply didn't understand my point, I wouldn't have any left. Basically. Road is great customer service. Well, I'm not so sure. I'd say that I did ask for help and didn't get any, so I had to figure it out myself. Any comment on the Arizona results? Well, the fact checkers as of today said that there's no irregularity there. At the same time, the headlines in Fox News were there are lots of regularities, but the fact checkers said, nope, no regularities, no irregularities. So I'm willing to accept any possibility there could be they find something, could be they don't. And frankly, neither situation would surprise me. I think they're both in play at this point. All right, I'm going to shut down now and do some other stuff, and I will see you in the morning. We'll talk about all those irregularities and more. Thanks for watching in my sound check, YouTubers. I hope this is better for tomorrow.