welcome to an unboxing and overview of something that's a little bit unusual
for us this is the SL300 condenser
microphone it's part of the studio series available on editors keys.com and
the idea here is that it is a relatively lowcost USB microphone it's driverless
it works on Mac PC or Linux and
according to at least one testimonial on their site which is of course the least
biased source of information possible about a product it is comparable in
terms of audio quality to $2,000 microphones which I mean I guess we'll
let you guys be the judge of whether it is better at least than a couple of
other microphone Solutions we have that are similar in price so inside the very
well- packaged box that has nice soft foam for protecting the gear when it's
in transit we have the SL300 which is I
mean I guess they're just kind of targeting sort of a very clean
unassuming look because people will be using it as a podcasting mic so they
talk about using it for podcasting as well as for vocal recording and
instrument recording it does have a low pass switch here so you can eliminate
any sound recording under around 200
Herz or so so you don't pick up too much bass and then it also has a minus 10
dbel switch which might be useful so we don't have to do any leveling in post if
uh you know Luke and I for example are recording in two of them next to each
other cuz I tend to talk a lot louder than him other than that you find a usbb
interface face on the bottom and that is pretty much it you also get a nice
Supple USB A2B cable as well as a shock
mount that just uses your standard mounting mechanism to mount it to
whatever you want it's got some foam along the inside as well as elastic cord
around the outside so that you're not going to well so that it does what every
shock mount does all right now we did got a couple of accessories with it so
we got a dual layer pop filter this is I think a $30 Adder is what we sought it
for and then we've also got the portable local Booth Pro now we do some
voiceovers for the pre-roll ads that we run before our videos and what we've
noticed is that um aside from having issues with the p the P
sounds that cause unnecessary harshness
in the recording so we got the pop filter for that we also found we're
getting a lot of echo because we don't have an optimal recording environment so
this supposedly will help and we're going to give you guys some before and
afters of how all of this stuff is working for us right here in just a
moment I guess I should also mention a couple of other things it has a 5-year warranty and it has dual 34mm internal
shock mounted diaphragm so that's something I also meant to mention as
well all right so now that we've actually set up the entire editor Keys
setup the pop filter is actually fairly
rudimentary just comes with a standard tension mounted clamp down here so you
can affix that to the stand that the microphone itself sits on you can affix
it to this bracket right here or here wherever the heck you would want and you
can reposition it with pretty much infinite flexibility so you can tighten
this to adjust the the tension here to make sure that it doesn't accidentally
slip around and other than that yeah that's pretty straightforward next up
we've got the shock mount so it was pretty easy to slip the microphone into
it it's just you know a standard sort of foam insert and then it's also got a gap
in the back here so it just stretches wider to accommodate the microphone and
it's just pressure mounted like that so you don't actually have to clip anything into place if there something I was
going to complain about because overall we've actually already done our
recording test so we're filming this after we had already done it um sounds
quite nice if there was something I was going to complain about it would
probably be that this is a little bit flimsy right here and I would like to be
able to tighten it and have it really stay in place a little bit more easily
than that um I think we're going to go ahead and take a short break here so
that I can show you guys how this guy works well I guess I can show you from
the ground so the stand it comes with is very robust we were actually impressed
with the quality of the stand so you've got nice plastic feet right here you've
got nice attention to detail and things like the loosening and tightening
mechanisms it doesn't feel it doesn't feel cheap at all so that's really nice
to have there's also a lock here so you can keep it from accidentally you know
slipping or something like that evidently and then the construction of
the portable booth has kind of a metal backing on it so that's a perforated
metal backing it's got little uh sort of
foam feet on the bottom I wouldn't call them rubber feet but little three little
foam feet on the bottom so you could set it up on a desk if you want if you don't
want to set it up on the stand we actually had to remove one of the feet
in order to attach the stand to it so that comes off just like that and then
the stand screws into the bottom and then it has acoustic pyramid foam all on
the inside the whole thing actually folds up so you can loosen these two
feet a little bit right here and then you can fold the thing up like this if
you did want to transport it or take it anywhere with you so actually I guess
that's all they're pretty much is to say about it and it's going to come down to
how does it actually sound so now it's
time for our microphone test I know we don't have a whole bunch of other Studio
mics to compare against but if nothing else we can give you guys some idea what
we wanted this thing for aside from a more podcasty style show that might be
coming stay tuned for that by comparing it to some of the other microphone
technologies that we have available to us so for comparison we have a
reasonably I'd say mid-range wireless lav mic so this is an e w00 G3 from
Sennheiser with the stock lav we've also got an ntg2 so this is a fairly
well-regarded Road mic pardon me red mic
so that's a shotgun microphone we've got a sure beta 58a which is an iconic
microphone for recording vocals and you'll even see some famous stand-up
comedians using it's an old design but tried and true and then finally we have
the SL300 which has a very satisfying blue LED now that we've actually hooked
it up in its little portable recording studio thing and we're going to be
positioning ourselves pretty close to it because we're going for that AM radio
deep sound whether it's a podcast or a pre-recorded message in front of our
videos so in order to give you guys some idea of the difference in the recording
quality we're going to record this in four different ways and it is my VPN
Hotspot Shield pre-roll that I do in front of some of my videos so first up
we're going to take these three mics all at the same time because that's pretty
easy and here we go Hotspot Shield VPN
service makes your browsing experience safer more secure and more private click
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safer more secure and more private click now to learn more Hotspot Shield VPN
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now to learn more Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience
safer more secure and more private click now to learn more so in order to be fair
to the other microphones we wanted to try this one with out the benefit of the
recording studio thing that actually costs about as much as the microphone so
here we go guys Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience
safer more secure and more private click now to learn more and finally because we
tested the other microphones without a pop filter which we didn't have before
let's go ahead and take a crack at that with this one as well Hotspot Shield VPN
service makes your browsing experience safer more secure and more private click
now to learn more I'll leave it to you guys what's actually better and which
sound you prefer but if nothing else this has been a little bit of an
interesting investigation into how different microphones will produce
different sounds even with the same voice doing the same thing over and over
and over again thank you very much for checking out this video online as Tech
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