Rodecaster Killer?

History. Welcome the Pro Audio Sweeks. These guys are professional and motivated with Tex the vo Stars, George Wisdom, founder of Sauce Element, Robert Marshall, International Audio Engineers, Darren Robo, Robertson Global Voice, Andrew Peters. Thanks to try Booth, Austrian Audio Making Passions, Her Sauce Elements, George the Tech Wisdom and Robo and aps International Demos. Find up more about us check the pro audio sweet dot com. Welcome to another pro audio suite. Don't forget. If you want to get yourself a try booth, use the code t R I PAP two hundred and you'll get two hundred dollars off your try booth. And don't forget. Also, yes, we need some likes and ratings and comments. Yes, yes, tell us how much you love us too, FATA, Yeah, give us. Where's the best place to do that? Well, I'll stick I'll tell you what. Look in the show notes and I'll stick a link there. That's the best way, okay, Or just give us a comment on your favorite platform wherever you listen exactly. Let's be very handy, now, George, a couple of weeks ago, you were in Denver, Colorado. I should say no, no, no no, but that's Boulder. And you were at the Very Cryptic Human this morning, and you were at the Podcast Movement, so when you bumped into someone over there, but you had it before we get to the interview you did with the product manager of the new Mackey DLZ creator. You had a bit of a look at that, and we're looking at it now. It looks very Roadcaster to me. Yeah, well, everything that's followed since the Roadcaster has looked very Roadcaster because they literally invented a category, talk about setting a design standard. Good on your road there you go, yeah, yeah, the big dog still, I mean for sure. I was at podcast Moving in Denver and I was there partially supported and sponsored by BSW, the dealer audio dealer here in the US, and they brought along a rep from road to be with the booth. So I was hanging out with RhoD and BSW, and of course there were other vendors there as well, including Mackie. So I had a moment to sit down or stand and to take a little interview in with Matthew Heron. He's actually the product manager and what's really cool is he's not just a sales guy. He is the designer of the DLZ oh wow. So you'll hear him explain, you know, why, when and why the thing came to be and he gets into a bit of detail. He talks very fast because there's a lot to cover in the short amount of time. But yeah, there's it's a very impressive piece of kit. As we like to say, Well, let's have a listen. Hey everybody, it's George the techt podcast movement and I've made my way finally over to Mackey and we're getting an interview here with Matthew before it gets too noisy in here, and he's gonna show us his baby. What do we got Matthew Today, we've got the brand new deal Z creator. We launched this back in May. We've been working on this thing for about two and a half years. So that's what I kind of a lot of people learned how to you know, make sour dough do over covid, and I decided to design a mixer. So we uh, you know, we're here with it, and we're really excited about this. I think there's there's definitely some highlights. Obviously, this is a digital podcast mixer. You can use it for live sound, but it's really designed for podcast use case streamers folks that are, you know, creating content, right, Mackie's been behind the content creator since nineteen eighty nine. Only it used to be grunge, long hair and flannel, but today it's it's podcasters, it's unboxing toys, right, you know, it's things like that. That's what people want to do, and so what we're trying to do is democratize audio, make it easier no matter what your experience level. So how we've done that is we've put three distinct user modes in one product. And what this effectively does is it allows you to work however comfortable you are, if you've your brand new, you've never done anything. We've have an easy mode that hides almost every parameter from you and allows you to just kind of have a preset based workflow because it's very easy to load which microphone you're using right now. We also have an Enhanced mode. This is very similiarity to other products you'll see in market. You know, there's a lot of competitors out there, but you know it's going to be the future set that a lot of folks are comfortable with. If you've you're coming from a roadcaster, for example, you'll enhance mode. It's gonna be very comfortable for you. And then finally we have a pro mode, and what that does is that kind of goes back into Mackie's you know, our back end Master Fader is a really good example of a pro product that we put out for many years. But we wanted to have all the features that you imagine. So just to jump into easy mode fairly quickly, I'll just kind of show you the channel view. We made it as easy as we possibly can. You're loading a preset for the channel. We've got em ninety nine B microphones, so you can just pick the microphone you're using and load it right up. We also have the SM seven B and and many other you know a little bit more generic microphones as well. Right right, plenty of choices, right, you know, the easy customer could then you know, label the channel. Right, we want to change the color, Let's make it blue. Let's go ahead and put a little little person in there. Right, we can do that. That changes the color. We can we can google strip. Yeah, there's a scribble strip as well, so we can we can label it as well. So we can call this one Joe. For example, this is Joe's mike. I'm doing an upside down, so I'm a little slower than I normally be, but you know, it's Joe's mike, and it's a digital product. And I'll be quite honest, I've worked on analog consoles and I love board tape. It's kind of a fun like tactle thing, but I'll be honest. If you have a digital console, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to label it digitally, right, you know, put in the name, color icon, that sort of thing. And that's really been true for Mackie since the DL products. So it's about automix because that is something that really stands in yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So if you are a brand new rate, we can help you set up the channel very easily, but we also have automix. And what this really does is allows you to do But it's kind of based on Dugan style gain sharing. Right, So each microphone, if there's no signal present, it doesn't get any game, but if there is signal present, it gets all the game. And what this does is this helps you know, so like it helps reduce feedback so from other microphones because they're not live. It helps reduce noise because there's other microphones aren't live at that point in time, right, So really it just helps clean up the whole system. Another huge benefit is when people talk over one another. Now you could ride the faders and that that's something that you can do, you know, and a lot of people do do. But if you don't want to do that, this is a really great feature. You can just you have everybody set to medium and you're all sharing gain. So if you talk over one another, it'll reduce the overall volume and you can fear everybody as oppose everyone talking over one another. Me that's important because if you're I host a show and on the sound engine, yes, so writing the faders and being engaged in the conversation it's very you can't really do it well. So the automix clears up cross talk between channels. We use condensers, Yeah, so it really cleans up a mix when you have automix setup. Yeah, it's really helpful. And we've actually gone one set further and we actually had it in these priorities and what that does is it allows you to set priority so you're talking about being the host. As the host, you could set your priority to high, and what that will do is that will allow you to be the loudest no matter what. So if you're running a political podcast and you know the people might talk over one another, they might get a little argumentative, you can always set yourself to this one level higher. And what that will do is that way you can come in and go, hey, guys, we got to take a commercial break or what have you. You know, you can kind help control the talk conversation a little bit more easily, a little bit like ducking, sort of similar to yeah. But when you combine it with them the auto mix that it's yeah, it becomes very powerful. Right. Like I said, that's our easy mode. And one step further on the easy mode, which is kind of cool, is we have this set up assistant. This will literally walk the customer through everything you need to do to get the mixer set up. Tells you to push up the channel faders. We know that if you've been in the audience there for a long time, you have to push up the channel faders to get audio to pass through the mixer. That's not inherently obvious to a brand new user. Why do I have to push those up? You know, well you need to, and so we tell the user to do that. We have them plug in their headphones. We then pipe audio to the headphones, allow you to turn up each headphone to whatever level feels most comfortable. And I'll be honest, I got my starting tech supports. We built tech support in the headphone help right, you know who're saying before, Like the reason this product is so good it is because you came from support, understand where all the issues are, and you designed it right in right. So we put in a lot of places where people do have pain points. We hope to eliminate those pain points. The same thing with the microphones. We help me set up the microphones, tell you where to plug in the microphones. We go ahead and say hey, here's a microphone one. You know, you can kind of select the microphone by picture also, so if you know what your microphone looks like, you can kind of get going. Also, we have automatic game setting, so for each one of the microphones, you don't need to know how to set game. You can press listen and set for me. And depending on how far you are from the microphone, how strong your voice is how how you know how how much gain your microphone really needs? We will go ahead and automatically set down on the back end that can you know the mixer is smart enough to do that for you. Also, again, microphone help, are you here not hearing anything? Try some of these suggestions. That's great. They're gonna learn a lot. I bet if they want to, they'll learn a lot about engineering from going through all that is. They're going to be familiar with all the functions and the inputs, and they'll learn terminology and stuff. So yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, And then like I said, in promode, we can we'll jump straight to promode And obviously in promode you're gonna I'm gonna turn off the sub assistant right now. But in promote it's in the no holds barred right. So we go into a channel view. You have full dynamic processing, you have access to forty evil fan power, independent delay in reverb, sens pan control. Also, we hide pan from our beginning users because they're only going to hurt themselves with it. And again, fully que full gate, full compressor, DS or all the stuff that you would expect in a full dynamic digital mixer like this, without any any limitations. Now, the other really cool thing about it, and what's we took a lot of time to figure this out, but all of this is not non destructive. So it's really cool as a pro if you have you know this product, if you have multiple users that have different experience levels, everyone can benefit from the same product. A pro can jump in, set up all the channels, get it all absolutely dialed in with all the processing, switch it over to easy mode, hand it off to their brand new user, and that brand new user will get access to all that cool processing, but it's been hidden from them so they don't get lost, they don't get and it's completely non destructive. I can tell somebody to get this. Yes, I can set up all that s up in promode. It gets locked away in easy mode and they can't mess anything exactly and it hides it all from them now. And the cool thing is too, is you can load them a preset specifically for their voice and name it and then they can just load that preset. So it's really really flexible in those situations. And like I said, whether you're growing with the mixer, you're brand new and you want to grow to become a pro or if you have a situation where you're this is going to be put in the studio, and the studio is going to be used by both pros and people that have no idea. It's really a lot more flexible, and what it does is it helps avoid what I call smear. And so a lot of times you see consoles in this category, and what they'll do is they'll be kind of easy, sort of easy to use, but they're not quite easy enough for someone who has no idea what they're doing. And then a pro will get in there and they'll say, well, yeah, I have those controls, but they're kind of clunky or they're difficult to use. And so what we really try to do is make it happy for both users, and what that means is actually separating out those user modes into two distinct interfaces. Yeah. Yeah, it's a beautiful product. I'm looking forward to bang it on it a little bit and giving it some tests and trying it out in the real world and congres vitulations on the launch. Yeah, it's a beautiful product. Pick so much. Well, we'll talk again another time when we have less background noise. Maybe we can do a sort of a from home session together and really talk a little deeper about product design. I think that'd be a lot of fun. I think that'd be great. All right, thank you. So, without knowing too much about this thing, George, as we mentioned before the interview there, it is very much roadcast I won't say rip off, but very much based on the roadcast A model. Right. Yeah. He was very clear that this was, you know, something that he had seen, They had seen, the whole industry saw, and so it was time that Mack you get, throw their hat in the ring, and he spent the majority of the pandemic developing it. Yeah. So when it came out, you know, it came out recently. I think it came out after the Roadcaster Pro two because it did just release like in the last couple of weeks, and so it feels even more like the Roadcaster Pro two as you can imagine. But you know, they still threw at it some of the MACKI kind of design ideology, which is I mean, obviously the road is designed to be easy, but these guys took it to another level of being easy. I think. Well, the first thing that truly wanted to be friendly. Yeah, Well, the first thing that strikes me. And the first thing I said to you when we were talking about this before the show is it's got a master fighter, which is interesting in and of itself. I know it does. Yeah, right. So whereas Road chose to condense the thing down a little bit smaller and lose things like a master fader, Macke I think wouldn't Dare lose that fader And I should have asked him about it, but I didn't think too. But he didn't dare lose it because it's an audio mixer. In the world of Mackey, like you always have a master fader. Yeah, well, if you don't have one, you're going to create one anyway, you're going to dedicate one to being a master fight. It's somewhere along the way, surely, probably, Yeah, it's that. That is one of the things that Road clearly chose to leave out because they felt like it's not needed for what people are using it for. But MACKI chose to leave in. But what Mackie did, what she explained really clearly, you know in the audio, was that it really is a tool that will suit total newbies and beginners to professionals. And the way they do it is by having three different types of user experiences beginner or easy, sort of a medium or moderate, and then the full on pro. Yea, we didn't look at the moderate version. He kind of gave me a good overview of the of the beginner version and the pro version. But the beginner version it literally has a wizard and it walks you through very much a step by step process of how to get your show set up on the mixer, even to the point of setting levels for you and all that stuff. So these are just different softways in the same box. So these completely different products though, like the beginning of the mean too media and the professional. In the world of firmware, it's all software. You basically, whatever you want to show on that screen is what the experience is going to be, right, So they have the easy mode and then it will I think when you first power the unit on default, it's going to start an easy mode. So it has a very simplified interface. It doesn't get into notch filters and you know, thresholds. It's very simplified. It has a ton of presets for different microphones. It will set the gain for each of your microphone sources, you know, by listening to the source and then setting the gain for you and then you know, it gets you started very easily. And then it also has a dedicated automix, which he talked about. It's really it's the Dugan Automix, which is a which is a very much a trademark kind of patented system, but they're not using, you know, in the brand and in the design. They're not infringing theoretically on any patents because you know, it's their own algorithm that they're doing. But they've created an automixed method where you can prioritize on three different levels. Each of it the inputs right, So if you want to be priority, you make yourself high, you can make your guests medium priority, and you could make like an audience mike or I don't know, a sound effects channel or some other things be low. So it will keep things from stepping on each other and it'll keep your mix cleaner. And that is a function that the Roadcaster Pro two does not have, is the automix. So it doesn't mean they couldn't add it later, because it will now you could. Yeah, well, I think what's going to be really interesting is watching what road adds to the Roadcaster Pro two's firmware to be on more of a parody with what the Mackie is doing. It's inevitable, right, so it's going to be a very interesting thing to watch it happen. But it was really it was cool to the real guy that the guy who worked on the design, and maybe one day we'll get him on the show. He said he would. I talked to him after he said he would love to come on another interview and keep him more into the geeky MutS and bolts of the design. Yeah, actually be interesting, absolutely, because I'm kind of curious as to where they've come at this from, whether they came at it like road Have, where they've just gone okay, straight into podcasting, or as Mackie comes from, going yet okay that we can tap into podcasting, but we're also looking at, you know, the normal kind of audio studio kind of thing as well. Yeah, yeah, well Mackie clearly they want to be in podcasting without abandoning music. So yeah, it definitely has a feeling of you could pull this out and do a live show with it and you'd have mostly what you need to do that it doesn't happen nearly the number of outputs like a mixer, like a live mixer does it doesn't have all the ax ends and so can I use this stuff? Fade is to control my door? I don't know. I didn't get into that level. I literally had an eight minute presentation. Yeah, so yeah, I didn't have the time to dig deep into it. There was so much to see at the show for me that I would I would have sat there and played with it for an hour. I just had too much networking to do, you know. I didn't want to squander that time. Yep, but I would have gotten more into it. But yeah, I hope to eventually get my hands on one and put it into its paces. And if I had had one for the studio, did most recently, I probably would have used it. Because the automix, I think is as a useful tool. Then again, I think automix is extremely important for live streaming live mix but not at all important for a podcast because in a podcast you want to capture everything flat and raw and then do all of that and post. Unless you're not going to mix it in post, then then that automix thing would actually be complete. Would be very powerful, wouldn't it If you were the type of person who just wanted to do a two track edit and didn't want to worry about having to balance a mix and all that sort of stuff. That would be That's what we do, Yeah, on VOBA, that's what we do. We do a live to drive, you know. So it's just it's it mixes baked and if I blow blow the mix, then it's blown. You know, it sucks. In fact, we did we did an appearance. I did VOBS from the trade show floor, so I was on the panel when we had on Lane Clark and then we interviewed Ryan from Road on the show and in post Dan had kind of a mess on his hands because the noise floor was so high. It was so annoying for me that I was riding the gain on my on my I was riding the level going to Dan. So what he hears in the mix is kind of a mess because the room tone is changing constantly as I'm turning the mics up and down right, So he very cleverly took some room tone and laid that over the entire mix to clean it up because he said it was really distracting. He said, did you use a gate? I said, no, that's called human gait. That's just writing my game, because it got ungodly noisy in that space, and it was one of the most reverberant, horribly echoy convention experiences I've ever had. It was absolutely terrible. I always find that really quite bizarre that you're actually selling basically audio stuff. If you know, in this case, and you're in an environment that just doesn't showcase it very well at all, what are you going to do? It just shows how how much of a lack of understanding of what is needed for a good experience by the attendance or the customers from the owners of that building. Yea, and the owners of that building are Marriott. You may have heard of them. Yeah you can. I say, get back a step. You said, if you had known about this, you would have put this in a build that you did recently with the auto mixed thing. Would you use that if you were setting this up for someone in a in a home studio, would you use that to manage their feed from the client slash studio to sort of keep a decent mix in their headphones to keep them down lower if that's what they wanted, or wrap high or whatever. Oh he could. Yeah, it never would have occurred me to use it in that way. But you certainly could set up a monitor mix for your headphones using the Automix so that you don't get blown out of your cans. Your voice is kind of over top of whatever's coming back at you. That would be a lot of a lot of singers like to sing into a compressor, and sometimes you don't necessarily track it with that, you just have it there. It's kind of like singing into some reverb. It's the same thing as that guy that likes to sit there with the volume knob Yep. It's like he could just buy a compressor, you know, and maybe not get coulprial tunnel syndrome. One of these days. I'll set that up for him. He still has that, you know, that affliction muscle memory thing going. Yeah, but yeah, it's it's definitely a matter of changing the way you hear. You hear everything in the headphones and controlling the experience for the performer, and that would be a clever way to do it. Actually. Yeah, Mathew's late to the game, but coming out with something pretty good. Yeah, Yeah, that's it's actually what we're talking. Waited and watched what Road did and then yeah, just you know, like, all right, let's start, let's start from scratch seeing the success of this thing, and go all the way through the end and see what we build. And that's what they did. It's like an eight hundred dollars retail unit, so it's a little bit more expensive. It's sort of like the road Caster Pro two. But Keith muss, Yeah, yeah, Let's see what the first thing Robert notices is when he looks at the picture. Let's see what the first thing he sees is. See if he picks up one eye picked creator, tell me what the first thing is that pops in your head when you just look at it. There's something on there that made me go, is that a blah? And I'm only saying Z because I know it's American Ze deals. It's the deals Deals create. So basically, robo robo thought, is this is this an eight fader unit from my approchol system with a touchscreen? No, happy, there's something on there that's not on the road cast a master fader. There you go just rip off? Yeah, yeah, yeah, fighter yeah. But they did pretty much rip them off pretty much. That's the second part of the conversation. It's like buttons on the bottom, buttons on the top, side by side, colorful buttons on the right. Oh, you get one more fad, two more faders, you get a master fader. You get some knobs that you don't have. Are those those digital encounter knobs? Right? So, like we're on the roadcaster, that knobs have are really a one trick And how much is a roadcaster too? Like six ninety nine and here I can buy this one for six seventy nine. Oh, six seventy nine. They're discount, it's it's retail eight hundred. Yeah. But yeah, so it's a very very tough customer in terms of competition, and it's physically bigger. It's not going to fit on everybody's workstation, that's for sure. But that touch screen is extremely compelling. It's the size of like an iPad mini. Wow, it's very large, easy to use, some very good looking screen and it the knobs on the side of the screen that are assignable, you know, make the knobs infinitely more flexible. So what out of interest, what pre amps are they using? That? Is it the Onyx? Are they Onyx? They're vlz's for the DLZ yo yo Yo. That's a darn good question. I don't recall him saying that they are onyx. I don't know, and I don't think that's probably even possibly either the extergies or what the hell does the benger call their onyxes? We took up lets rearranged them. Yeah, Preamps. I think it's kind of Mackie's turn to rip off or knock off another brand after being you know, knocked off by Baring or for the last ten years. Yeah, it says full on a microphone preamps. Okay, does I mean eighty decibel yelies? Descibilities? Do it? I think disabilities? Yeah, I think it's he said it's around seventy four seventy five dbf game wow for all your sm seven b's bees. So yeah, so it's a it's another product out there and in the midst and time will tell to see what how do you get the backpack with it? Does it come with the slick carring case? It looks like it does. I mean maybe you have to pay extra for that. So it looks like it's got a nice little bag to it. It'd be a nice idea if it did. I'm sure. I'm sure they'll sell it there. But yeah, It's what I think that really stood out from the interview from Matthew was that he came from years in customer service, and I think when you have a product that was designed from somebody that comes from customer service, they understand what all the questions are going to be because they know the client. They know the user differently than somebody that just designs a product to meet a price point and have a certain you know, fill a skew. Ah. We really got to make an X right. I must ask what is the Ethernet for? It is a future updatable platform feature device. I was told inside scoop of what it will do. I don't think I can tell you, but right now it's just firmware updates like the roadcast or Pro two. It's the Ethernet for software to do anything that I'm thinking about. If you can think of three letters that indicate sending information into another space or time, then yes, that's what you're thinking of. Yes, yeah, anyway, Yeah, it's it's a future they're going to release there. I think they're going to release By the time you guys hear this, maybe they've already released a firm more update for the Ethernet port. But I know it's coming and it will be infinitely more like integratable into a no but it'll integrate into an av media production suite or facility more slickly, seamlessly. I'm still trying to think where the three letters are. Well, I don't think we can say that, can Yeah, I'm about three letters. Letters. It's just like a cryptic from the weekend. I know letters. I'm going to think about that one. I'll tell you offline. All right, let's finish the show because they's killing me already. Let's go, all right, we're out to see it. One of the three letters. Yeah, just end the show so we can find out. And that's are out. That's a good one. I've enough of this show. I just want to know what the three letters are. 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