NZXT PODCAST - #104 - Alex and Patrick

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

This week we are joined by Alex and Patrick from the product team! We talk about the brand new NZXT Capsule microphone! Follow Alex at twitter.com/mooshubeef Follow Alan at instagram.com/jpatrickbutler Tune in live every Thursday at 10AM PT on twitch.tv/NZXT and send your questions to: podcast[@]nzxt.com

everybody and welcome to episode 104 of the n60 clubcast the official podcast of the n60 community this podcast is recorded live every thursday at 10 a ym pacific center time of the official n60 twitch and it's available to stream on demand on apple podcast google podcast Spotify and soundcloud so plug in play and enjoy this podcast my friends my name is dennis and with me as always is ivan happy capsule launch week how are you feeling sounds like a good idea i think we should give some away um I don't know, maybe. I think if the chat can let us know how much they would like a free microphone from NZXT labeled NZXT capsule, we'll think about it. But I don't know.

We'll see what's up. Yep. Dennis. We can't hear you. That's a big shame. It's actually by design. They shouldn't be allowed to hear you. You hear me?

Yeah, we can totally hear you. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear Pat. I don't know what's going on with Evan. You can chat here. No, we're good. Oh, yeah. Can chat here.

No, yeah. Yeah, no one can hear me. It's all good. No, they can. I was messing with you. Well, they can now. I had to click a button. Does anyone really need to hear, Ivan?

Does anyone need to hear anything? What, what? I've pretty much said everything I've had to say in this lifetime, to be honest. Well, at the very least, if you're listening on the man on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, or SoundCloud, or the, or, or, why shouldn't, not the Vods, you'll still be able to hear Ivan in very beginning. so he'll still sound amazing to you. Actually, no, he won't because I realized, okay, well, whatever, it doesn't matter. It was just some pre-show banter.

It's not like, you know, you ain't missing nothing. Yeah, you ain't missing nothing. Happens every show. Like, there's certain podcasts that I listen to where I'll just skip the first, like, 25 minutes because it's just them talking about, like, pizza and toppings and stuff. I'm like, I don't care.

Let's get to the topic at Hansers, right? Some stuff went down in the world, and I need your take on it, so I know what to think right now. So it works, right? Yeah, exactly. There's some special guest today. They are from the NXC product team named Alex and Patrick, not the name of the team, the name of the peeps.

So Alex down there with the dope shirt and then Patrick up here with the dope guitar collection. Hey. How's going to the right place? Oh, no. No, what, wait. Nope, over there. So he's always going to be above me. Yeah.

I am too, I don't know. I think I have it flipped as well. I forget. You think the Brady Bunch people all that... Wait, did they film that live? You know, when they're all in that... In that... The arrangement thing, right?

Like, I'm sure it was all separate, right? I don't know. I don't know. I was 70s technology, dude. That's what I'm saying. They probably had to do it live. And they're like, all right, so, you know, they looked down, there's Marcia. That's the only character I remember.

Yeah, you got a... Let me see. A Jan. Picture over right there for those kids who don't know. This is a show back in the 70s, right? Yeah. 1960s and 974. Yeah.

I mean, you guys can't see here. Yeah. Just bringing up the, what is Joe Rogan's podcast? Hey, Jamie, go, pull it up.

Is he still sick, by the way? Hopefully he's better. I don't know. I heard he got better. Did he? Pretty quickly. Yeah.

Damn, what a G. What a G. Can't kill that, man. He's undying, right? Too many neutropics in that body. Yeah.

Exactly. So, Alex and, Patrick, hopefully in the order or whatever order you guys like, can you give the audience a little bit of an introduction? Who you guys are? Where you, where you from, what you do all day? Yeah, so I am, my name's Patrick. I am the audio product manager here at NST. I'm the person responsible for all this, all this new launch stuff that you've been seeing. Also, it's actually a team effort, obviously everyone's responsible for it. But that's what I do.

I do audio stuff, obviously microphones, obviously, boom arms. And I was on a podcast with you guys, I think last year, where we talked about some headsets we were going to release as well. So this is kind of the first foray, official foray into the NZXD audio world. And but be on the lookout for obviously a little more stuff. All right. I used to do doing intros. Yes.

Yeah, I was just, I was getting lost in, lost in Pat's description of, I'm just thinking of his journey, you know, at least in the product. So I, my name's Alex, as Dennis said. I'm a product marketing manager for, for streaming products. And so, you know, I work a lot with our, with our streaming PC, that goes pre-builts. And we're starting to work on some new stuff. Should I leak it? We're going to be doing some blogs, some contents. Oh, snap.

I thought. So yeah, we have one that we actually have pretty much ready to go. We're just making sure that we have available in a bunch of languages. But basically like Pokemon Unite, I don't know if people are still playing that at all. By the time the blog comes out, it might be something that people are done with. But especially working from home, you know, sneaking some switch games without unplugging my monitor by playing it in OBS. So yeah, we'll have some stuff about that. But yeah, we're definitely excited.

I think this is really fun for us, for Pat and myself to, well, I can't speak for Pat. I'm sure he's over the moon about this. Yeah. But yeah, it's definitely looking forward to what's to come in the future. So, yeah. Nice. Yeah, we've been needing to do some, like, blog-type content for the longest time because I'll get questions, like, every single day on social about this or that about our products.

And, like, it's not even, like, super simple questions. It's like, hey, how do I do this, this, and this? I'm like, uh, there's, there should be a guide for that. Let me write that one down. Yeah, man. Guides, uh, guides are important. Knowing how to do stuff is streaming's hard. Knowing how to set up audio is hard.

You're telling me. Getting audio to the right level is hard. Yeah. Yeah. You should write those guides for Dennis. Yeah. The problem is that I use a guide for Dennis on the blog. Like how do, how to set up the NZXT podcast on Twitch?

Here's, here's their problem, right? The problem is that I use the same setup. you know, like a microphone and all this stuff for everything else, not just the podcast. Exactly. So I touch one thing and I had to kind of like readjust it. And then I forget like those steps. Because I don't know if you remember when we were in the office, it was pretty much turn it on it and we're just like we're good to go, right? Because it was all set up.

Except for, you know, weird like software stuff that Windows did. But yeah, that's one of the downfalls of, you know, using this thing as much as you do with everything else. Like I'm always adjusting audio all the time when I'm playing games or watching a movie or something. So it's totally. it's never the same twice. No, and it's like that for sure. I mean, I used to do a bunch of e-sports broadcast work back in the day.

Kind of is what brought me to N60 eventually, but every production, every show has a major fire. It's just like, even if you've done it for weeks, the same show, everything about the setup is the same. It's like,

all right, well, this decided to break today. Right. It's just, it is what it is. So, On the fly troubleshooting is like one of the key things that you learn early on in like anything involving audio and certainly anything involving live.

It's like on the fly troubleshooting is like half the battle more times than that. Can I get that in writing for Ivan every time he gives me crap? Yes. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't give you crap every time you messed up. How he makes sure you hashtag learn and grow. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Got to learn. Got to grow. Do you say hashtag anymore out loud? I'll just realize that. I think hashtag, it peaked in like 2017, I think. And now it's like just right on the down. That was an amazing whistle. Can you do it again?

Actually. So, oh, Discord is canceling out your whistle now. Yeah, Discord is going. He was watching and go, so you trying to blow me a kiss, man? Like, listen, come. I mean, yeah. I'm so old. I remember when people said pound sign.

Wow. Yeah, there's this thing I read where, I think it was a thread on Reddit. It was like, what are things that seem pretty common now? But if you weren't born before, like, I don't know, like, if you were born after 2000 something or something, you wouldn't know. And someone's saying, like, dial tones. Like, why we say dial tones are like, why, uh, why, uh, I, I try to think, like, why the phone sign for, like a cell phone, right? you know, like when you make a phone call, is that little still handset. Like, I don't, like, I can't recall the last time you actually use, like, a handset, like,

telephone, right? That has, like, the little, you know, like, that little you band on it. Because phones are just like, there's flat now, right? And they're all rectangular. Yeah. And, like, that icon doesn't even look like old, like, clamshell style cell phones. Do you guys remember back in the day when you go to a restaurant and they'd say, oh, hi, how many? He'd say, four.

and they'd say, okay, smoking or non. Yeah. That is how you know you're old. I've heard that in like 100 million years. But yeah, definitely a step in the right direction, I would say. You know what also is a step in the right direction is this fantastic new product called The Capsule. Patrick, can you give us, well, it's not a segment if you say it's a segue. It kind of kills a segment.

I liked it. I liked it. Can you? Genuinely. Can you tell us just what is capsule? So, thank you for asking. Capsule is our, again, first for Ray in the NST audio world. The whole goal of this product, it's a USB microphone, obviously,

is to level up to the vision of NZXT to make things simple, to make things easy, to make things less complicated. Alex said himself, it's very difficult. to get the stream exactly right. This product levels up to that vision of simply plugging in and going. We don't want to introduce, or let's say we wanted to minimize

the chance for a pilot error in a microphone. And what do I mean by pilot error? Well, it's very easy for a customer to incorrectly use a microphone. If you look at the competitors out there, they kind of take a, what I call a Swiss Army knife approach to audio. So they'll put out a microphone that have these teeny tiny microphone capsules inside of them

that kind of try to do it all. So you could use their microphones for gaming or you can use it for an interview with someone or like a conference room microphone or if you wanted to record your your kids piano recital or something like that. They have all these polar patterns in them. And And no one knows what the heck to use with these polar patterns. They look at the back, they say, okay, well, I like that one because that's a circle, so I guess I'll use that one. And what they're actually doing is recording everything that's behind the microphone if they use that circle. So for our customers, gamers, presumably, they would be micing up their voice and possibly their mechanical keyboard, which is bad sound. So it's a surefire way to get bad sound out of the gate.

and assuming they are in the correct polar pattern, which would be cardioid because they're only one of them, one sound source, the odds of them even positioning their microphone in the correct way are, it's kind of up to chance because a lot of the industrial design of these microphones it's not quite obvious where you should even point the damn thing.

So we really wanted to make a product that was as truly plug and play as we can podcast, possibly get. So a customer will have the best chance for success for a good sound right out of the gate. Simply plug the microphone in and you're 90% of the way there with this microphone. But we did some other things too to make it as easy as we possibly could for customers. There's two knobs on the microphone, a headphone volume knob and a microphone gain knob. They're endless rotary encoders. And we did that for a very specific reason. One, we can part. the gain in the headphone volume output at 50% right from the factory.

If we had stops, if we had mechanical stops, we couldn't really do that. So a customer doesn't really need to touch the knobs. They just plug headphones into the microphone and plug it in and they're even more than halfway there. They're almost exactly where they should be. They're endless encoders because if you have this parked on a boom arm, as you can see here, the clockwise motion, no matter what orientation you're in, always means more headphone volume or more gain or less headphone volume if you go counterclockwise. So no matter what orientation a customer has this microphone in, it's super simple to use.

It's as dummy proof as you can possibly get. And that's really where we wanted this microphone to go. So by minimizing the chances for a product's bad sound experience, we were able to have a little bit more room in our budget to invest and a really, really high, high-powered 24-bit 96-kHz resolution. It's a really high-resolution microphone. It also has a big fat, and this is actually what the capsule looks like, I took the grill off. This is one big, fat microphone capsule on here.

Damn, it's a thick capsule. That's a thick boy right there. Bigger capsule equals bigger sound. Quote that, quote that, guys. Everybody quote that. Quote that. and that's really the sort of intent on this. So we basically wanted to make a product that was going to maximize the chances for our customers

without confusing them on what polar patterns mean, without confusing tweaky software, without the need to install some other software to even use some key features of the microphone, you simply plug it in and go. And that's kind of the idea behind the microphone. I was waiting for the plug-in and leaves it open for the rest of the audience to fill whatever they want in their head. Well, that's exactly right. You point the microphone to the audience for the participation, but they don't know.

For me, it would be plug-in mute because I hate talking while I game. Well, yeah, I mean, that's fair enough, too. And by the way, speaking of mute, this actually has a nice little mute button right towards the closest knob towards the, towards the capsule there, or towards the actual capsule element. So, and then you just press. Oh, my God. Red light means mute. Red light means mute.

Imagine that. White light means you're in record mode, record enable mode. And it's really easy to remember which knob does what. The knob that is closest to the actual microphone element, the capsule here is the gain mute, and the knob that is closest to the headphone output. On the bottom is the headphone gain, or the headphone adjustment. So very, very easy to use.

What's interesting about the mute button is, I don't know if that was the number one question I saw yesterday, but I did see several questions from people asking if there was a mute button on there. So that's cool. I'm glad that we have a mute button because I prefer just pushing that mute button on my mic too, as opposed to like fiddling with my mouse and moving sliders and whatnot. Yeah, and we didn't want to go with a capacitive touch to mute because a lot of people tend to grab their microphones as they're moving it on the boom arm. And some customers will accidentally disengage the record function. So we really wanted to be a deliberate action to mute the microphone there.

But I think most importantly, though, we really wanted to have some flexibility with this microphone kind of as it kind of grows with you. as you kind of become a person who kind of want to think about getting into streaming to kind of actually becoming a streamer. There's not really any product, any microphone in the space that kind of really focuses on how do we get you from getting off the headset to kind of getting into this streamer world? I think that's an important thing to kind of note here. Our philosophy, our point of view, is that they eventually want to get there, but the world's kind of scary. That's kind of our philosophy with this product. So how does that transition work? the process is typically like this.

A customer will get a gaming headset with a built-in microphone. They're gamers. They want to get into streaming. They know that they need to get a USB microphone. And so what do they do? And that's really where this product comes in, because they'll usually get one of the many microphones

out there that you can get for this price point, $1.29.99. And they end up getting a bad sound. Oftentimes they end up getting a sound that's worse than the headset they have. And it's simply because they don't know how to use the damn thing, that that's half the battle. So we get the microphone, get it on their desk,

easy to use, you plug it in, all just kind of works, very simple. But then you kind of want to transition into becoming a little bit more serious, a little bit more of a gamer. You kind of want to get the microphone off the stand. You want to put it on a boom arm. You want to get a little closer to your mouth, freeze up, freeze up some desk base,

gets it away from mechanical keyboards, gets it closer to your mouth, so you can get a little bit more of those low-end bass frequencies that everyone knows and loves. It's called the proximity, in fact, right? There's a reason for that. In order to do that, though,

on microphones, you have to unscrew things, pop things off, unscrew washers, the things are falling on the floor, your dog's eating them, got to go to the vet. It's very expensive. Terrible, I know. We have a button.

I don't know if you can see that there on the back. Rather than having to fumble with washers or screws or anything, you simply press the button. The microphone pops right out. You attach the adapter and you attach it to your boomworm. That's really clever. I like that a lot, yeah. I have not seen one in person yet.

So I've been watching a bunch of reviews trying to like pretend like I'm there, right? And like I'm using it. It seems like a really simple, clever design. I think you got a bangor here, folks. I don't about y'all. People seem to like it. As far as I can tell. We really wanted to listen to our customers here.

We really wanted to identify the problem that our customers have. And our customers obviously want to become streamers. They want to, obviously, they're gamers already, but they kind of want to be a little bit more. What we want to do is make. it as easy as we can possibly make it from a hardware perspective to get there. It's why BLD is so successful, right? It's because they want to buy something online that's kind of already good to go.

They just need to plug it in and turn it on and boom, they're ready. They want that level of experience with our microphone. And we really, I think, did a great job of as close as we possibly can delivering that kind of experience with a microphone product. So we're supposed to ask you next how you develop the capsule. but I'm kind of like, I'm not sure if that's like a specific enough question. Like how, I kind of want to ask you, like, how did you go from like conception to like production? Like how, what does that process look like?

What were the conversations during? And I guess like, you know, did you have to like really like make your case, you know, in terms of making this product or was it just kind of like a really obvious thing? Well, so there's videos on, it all starts with identifying a problem. And it's, it's, there's two different types of problems that you can solve in the, if you're in, if you're, do work for a company like we work for, right? We're in the business of solving problems. There's two different kind of problems you can solve. You can solve problems that customers know they have and that's good.

What's even better is solving problems customers don't know they have. Oh. That's the sweet spot. Big brain. I like that. So if there's all sorts of videos on YouTube, Alex and Alex tell you, we, we, about a year ago, a year and a half ago now, I think is when we really first started development of people using their microphones.

And you'll see in chat, someone will say, hey, are you sure you're using this right? You kind of sound really weird. And so they'll go onto the back of the microphone and tweak a knob and maybe reposition it weird. and all of a sudden it's like the microphone just came alive and turned on. Right. And they were sounding like garbage this whole entire time because they just didn't know how to use it. And so we're like, ah, there's a problem. They don't even know they have.

They don't know how to use their own thing. It's all pilot error. And so we started with that position of, man, shouldn't we just make this easier? Should we just make this like, I plug the thing in and it all just kind of works. And I don't have to like Google search. what do the circles mean on the back of my mic? Or I don't have to install crazy software on my computer so that I can use key features of the thing

and then also what are these key features? Now you're Google searching other key features. It's a whole thing. So we really wanted to bring it back to Earth. Like, okay, how do we make this just kind of go? How do we make that happen? And then we kind of started from that position. As far as the development cycle,

it usually goes something like this. We'll work with... an entire cross-functional organization in terms of what we think we should make. And then we basically talk to our, all sorts of peoples. We develop what we call a marketing requirements document, like, okay, we think we can sell this many units, if we can do this thing and execute on that thing. and then we eventually work with the industrial design team knowing the requirements to do this,

knowing what it's going to take to really make the vision kind of come alive. And then they show us four, five, six concepts with some input, obviously, from the engineering department. In other words, we would never design something that can look a certain way if from the engineering perspective things couldn't go into the thing we're designing. In other words, if we were making cars, we would never put a V8 engine in a Honda Civic.

Speak for yourself, buddy. I want to go room. But you get my point, right? It just wouldn't work. So all this stuff has to kind of, there's this constant, like, tension as you go along with developing a product. And then eventually you work with a good partner

who can actually make the thing and make it to our spec. and if they can theoretically make it then you go into what they call a can they actually make it in mass right and so you go for like a kind of production test

to make sure it all kind of works and comes together and then you launch and you kind of make sure that the story is all tied together and most importantly make sure that story

really levels up to the big picture of NZXT right the big the big enchilada, right? Otherwise, what are you doing? You're making clones of things that exist out there. That's not a good experience for our customers. And we're not most importantly solving a problem for them. And I think that's really where it makes this thing special. That's great. Who decided on having it being mounted from the bottom, I suppose, from the side? Because

there's a microphone out there that I actually own where the mount. points for like the for like the the what you call it the I don't know you call the screw stand thingy it's like on the side and it makes me so mad because I'm always knocking this thing over because it kind of shifts the the weight to one side makes you so mad well it's it's there's there's there's mechanical reasons to do it there there are just a design reason to do it we think this would look better and be more functional mounting from the bottom we can get a little bit more extension if we have a little bit more vertical play this way.

Right. In fact, one of the things we did was we included one of these, an adapter. We went with a camera mount thread on the actual bottom of this. So we can, A, make this universal from a selling this in a different region's perspective. But, but B, allow a little bit more room on the PCBA board to do a little bit more cool things if we wanted to have a more downward extension there. And the adapter we had included with this is long in itself. So not only can we get this thing going really down, we actually get the boom arm out of the shot this way,

which is a really, really, a nice little subtle detail that we went with. If, of course, you have enough space this way on your desk, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. But it's a really clean aesthetic that way. So every decision we made was all, how do we make this easy? How do we get the max level of rotation too with the boom arm? Because as you've seen with all sorts of setups, I mean, look at Alex.

Alex has his coming up from underneath. I have mine coming right up down over top. And I'm kind of jealous. I've seen people coming from the side. And so the more horizontal, or I'm sorry, more vertical reach you have this way, the more kind of flexibility you have with that pivot point. So that's really why we did that.

All right. What is the best way to mount your mic? Because you're right. Like Alex says it in the bottom, you have it up top, and you say some people come in from the side. What's the best? All depends on your, your set. up. So in my, I'm fortunate enough to have a pretty, pretty good desktop real estate here and a pretty

decent size room. The appropriate answer is whatever gets the microphone closes to your mouth, right? That's the appropriate thing to do. So in Alex's, and Alex's set up, he's got, I've been to his place, he's got like, it's like a, he's got like a desk this way and then like another desk this way. So from his, in his environment, it just kind of works coming straight up that way. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I think, um, this is a, this is a super common question. The proximity is definitely the biggest thing. And, you know, if you're just getting it out of the box,

placing it closer to you than your keyboard, it might feel a little, like it will take some getting used to. But there obviously is a space between where your hands are and your keyboard that the mic can sit. And, you know, having one of the reasons why you want to have that close is, as Pat mentioned, there's a lot of really nice effects that you can pick up from the, the voice based on your proximity. And it also really, really helps with just reducing other sounds.

Because the gain is the main, is the major key. So I have an air conditioner in the background. And I think Discord is probably doing potentially a portion of it. But yesterday I was doing an audio test. And I left music playing on those speakers over there just because. But because I have the gain set to like a lower level because I'm closer to the microphone.

then it means that everything else is less. Like if you picture all the sounds, but I can, you know, on like kind of a graph, but since like if my voice is that much louder, then my signal the noise can be like a better ratio for, for, you know, everything else that happens will just sound way lower. And then when it finally goes out to the stream

or goes out to Discord to your friends, if everything else is way quieter, then they just aren't gonna hear it. So that's one of the really big keys is that you're gonna sound better because you're closer to the microphone, but then also everything else will sound way quieter, which means that, you know, you may, there's even a question in chat too about, like,

do I need an Nvidia broadcast? Like, it's a really, really, really great tool. But you just try it on your setup, do a test stream and see how it sounds. Because you might not need it. Yeah, I think that's something that even with this mic being really simple to use and like really simple to set up, audio is still something that's really kind of like hard to like grasp for folks. I mean, it took me, you know, like a.

you know, months of just pure doing nothing but audio and like production work to even to even like begin to understand how to hug things up, how to make things sound good. A lot of it's like self-research. A lot of it is like like just just listening over and over and just kind of finding like the small little details. And like I was saying, one of the simplest things you can do is to turn the gain down and just get your mic your mouth as close as you possibly can to the mic. Because it helps a lot, right?

Because then you're not catching the background noise. and stuff like that. And that's kind of what I think software, like Nvidia broadcasting software does really well. Is it kind of like removes some of that thinking that you have to do. But like no matter what, just having things like set correctly or quote unquote correctly, like from a physical perspective

is gonna help so much with audio because it literally is, you know, converting something physical that you're doing that's coming out to digital, to a computer, to a stream, to, a podcast even, right? So I'm glad that at the very least we have found some ways to kind of eliminate a lot of that, you know, big thinkings that you got to do when you want to set up your audio.

And for anyone in here that's ever been on a call with like Skype is notoriously bad at this. This is literally something that, again, back in ESports broadcast days, like that we had a battle with Skype because we would use it for camps. for those in the audience that know about NDI, so Skype had a protocol that where basically, if you're in a Skype call, you could pull video feeds through NDI. So I could pull it into OBS and just target that NDI channel, and it would make it way easier to bring people's cameras in.

Well, the downside was that you had to uncheck off the box as saying, hey, Skype, do not touch my gain on my microphone. Do not, you know, do not try to control the sound. Because Skype's like, oh, you're not loud enough. I'm going to turn you up. but they cranks you all the way to 100 every time. So with the capsule, there's something that we worked on with Patrick was like,

hey, let's eliminate that. We lost somebody. Yeah, Pat died on us. Yeah, he hated implementing this future, guys, but, you know, we, at the end of the day, we knew we needed, I'm just kidding. Welcome back. So the, basically, the gain knob on the microphone

is the one source of truth, right? If you, if you know you know, what I'm about to say, When you go into the mic settings and there's like that levels on the microphone that you have to set. Say for example, like a blue Yeti. This is what I would have to do every time. Like, okay, cool. Park your gain knob at 50%.

Make sure you're in the heart, upside down heart. You know. Yeah. People might say it looks like a butt. I don't know. I think he does a bit. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a butt.

And then you go into the audio mic settings. You have to right click. There's like five clicks and you have to know where to go within to navigate. It feels like you're going to the jungle. And then you have to put the level. all the way down to like 10. So with this capsule for sound checks, and every time I'm going to go on broadcast,

what I'm looking at from my side is I open up OBS, I put in my microphone, and then I'm turning my game knob so that it's just between just hitting that negative 20 where that green turns into the yellow for my normal speaking voice, right? And then that means that I should be at a good gain there. And then of course, you know, there will be other tweaking that might be necessary, especially if you're in a call like this. But yeah, it's just looking at that gain,

meter on OBS and then this knob right here is a source of truth for for this microphone. So after you're set up with that, Skype can't do anything to your game. If you go into the Windows audio level and you try to change that level thing, it does not affect how you sound. It does not affect your gain at all. That sounds like a pan in the ass. You know, this is actually like, I'm not, I'm not making this up. But two weeks ago, I built a brand new computer for my nephew.

You know, he bought all the parts. he asked me to build it for him. So I went over there. I built his PC and I built his PC in record time because he had like an M.2 drive and everything was just super quick. So I think I built his PC like in 45 minutes. Installed Windows and everything.

And then it came time to set up his speakers and his mic and his headset and his monitor and keyboard and everything. And we literally spent twice as much setting up his audio than we did building the actual computer. I swear. Like it was like nothing was working. Like we couldn't figure out like the settings on anything. And it was really confusing. And he was getting really frustrated.

And I just told him like, hey, man, don't worry. We're going to figure it out. That's just how this is. Like audio stuff is just notoriously difficult to set up. But once it's set up, you're good. Just don't touch it anymore. Just set it up and forget about it. Yeah.

That's not fun about. Yeah. And I did tell him under friend DNA or friend DNA, wherever you say it. Friend DA. Friend DA. I was like, oh, don't tell your buddies, but we're going to be coming out with the microphone here pretty soon in a couple of weeks. That's the first thing I do. As soon as anything's new, I'll run to my friends, guys, you won't believe it.

I'm kidding. I don't do that ever. I always keep everything to myself. Yeah, no leaks here. No leak boys. Yeah. Or men, actually. First sign of the league, flex tape.

Yep, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you kind of went over this a little bit before Pat. And maybe Alex can answer this as well. What would you say the best use case is for this microphone? Like, dial it down. Like, who's this for?

This is for anyone with one single sound source. So your voice is a voice. is a sound source, right? Right. You wouldn't record several things with this. You wouldn't record your friend on either side of this microphone, doing like an interview kind of thing. You wouldn't use it for that.

You would use it for just you. Right. And that's really, and this is actually something that seems simple. I think Alex, we're talking about how things are actually a lot more difficult in audio than what you think. The concept of single sound source seems simple, but no one understands what that means.

Right. Like, when I mean sound source, I mean like, a thing putting out sound. So, like, your voice is a thing that puts out sound. If I were to record, let's say, a drum kit, there are many things putting out sound, right? A kick, a snare, a high hat, Tom 1, Tom, 2, 4, Tom, two crashes, right? And maybe a couple of room mics. There are a lot of sound sources there. but our customers are one gamer in front of their PC

and that's it and again this is the philosophy thing that we've been talking about right competitors will put out a mic that does it all at the expense of two things one how do I use this thing and two the actual capsule size inside because they have to accommodate these other they call them polar patterns these other polar patterns they're fitting these small tiny capsules

that real small sound and they're on this weird like X, Y configurations and one sort of stacked on top of the other and it's just a very small sound, small capsules small sound and you guys remember right? Remember class what they would say earlier

big capsule big sound right? Yep so question about that because that's one of the first things I noticed is that this doesn't have those polar patterns, right? Is it just the one direction that the audio comes in? Yes. Did you take inspiration from the unnamed competitor microphone

that's in that big meeting room in our HQ office that has always pointed with the top part going towards everybody when you're supposed to talk into the front of that thing? That's that, so that's, now you're talking about positional stuff. Yes. So when it's in, so this competitor microphone that you're talking about, let's call it a monster themed microphone that's out of, there.

When the polar pattern is in the correct polar pattern, which is cardio because it looks like a heart. Get it? Cardio, cardio, cardio. And there's that connection. So it's not a butt. What's cardio?

Cardi B. Eoid. Cardi Boid. Eoid. So, but because the industrial design of that microphone, it's beautiful. And it looks like something Johnny Carson would have on his desk. It's kind of confusing as to way you should point at. A lot of people.

and you'll have hundreds of people on on YouTube. We'll have this microphone pointed, you know, let's pretend this is that microphone. They'll point it like that. Like a shotgun mic, right? And you know what they're micing up? Nothing. They're micing up their stomach.

They're micing up their... No way. Sometimes they'll have it in front of their mechanical keyboard like this. Oh no. They're literally micing up the mechanical keyboard. And they'll be like, this sucks. It's like, you're just not used. using it right.

Say it louder for the back, Pat. Say it louder for the people on the back. I'm just saying. There's some Zoom calls I'm in

that really sounds like keyboard ASMR. It's a brr. Yeah. Exactly. So now what do, that's a best case

scenario. Yeah. Right? Because they're in the right polar pattern. They're just pointed incorrectly. So now what if they're

in the, like, the bad scenario where they're in like the wrong polar pattern and they have it pointed correctly? So let's say they're in that figure eight mode.

It's two circles, right? Like this. Let's say they're in that figure eight mode, right? So, which means that one side of the microphones going this way, one side of the microphone's going that way. Right. So if they have it like this, then they're, they're micing up, not only their mechanical keyboards, but their neighbors upstairs.

And again, they're micing everything but their voice. So they're getting a bad sound. That's like, that's like the double whammy. So we really wanted to take all these. the possibilities for all these errors out of the equation, as much as we possibly can. And say, you want a good mic here. It's very obvious where you should talk into. Super, super obvious. You don't have to fumble around with any polar patterns. We parked the gain right at 50% right from the factory.

So right out of the gate, if you plug it in, you point to the NZXT USB microphone, and you're done. You're good. And if you want to get into a little bit more of this tweaky kind of stuff that you, You can do an OBS or Twitch Studios. You can because now the palette that you're painting on is clean. It's a clean slate. The canvas is blank for you to just go. I love that picture.

That's a great metaphor. So that's we really, not only do we give you a good sound out of the gate, dry, an audio that they call things wet and dry, a dry sound. Sorry, I'm 12. You can paint all over this and you have a really good canvas to start. Uh-huh. Sorry. I'm like literally 12 years old.

No, but that's, that's, that's, no, that's, um, it's actually something that, that I noticed yesterday. I'm moving away from microphone, so I'm actually doing really bad job with this. Pat, please send me a boom. I need a boom. I'm, I'm done. Okay, so we'll actually talk about the boom in a second because I have a couple things to to say about that.

But I guess we can kind of close this, this kind of capsule part off a little bit, because I feel like we already said a lot. But, um, who is this not for just real quickly who who is the microphone not for because I feel like a lot of companies are afraid to talk about who who shouldn't buy this microphone but I feel like we'd be doing our community and our potential customers and just people in general a disservice if we don't tell them don't buy this thing so who should not buy this thing if you are buying a microphone to record uh your conference room for your office if you are buying a microphone

to do piano recitals. Don't do it. If you were buying a microphone to interview your you know, maybe your grand-grandma, you know, that kind of thing. Don't do that. You could still do this microphone,

but the ideal world would be in those microphones, figure-eight's, where someone is across from you and there's a microphone in between us so both sides can pick up both things. You can still do it with this microphone. If you are a gamer, you should buy this microphone.

If you want to get into streaming, definitely should buy this microphone. But if you want to do these other, I'll call them utility applications. Right. This sort of office conference table. It's not for you. It's not for you. It's not for you. Can't do it.

If you do it, we're going to call the cops on you. You need to get arrested. It's illegal. You go to Mike jail. Yes. Right away. Straight to jail. So I do want to, you know, I normally chase the banter rabbit hole, but this time

I won't. Because some stuff's coming up in chat as well. I do want to address too that like actually a lot of the pandemic, it was funny because I, because I do some streaming and, and I don't know, I will play games with a bunch of folks who either do commentary or stream as well. One of our friends was like, you know what? I hate seeing clips of us playing and then my microphone sounding terrible.

Because you'd only use the headset mic. So he's like, all right, I'm going to buy a microphone, like a USB mic. just so I can just sound better in comms in these clips, but then also sound better in comms and game. And he's like, what should I get? And at the time, I would have loved to recommend this, but we recommended, I recommend a different one because it wasn't out of the time.

So something that comes out a lot too, and I see you from a lot of YouTubers as well that this was a question that came up a lot too. So, yeah, if you're just looking for a better sound, that's an upgrade over the mic that's attached to your headset, it's something for you as well. and it is compatible with consoles as well, by the way. You can plug this into an Xbox.

Yeah, Xbox or PlayStation. And the audio will route through the microphone, and your microphone will go through it too. So the chain would be you have your console, plug in the USB into the console, and then for, so specifically Xbox and PlayStation, it's compatible with those. No one told me that.

So your comms and game are going to get crispy and really nice. Crispy in a good way, you know, like good kind of crispy. Not like, you know, salts or water. I can't imagine being that one guy in, like, the cod lobby on, like, your Xbox who has, like, the really nice microphone. I was using those, like, used one that's, like, built into the controller or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. It's a little extra in it.

If you want to be extra, buy this for your Xbox. Yeah, yeah. I was testing out with, um, with Andy because we, we somehow were able to, I think, I think Walmart put up the PS5 link. like they like opened up that site like earlier than they should have because he was like, hey, I just found this and I just ordered one. I think it works. This is back in like November of last year. But anyways, yeah, we're doing some testing in comms and PlayStation 5 with with a capsule.

And we're like, all right, well, now PlayStation knows that we have a microphone on coming because, you know, it says USB, NXC USB mic on it. But anyways, yeah, it does work there. That's actually really cool. I wish someone would have told me because it's actually some really, Yeah, that's that's dope. I'm assuming we're not going to market it like that because it's not like the initial, you know, like I guess like design or whatever the phrasing is,

but it's actually cool that you can do that if you wanted to. Yep. Good to know. How do you feel about that, Pat? Do you feel okay that this is going to be using a PS4, potentially? Branching out to console, dude. You can, you can. We're just taking over, man.

There you go. New waters. you're taking over. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about that boom. What's up with that boom? So people want that boom.

The other side of this equation is there's kind of this transitionary point from a, from a gamer into a streamer. So obviously they want to, you know, they got the USB mic phone. They like it. They kind of want to take the next step. Next step, obviously, is to get a boom arm. Obviously, again, they want to get the closer to their face. I want to get it up off their desk.

It's just going to sound better the closer it is to you. It's called the proximity effect, by the way. Basically it means the closer you are to a sound source, the more basal here. The problem is, in the boom-arm world, there are a couple competitive products that kind of just are the go-to. And usually it's the road PSA-1 is usually the go-to boom-arm.

That boom-arm is notoriously, noisy. It is a bit, it's kind of a squeaky sort of boom arm. There's no way to also really elegantly, I would say, manage your cables with it. It just comes with zip ties here. As you can see, I actually have one. And I like it, and it's good for some things. But if you really want to get a much more clean aesthetic and a boom arm that actually doesn't use any internal spring system, actually uses a cable system like ours. And what we did was we actually, in that cable system, we actually lined it with a bit of rubber

so that it's a very quiet boom arm. So then we'll make any noise as you... It doesn't creak around like that. Doesn't creak, doesn't do anything like that. And it actually is a very unique channel, cable channeling system with covers on it. Sometimes companies will use Velcro. Sometimes companies will use just like little clips

that you can kind of run down the thing. We actually just used a complete channel covers. So it actually covers the entirety of the cable. Actually, you know, it has to go, it's supposed to go over the sort of pivot point there. But it's a completely covered channeling system. Yeah, I have it pulled up here on the stream real quick. If people are watching live,

you can see kind of how the cables kind of ride into that channel. It's actually pretty smart. I like it. It's cool. How did you come up with such a clever name like Boomarm? we were going through the legal we uh we we we we we basically kind of wanted to keep with a literal of very literal kind of approach to to the audio line if you recall we had the the name of the original stand and mixer was simply stand and

mixer which is spelled a little bit differently i was actually thinking about this yesterday I was like it would be kind of funny and in but funny in a good way like if we just named all our products for like what they were so like it would be like you know the the the H 700 series could be like no the PC the big case the H1 would be like the small case and then you know we would have the microphone I just got one of those what what there's a there's a company out there got to get the name of the company that makes pillows. It's not my pillow. I was going to say it's in my pillow. Casper, Casper's the name of the pillow company.

They're like big selling pillow. The skew is called the pillow. And it's like, yeah, okay. I want the pillow. What is it? It's a big, super soft, baller, king-sized pillow that I highly recommend anybody, by the way. And it's sweet.

So there's kind of, there's something to that, I think, you know. but with the capsule, we wanted to convey what it is and what makes it different from everything else. So there's a big fat capsule in there. So to kind of tie into this sort of story of the literal aspect of that, we said, okay, well, boom arm. Because, and again, kind of ties back to the original story of the naming scheme for the stand and the mixer. Because stand and mixer. So there's kind of, there's some kind of tie in there.

But that's it. That's really all the, well, that's what it came down to. Okay, so I haven't seen this thing either. I haven't pulled up here on the stream, and it's,

and it's the shot where it's on the desk, and you see it kind of like up and kind of curve down a little bit. Where are the pivot points in this thing so that I know if this is something that I could use for my own setup here at home because I really do want to boom arm. I literally have a microphone right now on my desk.

I know, sacrilege, right? I haven't found to boom. I haven't found a boom that I liked. And then when I heard that we were coming out with one, I'm like, well, I might as well wait because one is probably going to be dope. And two, I could probably get it for free if I asked really nicely. So there's a lot of demo right here. There's a lot of demo.

So there's a couple different connection points. There's one, we'll call this the bottom sort of joint here that kind of is the big, the one you would want to adjust to your, where you get this position, adjust to it and just kind of tighten there. There's another, we'll call this kind of, I call this the elbow. the pivot point right here kind of at the at the middle between this vertical arm and this horizontal arm and then there's another pivot point right at the actual connection of the of the of the microphone right here so you can actually tighten this to be a horizontal if you need it to be you can tie this to be like the analysis case up from underneath I've seen people I've seen people use it

to actually come over their monitors it kind of come down so you could do there's a lot of different sort of configurations you can have this in. Okay, okay, nice, nice. I haven't given any other questions because I haven't seen this thing, but I mean, it's a boom arm, right? I mean, look at what's, like, is there anything cool about it? Like anything else cool about it that we want to talk about? Or, I mean, it looks like a really good boom arm, right?

It has their design or kind of aesthetic. I love the little knobbies on the side. It looks great. I mean, I don't know what else you can say about a boom arm, right? The only question I want to ask about it is actually a question someone just asked in the chat that I was curious about myself. Is there anything else you can connect onto the boom arm? Is there anything else you can connect onto the boom arm? Obviously you can connect.

Or, you know, other microphones. Yeah. Well, you can connect obviously other microphones to it. You can connect. It's threaded for the European-style connection. So if you had the adapter, you can use anything that's threaded for that European-style connection. Ours comes with the camera thread mount. adapter. The microphone is actually threaded

for camera. Like the camera thread and that we simply did that to give us a little bit more space to do the connection ways. By the way, it's USB type C. I don't know if we actually if we actually talked about that I don't know, it's a USBC microphone. Yeah.

But as far as the microphone goes, if there's anything that the boom arm goes, if there's anything that's weight rated within the weight spec of the boom arm, which I think is up to five pounds, which by the way is any microphone since like 1920 so you should be fine unless it's like the comically like you know huge thing that you'll see in like some like capital records all these big like noyman u47s with a huge power supplies on probably won't hold that um but it'll hold SM7b it'll hold obviously our microphone

uh it'll hold a wide array wide away of mics and uh the mic is USB c to USBA correct Okay, it's not USBC to USBC. I wonder when we're going to start getting just like straight USBC to USBC on stuff. I think the only company that does that right now is like Apple and I absolutely hate it. Because I need to buy stupid and bad for everything. I feel like motherboards are going to need to really have like more USBC ports. Because right now they only have like one, right? And then you may have one on the front panel.

I'm literally using mine for my mag safe charger for my phone. So the reason it's in there right now. I know eventually I'm gonna get more stuff. They need to plug into this thing. If you were to bring a USBC cable to it, it should absolutely work as well. And this also, I think we tested it with Mac as well, right? It should be compatible with that.

Yeah, absolutely. Just plugs right in. Easy peasy. Same. Plug it in. All right. And go. I do my pat there.

Plug in and dub some anime. You got to be dramatic. That's what really sells it. I know the chat has a bunch of questions they've been asking, and we'll get to them in a second. But before we get to those, I do have a few questions for Alex here. Not Patrick, but Alex. Oh, let's go. Alex, first question for you is, why are you such a bad fantasy football commissioner?

Okay. Are we really going to throw down here? You're right. Actually, I'm going to run into it, huh? Yeah, I haven't figured out what our what are, what our, what are, what are, what are, what are money pool is going to be. So for everyone in the everyone listening here and everyone's like

when are we going to do the giveaway but we'll just tell this mini story. If you want to hear more about the fantasy football like how the how the season is going, let us know because I think there could be some good content that comes out of it. We have a 14 team league in our company and it's

it's going to be good. It's going to be good. Anyways. Yeah, I'm mostly teethy. You're not a bad commissioner. I'm dodging to the question like a bad commissioner. I was just giving you grief because more fun, you know, like I wanted to play for money. I like, can we play for money? But yeah, yeah, we're going to do it. We're going to do it for. Gambling's illegal, Ivan. I mean, if HR is listening, we're not playing for money. No, definitely not. But from Napoli money, right? Oh, did you guys know that I am the reigning NZXT fantasy baseball champion? I had no idea.

Yeah. So I have a, I have a reputation. I heard you auto drop everything. I do, because... I'm a... I'm a... I'm a... I'm a waiver hound, man. Like, I'm on that waiver wire, like, on the daily. Sounds like you're just lucky to me, dude.

No, no. Like, for me, like, the draft, honestly, like... The only real draft pick, in my opinion, that really matters is the first one. Yeah. Like, the rest of them is just kind of, like... Just lucky, basically. But that first pick, man, that, like, literally makes or breaks your team. But the waiver wire, man, that's where you find the gems.

You know, like someone gets injured and you get their backup right away in the waiver wire. And next thing you know, that guy's like putting up 30 points every week from nowhere. Like no one drafted him, right? But anyway, enough fantasy football talk. All you all in the chat with questions for Alex or Patrick about capsule or boom arm or anything else related to NZEXT products, I guess, too, even. Since they're on the product team, they might be able to answer some stuff. But yeah, just go ahead and ask your questions in the chat, and we'll answer.

I did see one, a few questions already that I jotted down. Like, how much weight can the boom arm hold? It's up to, I believe, five pounds, which, again, will accommodate vast, vast majority of microphones. It'll accommodate the microphones as heavy is the SM7B, which is kind of a weighty microphone. Ours happens to be a pretty light microphone. I think it's just over a pound. It might be under a pound.

So when it's on the stand, it's a pretty hefty little piece here, but when it's off the stand and mounted, it's actually a very light microphone. So it's a pretty wide array of weights. And if you happen to be using something that's a little heavier than our microphone. You may have to adjust the tension mechanism on the bottom. It's a pretty typical way of doing boom arms. There's some, they just posted something really funny in the chat.

I got a message from an HR statement out here. Yeah, your best behavior. Stacey's listening. Sorry, yeah, go. Spread on the game tonight. Is there a minimum weight requirement on that? Uh, yeah, they're, you know, you can't put this unbelievably light. Remember the stick microphones from like the old, the old, like your grandma's computer in like 1995? Oh, God, yes. Probably can't use those. But, uh, but, um, you should, you should be fine. It'll hold, it'll hold things as light as, as ours. Honestly, ours happens to be on the lighter end of the microphone spectrum. So you may have to adjust the tension mechanism to hold things a little lighter. It's rated to hold our mic from the fact. factory. So the idea, obviously, is a customer will buy this microphone and it'll probably pair our boom arm with our microphones. It's weight rated from the factory using ours. You may have to adjust that tension mechanism and just a little screw right on the where that connects on the base. So it's really intuitive. I don't think people have any problem with it.

Nice. Cool. Yeah. Because I used to have like $20 boom arms from like Amazon. Those things are so hard to like adjust and they're really creaky and make a bunch of noise. And I think I think I used to have like an old Yeti on it. I was going to say it because it was my microphone. And I think I put too much weight on it and it bent the bottom of it. And like I didn't notice till forever. So like when I would move it back and forth, it would scrape the metal. And I was like, what are these like little shavings on my floor?

And I realized the microphone was way too heavy. Sometimes the actual on those kind of stands, the joint is like this like, it's like a scissor kind of joint. Yeah, exactly. So sometimes. So sometimes if you have. have like something that's a little too heavy. Sometimes those scissors joints will pop out.

Yeah. And then it'll like, they'll like, it'll pop every single time you get to adjust. So I've seen that in the past too. Yeah. So this, this won't do that. So when I just said every mic is too heavy for the Amazon stands, which I probably don't doubt. Well, the problem is with those is that there's, there's really no way to adjust those stands. So you kind of just put it on and kind of hope for the best.

Yeah. And it's hard to make a boom arm that will just do it all unless you have that tension adjustment mechanism. So more times than not our customer should be fine. Yeah. Outsider 996 is asking if they have a USBC to USBC cable, could they plug in their smartphone or anything else into it? I'm actually going to test that right now. Like right now or now? Well, like because I can test it right now now.

Yeah, let's do it. Do it right now right now. I'm not going to be able to... So you'll see me doing it on camera, but basically I'm going to take my iPhone. I have the little... You have to have the dongle for the iPhone, by the way. We're going to plug this in. We'll record a video.

And then live on air, I will play the video audio back. And, okay, it's BRB. All right. So while that's going on, Patrick, someone wants to know if the boom arm will hold their dump truck. Will it hold their big dump truck? It says it's pretty massive. How big are we talking?

They didn't give any particular number or measurement, but just saying it's a pretty big dumpy. So, I mean, what would you say? What's like the dumpy rate for like 1 to 10? I would say it'll hold an 11 on a scale from 1 to 10. That's not a dump. That's a badonk, my friend. That might be a badonk.

We think I'm back to Miss Elliott. Much past 10 in your rapidly approaching a badonk territory. So let's get with customer service. figured that out. All right. Contact us and ask something about the

dump truck rating. The dump truck spec, yeah. I think Alex just died because he's doing this stuff with this, whatever. But I did have a question

from somebody. This is, I think, Magnetter. I don't know. That's, maybe I'm pronouncing it weird. Have we tested the mic

with software-likein, with software-like in a video broadcast? And how's the noise background is suppression? So that's two questions. So, yeah.

We have. We've tested it with Twitch Studio OBS, you know, all the way down to like garage band on, on, on, on on on on on Mac. And it works exactly the same way that you would expect it to work. Right. No issues so far. That said, software companies do updates all the time. And we may need to issue a firmware update for the microphone to exactly work in its exact to make the handshake happen between the microphone and the software. but fortunately this microphone is firmware upgradable. So, for example, we find that, well, it turns out a lot of people engage 96 kilohertz mode, but not put it on the boom arm. And we need to tweak the EQ a little bit to make it a little more like fuller sounding. We can do that remotely on the floor.

It's easy. So that's the good news. It's a tough question to answer because things change all the time. But as today, no issues so far. Okay. Besides making you feel like a rapper, does having the microphone upside down or right side up have a difference? No, honestly. I mean, you can look at the,

Alex has his right set up. I have mine coming down. It really is just about making that grill, the actual capsule element closer to the closer to your sound source in this case. case it's your mouth. Just like this. Exactly. So it doesn't matter what orientation it's in. However, you can get it closer to your sound source, your mouth.

The more broadcaster tone you'll have. Alex, what are the results of your experiment? So, and unfortunately it doesn't work. And the reason why is it requires too much power for my iPhone. So I also try it on my iPad as well. Um, that's, yeah, that's something, uh, I'll have to, I'll see exactly what the spec is. Actually, I'm not. I, I hadn't really thought about like what the, the current draw is from that. Um, because normally if I, if I am going to be doing like, say, like, how my, my, uh, do audio for, like, TikTok or whatever, or if I'm recording, like, a guitar cover, I actually have a separate mixer, um, that I plug in through it as well. Um, but I guess it doesn't get, that thing has its own power. So, yeah, unfortunately, uh, it, yeah, potentially for a non-appellate, uh, it, yeah, potentially for a non-applet

device we'll have to see get some Android users in chat it also it also could be the kind of thing where it actually has enough power to power the device but it's not MFI certified so sometimes Apple will do some funny things where they'll turn on and off power allocation yeah to to that so it we'll you know we'll look into it for those who don't know what that means MFI certification is for the lightning port on the bottom of your iPhone iPad iPod, whatever, so you don't use like janky cables that could break your stuff. It could also be the, I don't know what adapter, Alex, is that an Apple adapter you were using?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just because it calls up the power, actually. So that was, I had not seen that before. Interesting. Okay. SAS Lambo, is to know, is there software for the microphone to control audio channels and things like EQ? If not, are there plans for this in the future? Good question. So as of right now, there is no software right now to pair with the microphone right now.

However, we do have plans in the future to allow a customer to tweak things with the microphone, and we'll hopefully have this as a firmware update in late, hopefully knock on wood, late October, early November. And then we'll do these in phases. So it's not just going to be like a one-time update. It's going to be like, we'll do another update, then another update. So the plan is for the first update to have things like sightone control. So there's sightone built into this microphone, but it's parked at a fixed value right now at 50%, which is about what the Yeti has as their fixed sightone value.

So good news and bad news. The good news is you don't have to launch software in order to use sitone. Some competitor microphones require you to launch software to hear yourself. We think that's ridiculous. but in order to adjust that side tone, some people want to hear a lot more of themselves. Some people won't want to hear themselves at all. That's an idea of mine, yeah.

So we'll, as a default, parked that at 50%, because we figure that's about right. We'll give customers control that. We're also going to have a gain control function so people can use a slider to adjust their gain rather than actually touching the knob, same with a mute control. In addition, we'll probably have a metering system,

so customers can exactly see where exactly they are in that software. And then lastly, we'll have an LED mode. So this value of this LED brightness is 100% brightness right now. We'll probably have on-off control, so you can turn the LED off. So in my environment, it's moderately well-lit environment. This doesn't bother me. if you're in a dark space, it could.

So you customer might want to turn that off. Or maybe they're in kind of like a halfway where it's not quite bright, but it's not quite dark. We'll give them a dim mode. And what that'll do is that'll just cut the brightness in half. Nice. So this will be the basic kind of first kind of round of software control, firmware control.

And then as we move along into 2020, 22, we will have all sorts of surprises for you guys. So stay tuned, my friends. We're in for the long haul. We're not going to just abandon this thing. No shot about that. So I go on, Dennis. Real quick.

So you just said something that kind of triggered me a little bit. Probably bad phrasing. But when does people start saying no shot? Like I feel like it just came in, like, within the past like a month and a half, maybe two months. I don't know why. Alex coined it. He invented it. I've been hearing you everywhere. What's up with the no shot? No, I, no, I, the, the friend group that I play a lot of video James with, someone started

saying that. He actually is the person who says things a lot, and I'm fairly certain he's just trying to, like, program us. He'll just say things a lot, like for phrases. And then we'll eventually say it, and then he'll move on to another thing. So I feel like, you know, friend groups might, people might relate with that. I think it's not in every friend group, but there are definitely people like that just. Say things and people can't copy them. Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, but I think it's beyond, it's not even like he's like a trend center.

He just like brute force, like, says it and so much that you're just like, all right, now it's just in my brain. All right. Anyway, so I just want to address that because I don't know if I like it. I don't know if I like the no shot. It kind of bugs me because I feel like it's almost like no shit, but like you're trying to not say that. But I know it's not the same intention.

There is no question that it is undeniable. How about that? It is undeniable that we would abandon the microphone development. We are excited to see. Right. It is undeniable. We use it and to continue developing it. I think you said that.

Look, the important thing to know here is that we developed this microphone with some assumptions that we were pretty damn sure of and some assumptions that we were a little less sure of but had a good idea. And those assumptions were things that we can tweak on the fly should we need to. Right. So, for example, if you're in 96 Killerhertz mode, the assumption was that the customer would probably be on a boom arm and therefore would want to roll off that base to compensate for the proximity effect.

If it turns out that people are actually using 96 Killerhertz mode on the stand, we simply send a firmware update. How dare they? That easy. So these kind of assumptions. We are pretty almost 100,000 percent sure that customers are getting shitty sounds out of their microphones and it have no fault of their own.

And that's really where the magic comes with this microphone. I love that. That's what we should clip. Someone clip that, please. Thank you very much. I just want to quickly go back. I know who's clipping that. It's HR.

All right. How do you? So I was going to quickly say about all these things that we're talking about when it comes to future support, things will change, right? Sometimes things might get delayed. So don't hold us to any particular date, right? To be honest, passion is at anything?

Because now people are going to be like, you said, but just, you know, just, just, you know, just keep that in mind, guys, that, uh, or folks, right, that, uh, you know, we will do our best to hold to, like, our internal roadmap for what we want to release and, and, and, and do with this product going forward. Um, you know, just, just know that it's the real world and nothing is perfect and sometimes things might take a little bit longer than, than, uh, that we hope to. But, um, I, for one, I'm actually very glad to hear that we're going to be supporting this thing long term. Because I remember we had a conversation, like really early on, and you asked me for some

reason you asked me like what I think about like a microphone and stuff like that and um uh when you guys were like I had no idea that you guys were been thinking about doing like longer term support I thought it was like should it have this on launch or not and if not then it's just the product that we're getting so I think it's going to cool that we're kind of thinking long term with this and I hope that we kind of go forward with that level thinking like throughout every product that we put out in the future because I think um for myself like you know I have a wave three and this thing updates like every five days. It's like an update for something or other supporting some other software thing,

which to me is nice because to me it tells me that the developers, the engineers, the programmers, whatever you want to call them, they care and they're listening and they're and they're taking feedback and usage to consideration.

Since there is no software for the mic, real quick, Pat, how do you update this thing if I wanted to update it? Because you're saying firmware updates and stuff like that? So there would be an update through cam. You would just update this through cam And obviously it would just update that that way. And the idea is that the first time you go to plug it in, if there is a firmware update,

it would just automatically and just kind of update would prompt you to check for updates or something like that. I don't know that's actually really cool. But you don't need Cam to run this. Yeah, yeah. I don't be very clear about that. But if you want to update it, this updates would be done through Cam.

Okay. Is that noted on like the packaging or like? So it would be, so when you get the, when you get the microphone, it comes with this one of these little handy QR code, scan the QR code, send you right to the manual, they'll send you to updates, etc, etc. Oh, okay, awesome. I love that. That's cool. All right, here we go.

Wait, wait. I'll do you. One too. Wait, wait. Don't we do it. Hopefully that'll link to the right thing. We were working on adjusting. So we'll see. They remember somebody, somebody sent us a DM the other day, and they're like, they're like hey the QR code on your thing doesn't work I'm like oh yeah we have QR codes on some of the manuals now and I think it was looking to like the old website or something so we just changed at that that uh yeah so what happens is there there's a lot of things obviously on the back end so you'll print a QR code and that QR code will then someone on in ZXT will have to like you know like the old

switchboard like connect this cable to that thing and then it'll all connect so it's just just a matter of Clicking Apply and Save pretty much, I think. So, yeah. St. Jean's asked a really good question here, and I've been seeing this question pop up often on social. And it's, how good is the microphone to record instruments or vocals? Wonderful. It's wonderful to record instruments and vocals, because, again, it's a single sound source,

like an acoustic guitar, or let's say a saxophone or a ukulean. or a ukulele or a female singer or a male singer, great for that kind of stuff. My advice to anyone who wants to... Actually, this is a really good Easter egg. The way to record acoustic guitar well is to put the microphone on the 12th threat. You would traditionally have thought that,

okay, well, I should put it just on the sound hole. It's like, mm-mm, too much bass. What you want to do is you want to put that in the 12th thread and angle it down this way. And it just so happens that our microphone is at the perfect angle when it's perfectly like that when this is on your desk. So suppose I had, I'm a lefty unfortunately, suppose I had the guitar on me and I angled this microphone straight down like that. It is at the exact right angle to record acoustic guitar. So this is a really good microphone to record acoustic guitar on.

Good also for singing, obviously. As long as you watch your game, like any software. program you'd be using ProTools Logic would tell you and you can launch all the software with that as well you can get a great sound nice nice nice nice I have it anymore yeah there's a there was a bunch of questions from hey let's go so I forgot who asked this but someone made a comment a hundred and twenty dollars really that's why is it so much so what what do you guys uh well that's a that's a that's a That's a good question. Well, let me keep going, though.

The follow-up to that, so people were responding to him, letting him know that $120 is not that bad. It's reasonable for like this type of microphone, et cetera. But yeah, I guess, like, what do you guys think about the price? I think it's appropriately priced to be competitive in this sort of product space. The components that we used for this are, aren't garbage components. It's a really good capsule.

It's a really, really good resolution chip on it, chip set in it. We wanted to price this appropriately to be competitive in this space. And we want to position this. So where it doesn't, it just makes sense to live where it lives, right? And it's still more appropriately priced than competitive product than even, it's even, it punches above its way class even, because I think the wave three is significantly more

expensive than this. XLR mics are significantly more expensive than this. And, you know, in regards to XLR microphones, don't only do you have to get the microphone, you got to get the cable that usually doesn't come with the microphone, and you have to buy an interface as well. You can easily be in the tank for like $800, $900 if you want to get an XLR set up. So it's appropriately priced, I would say. Yeah. Given the components, given the feature sets, it's, it's, it's, yeah. The materials, it's obvious, it's right where it should be.

I think it's definitely one of the hardest parts to really convey in that. I think we always expect those reactions, but we don't want to just like straight up ignore them. You know what I mean? Because like, I think it's hard to give that context of why something is the price of what it is, right? Like, but there is, I let me answer in this way to you that if it was going to be cheaper, then we wouldn't be able to do the same components that we are, right? Like we are building up towards the product that we think is the right one that should exist. And we are seeing the pricing that, you know, we have to, we have to ask for

to accommodate for those components and those parts. So, right? And of course, like, just looking out there what is competitively out there at the similar price points, we have to make a decision of like, hey, this is what we need in order to make this sustainable for us to sell this product and the continued support. on it. And this is the quality that we, you know, feel that our customers are going to want and are going to need out of it. And so, yeah, I think pricing is always going to be a tough discussion. But I think a good distinction is what is a good value. You can be, you can be expensive,

but be a good value. Or I'll say this. You can't be high price, but be a good value. You know what I mean? Um, like usually, the, the problem is if it's low value, right? If this is, if this is a $129 and was low value as in it's not worth $129, that's, that's a problem, right? And that's something that we absolutely want to listen to. But we, there are definitely situations in cases to where, you know, unfortunately some people won't be able to afford it, right? And that's something that, you know, we of course are always, so this feedback is super important,

right? I think where we just need to make sure where we are standing is where, we're, we're not providing something that's low value, right? That's the thing that we absolutely want to avoid. And we'll respond accordingly, right? So I think everyone's feedback is always, we're listening, we're reading, we're watching everything and, you know, trying to take into all into account. Yeah, I think like when I heard the pricing of this thing,

I wasn't surprised at all, right, considering like what we were trying to go for, the market we're trying to hit, the parts we were using. But I think for like general public, right, you see $1,2,219. for a microphone. You're like, well, my headset was like 120, you know, and I got both of them, right? So it's like, it's one of the things where like, you know, it's, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like funny to me, not in like a ha-ha, like, you don't know what you're talking about, but like funny to like, you know, not being in this space, not like knowing how products

kind of like, making stuff, how products are made. I don't know what I just said there. Not knowing how products are made. Like, it's really easy to kind of like look at the price and not kind of understand what goes into it, right? And like, I would hope if you're buying a microphone that's straight, just 120 bucks, they put a lot of work in that mic to justify that price. And I think that's kind of kind of like what we're asking of people. I would also say if you don't think it's worth it or if you're still, if you're on the price, don't listen to us.

Like, go look at the reviews. It's like a bunch of reviews out right now. We sent mics to as many people as we possibly could and they gave us their opinions. And I think that you shouldn't listen to us. us, I mean, you should, right? You know, but you should listen to people who aren't literally working for the company and trying to sell the product to you. You know what I mean?

And I think so far from what I've seen from reviewers, they seem to like it. And they, I haven't heard too many bad things, to be honest. Other than like a couple of, you know, like nitpicky things here and there or like, you know, like it's always personal. I don't like this, but it's fine. It doesn't, it's not going to make the product, you know, I just smack my mic. Sorry. one of the problems not having on a boom on me smack your microphone.

But anyway, this all goes to say that I think we all hear like me, Ivan, Patrick, and Alex think it's worth the 120, right? Hopefully we think you think you think. Yeah, 139. Okay, 1.30. Hopefully you think, there we go, it's worth the 130, right? But don't take our effort for it. Look at external sources, see what they say, and you make your decisions based off of that. someone mentioned like random frank p yeah there's there's a lot of a lot of reviews out there right now

and i say for the most but they're they're all pretty positive right i like it i think frank did a a whole comparison with other mics yeah he did yeah it was good it's really good so i see i saw this a couple times in the chat but uh like from people like yeah yon stinks and soviets and a few others, but are there any plans to have RGB capsules? That is a very good question. I will not answer it by. I think the

the reason why we didn't put RGB on this is because this is actually a really good segue from the last question as why was it's so why do we price it the way it was? If we would put RGB on this, it would be significantly more expensive. and it would take a lot of the internal components. We would have to squish a lot of that stuff down, so we wouldn't have been able to use as big of a capsule

as we chose, for example. If, on the other hand, a lot of data showing that the RGB scene is kind of making a comeback. It's actually on headsets right now, for example, the RGB kind of seems to be going from less of a rainbow explosion on your head to kind of like a small, subtle little hints of RGB here and there, then we'll reevaluate. One of the questions that I've been getting a lot to is, man, I love it and white,

that's great in black. Can you do like a red and a green and a purple? And so all these things are obviously topics we're talking about, things we're considering. It's very interesting, though, to know, and we talk about this a lot in our product manager meetings, that Alex and I have a very unique sort of set of circumstances here at NZXT. which is our products are the only products that appear on camera. So there would be a, there would probably be a reason to do some cool aesthetic things in the future,

wouldn't there? So that, that's kind of where we're kind of going here too. Like how do we maybe embrace that a little bit more? How do we maybe kind of serve that customer a little bit more? So all of these things are things we're thinking about all the time. So you said, you said,

RGB scene making a comeback, which first off was a hilarious line. I love that. But are you saying that people aren't as into RGB as they used to? It's just kind of an anecdotal thing I've noticed amongst, let's say, just the headset world, and that it's kind of gone, it's kind of decreasing in terms of its real estate on headsets, for example. Whereas in the past, they would have the big, you know, the big circle cups. The big cups would be RGB. And now it's kind of like maybe just the microphone on the boom. Or like an accent. or something. Dennis, can you jot down what Patrick said about the RGB scene so we can tweet that later, please? Yeah, for sure. I never understood RGB on headsets because you never see them.

You don't see them. It's for other people. Yeah. Well, I guess if you're a streamer, but I don't know why you get a haircut if I'm, if, if I can't see my hair. Well, I, I start in the mirror like every, you know, every 30. Well, it's, you start your day just looking at yourself like, people tend to want to amplify their own personalities as much as they possibly can otherwise why go on camera right

good point so so so the trick is for us if we were going to go down this route how do we do it in a way that serves this community this customer and also in a way that's authentic and I think that's really that's really where the rubber

sort of meets the robe there. So long-winded way of saying maybe. Okay. Okay. Another, so I saw several questions about the specs, people asking, you know, what's the frequency response? What's the polar pattern? What are the dimensions,

etc.? Can you just give like a quick spec rundown for people? Sure. It's as far as the actual dimensions and the weights and the height and lengthen with this way, that's all online. It's a 24-bit, 96-kilhertz microphone, has USBC output. It's got a headphone output with real-time monitoring, so you don't have to install any software. It's a cardioid only. There's a headphone knob. There's a gain knob. It's got a built-in pop filter, which is actually very substantial. It's a very substantial sort of pop filter. It's got a built-in sort of rubber-mounted shock mounts. We actually, we went with some other subtle things that would make it easier to connect to a boom arm. So companies typically put out a little tiny adapter. Ours is a really long adapter, so you can get a little bit more rotation this way. We also put a giant, I think it's a nine-foot-long cable, a USBC to USBA cable.

So if you wanted to run, do a long run, some people have their VCs kind of in frame going back to being on camera. Some people will have their PCs actually in frame, which means the damn things way far away from you. So, like, damn, I wish I could plug this in. We thought about that. And the whole thing just works. You just plug it in and you're good. Also, I think I touched on this a little bit,

but when you pop this out of the stand, obviously you expose, comes with a quick release stand. I obviously should mention that. When you release this thing from the stand, you actually expose a little bit of this back. so we actually put a little back cover with the product as well. So you'll be able to kind of cover that and hide that. And wouldn't that be a cool spot for some accessory?

Wow, I really did think of everything, huh? Sure did. So, and it's also parked, again, everything's parked from the factory to be as easy as you can possibly get right of the gate. So it defaults to 24-bit 48 mode, which is like the universally accepted. bit depth and sample rate for most programs obviously Discord, Twitch, OBS, it all kind of defaults 24-bit 96. Some things except, or 2448, Audacity Logic, Pro Tools will accept 2496. So you can use that, but it defaults to the more universally accepted bit depth and sample rates. You don't have to even tweak that. We parked everything at 50% right out of the gate, and it's truly as plug-in-play as you can possibly

get. And again, it levels up to that vision of just kind of making it easy. So someone asked if we're going to make a RGB back cover. And what do you want to even better? We should translate our experience with the crack in Z and make that little back cover than when you pop in a LCD screen and you can put gifts on it. And it'll be $500 and people will run out to the store to buy it because it's such a ridiculous concept that you can't can't not buy it. Like, think about it, right? You're streaming and it's like, you know,

thank you, you know, whatever, it's like scrolling text, right? Thank you, Alex, for following the stream or something. That'd be dope. That'd be real, that'd be kind of cool. It would be a, what, a $100 ad on. No, I don't know. Again, you know, maybe, man. If that's like the kind of thing.

Or hell, why not? I mean, we would be foolish, I think, to not listen to our customers if the, if the demand is there. there, why not be the supply? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's like, we definitely like hearing people's ideas. I think the one that's more helpful is when people complain to us about what's wrong on our setups now.

So if you all, I mean, even complain about our stuff to us if it's legit, right? If you're actually pissed off at stuff, like we're, they do. Oh, yeah, for sure. But, but, you know, I'll say we are, we are, you know, we are listening. Like, it'd be interesting to see if, like, what channel would be the best in our Discord for that. Just tweet it. Just tweet at NZXT and then we'll find it.

It's actually a good topic to kind of discuss a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, because people give us, you know, not just complaints, you know, like it's not really a complaint, but it's like people would give constructive criticism or I guess sometimes complaints too. positive feedback at times negative feedback at times you name it but what a lot of people don't realize is that you know we primarily Dennis here he does a really good job at jotting this feedback down and actually sharing it with people like it doesn't just disappear into the vortex and I know you know we have a lot of fun on social media and you know sometimes people you know ask a question about airflow and we'll

respond with the meme or something, but, you know, we're really, we're still sharing that information. Yeah. We're still telling the product team, hey, you know, everyone's asking about, you know, mesh cases, you know, and it's not that we're ignoring you guys, I guess, by not doing all these different things that you're asking for. It's just, you know, we also have to prioritize the things we got going on and what we can do ourselves, you know, and, you know, we don't know what the future holds. So maybe one day these products you guys are suggesting to us, we actually will make them one day. Like I know someone here just asked when we're coming out with the headset.

And I saw a lot of comments yesterday about the headset on Instagram. And for those that don't know, if you go to, here, I'll drop the link here so you guys can read it yourself. But basically, you know, when we announced our headset and stand and mixer back in September 2019, which by the way I think you could listen to Patrick's podcast yeah not in September I think we was the last time was in the podcast yeah I think it was about I think it was about a year ago almost exactly yeah but ultimately you know Patrick and the team decided you know this is not living up to our expectations and rather than just push it out there

and try to sell it like let's just bite the bullet and make it better and figure it out right I'll touch on that a little bit. So again, we release a product with two things. We release a product with a point of view, right? And we release a product with some assumptions. And the assumptions that we make can, if they can be tweaked as we go, that's okay. That's good, right? Because we're learning something, right?

If on the other hand, we release a product with some assumptions that we can't tweak, say comfort of a headset, then that's a no-go. That we can't fix that on the fly, right? So ultimately, we really felt like we could do a little bit better on some things that we couldn't adjust via firmware, let's say. And that's really why we decided not to go with it. as far as when we will have headsets, stay tuned.

That's why the page is on the site, yeah. Eyes emoji, right? Thinking emoji with monocle. That's going right. I see. Speaking of monocles, Dennis. Did a break? Uh-oh.

Emote. I think my camera broke. Can you guys hear me still? Uh-oh. Hold up, folks. We got to do a little bit of troubleshooting here. Hold on for a second. Technical difficulties.

Why do you decide to make this thing look so sassy? Well, so our industrial design team. Are you guys there? Hello? Test test. We got you. Cool. Awesome. Yeah.

I didn't hear you guys like the last like three seconds. I was about to throw on. some of my technical difficulty thing. Let's say we're back. Are we good? I don't know. My cam is like dead. I don't know what happened to it.

But we'll just, we'll just, we'll just rule like this. Someone said, even talking about the headsets is causing problems. Not enough airflow in the cast.

Oh, no. But yeah, like, I was asking before we got disconnected is why did this thing look so sassy? Like, it looks like the capsule's holding his arms on his hips. It's,

or its hips. Merely a byproduct of the function of the product. We wanted to, again, minimize the chance for, again, pilot error for this product. So we would, for example, limit the degree of rotation that a customer could have while it's on the stand. This way and that way, right? We also wanted to make this look proportional. We also wanted to have a quick release mechanism here. So that dictated some of the shape.

Also wanted a way to put the cables nice and neat in between. And this is the result. And it kind of just sort of looks like this. I don't think it was intentional, although I think we should run with it now. But our industrial design team is stunningly good. Stunningly good. There's never a single... Designed in house.

There's never a single time when the team shows me something, and I'm never like, oh, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. every single time. Every single time they show me something, I'm like, wow, that's incredible. And we'll really, we get in this position where they'll show like five concepts. And it's like, well, I don't know.

And they're like, well, which one do you like best? And it's like, well, we'll have to like rank them, which ones we like best. And then that's the hard part because they're all so freaking good. Yeah. So this was the winner. Yeah. I think the first thing we noticed was a little arm,

little arm thing. I think like, yeah, they're like, yeah. When we saw this thing, probably like, I don't know when we first saw this. It was a long time ago. Me and Dennis looked at each other. We're like, this thing has a lot of mean potential. Because it just literally looked like the capsule's just like judging you there.

I have the Karen version pulled up right now on the stream with the haircut. It's like, I want to talk to your manager. Or I want your manager to speak into me. And we're obviously not the only ones to notice. that because yesterday on our general Slack channel, the memes were flowing. A lot of people at work making them as well. So, cool. I think it's funny to see. Should we throw out the next one, Ivan, soon? Should it do it live on the air so people can see it? Yes. Yeah. Oh, another meme, live on air? Are you guys ready for this? Let's do it. Let's do it. Do some live tweeting. Where'd the

capsule memes go? Oh, wow, this chat went weird on me. Because there's so many. Yeah, why you're looking for it. I'll say the meeting that I first came up, someone was like, that kind of looks like, yeah, when we first discovered, so this is almost, you know, this is, this is months ago. And I just remember us, like, not being able to actually do anything because we were just all making variations of this. But, like, adding on, like, monocles and, like, top hats and,

and bow ties and stuff. And it looked too, it was too funny. It was too good. It wasn't kind of a poor quality one. I can't throw that one up. I'll keep looking for a good version of this one. The one that I have is like, is blurry, so I don't want to throw it up. I'll just remake it.

It doesn't uphold your, it's not up to your level of quality. Yeah, I mean, it might be even funnier if it is a blurry image you just throw up. Like a Photoshop thing, it's like 500,000 hours in MSPaint or something crazy like that. But anyway, yeah, it's good stuff. You guys have any more questions for the homie Pat or even Alex? Alex is our resident streaming guru and he's had a lot of input into this project as well, as well as future upcoming stuff, right? We're working on like a lot of things and, you know, he's pretty active in our community.

So if you all don't know our good homie Mushu Beef, aka Alex, make sure you give my shout out on the internet's. Yeah, even if not here, we, we, we, are going to be getting those blogs. And it's just going to be really important. Like even, you know, tweaking to some of the settings, a lot of questions around, you know, is this going to have, you know, what kind of software

can I use it? Do I need to have an video broadcast, right? I think that's stuff that I'm really excited to dive into and kind of see my role on this, on the microphone is to, yeah, just like when people start getting it into their hands, like what works for them, what doesn't work for them? Like, let's talk about it, right?

Yeah. Tweet at the account. The stock in Discord. Yep. Feel free to ask me questions. We used to have a streaming channel, a tech support channel. I think that's something that we took away for the time being. I think we're trying to find out the right answer for it.

But yeah, just feel free to tag me anytime. I'm happy to help out with people's setups and settings and whatnot. Pretty much, pretty much. Here's one. Patrick, do you have a question for the community? Do you have a question for us here on the cast? Or Alex? Both y'all can ask any one of us a question.

A question for you guys. Yeah. What's your favorite NXD product? The capsule. Me too. I know. To honest, I actually really want that boom. I need that boom like expeditiously.

Boom boom. Every time you say, like I'm, yeah, sorry. William I am is my favorite artist. I still think, just to answer the question seriously, I still think the H1 is probably one of the most beautiful cases we've ever made. Like, no lie, it's an amazing thing. No shot, dude. It's so good.

I love it. No shot. No shot. A question for the chat. Oh, here is. This is something we have actually talked about. Well. Listen up chat.

Pay attention. Is NZXT a gaming company? Or is NZT a streaming company? I feel like you've asked this question to very important people. in the past. People were saying yes. We've trained them very well because that's what we do all the time and people ask these questions.

We're like, yes. The correct answer is we are a lifestyle brand like sodium. That's true. We do sell hoodies or we used to. We're naturally sold out of that drop. Like Harley Davidson of a... An experienced company.

We sell experience. Our goal is to make like computers easy and accessible for gamers to use right. If someone had to ask me, I would say we're a gaming company.

We are solving world hunger because you know, if you're having fun and hungry for drip. No real talk. I mean, I think you'll see this more and especially why we want to get in the blogs is that a lot of is super complicated to get into. And I think if you're an enthusiast and if you're really into it and we geek out over stuff,

it's really exciting, but making it easier is what it's all about. So they want you to play the guitar, by the way. You should play, definitely play guitar. Can you even some acoustic? What are you feeling? Yeah. Oh, God. I've never put on the spot like this.

Let me see. Let me grab my Martin real quick. All right. Live performance. Live performance. Are we might, we might have to, okay, so here's a thing, by the way. So, so hold up, hold up. Another blog post idea.

Are we just going to ignore the fact that Patrick is wearing shoes inside the house? Yeah. I just spotted that. This man's wearing shoes. He's wearing shoes indoor. How disrespectful. I'm never taking the Jordan's off, honey. The Jay stay on.

The Jay stay on in the house. So, Pat, do you point it at the ballpark? Right. Is that the thing? Yeah, let me see here if I can. All right. We might have to see if Discord is going to even send the guitar because this happens all the time. Yeah, we might have to turn off some stuff.

But look at that microphone arm in action. Okay. I can't hear it now. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we're going to have to go in the Discord settings. Yeah. Are you down to do this?

Live tech support? It's exciting. We just discuss Discord settings, voice in video, and uncheck noise suppression. We're going to hear some wild stuff now. It's like a party in the back. ground like it's going down it's under yeah so voice and video advanced noise suppression uncheck that oh oh we got it oh okay we got it you might want to adjust your uh your auto automatic gain control yeah no no i think uh oh lord is it is it is it too is it too

quiet is it is it is it so so word yeah uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh so so so word uh uh uh uh uh What it is is you probably have either the automatic input sensitivity on or you don't have your, yeah, you don't have the auto or it's not low enough to catch. Ooh. I don't know. I like it. No, no. I mean, hey, so, I mean, this is also a good moment to mention, too, like when you are on calls with people, like, all these call programs actually do a lot of work to make sure they're reducing other sounds as much as possible. So whenever you want to send something not voice over Discord, or.

or whatever chat application. It's actually really hard to do it. It's actually a feat. It's straight up. Yeah. Everyone chat saying like Discord has issues with music. Discord hates anything that hates everything that isn't voice, which is true because I'll play music through my wavelength software here before the show.

And podcast, here sounds great, sounds perfect. On Discord, it like purposefully, like does something with whatever, like, audio codec they do where it just sounds like butt cheeks. straight booty. So it colors the sound a lot. It basically has a, it recognizes your input device, input device. Then it has the noise suppression by crisp using an opus codec. And then there's some other things.

There's a lot of big words there. They don't understand. Noise reduction, echo cancelization. It's just very, in order to record the guitar the right way, I would have to like really go in, adjust my game settings, put some filters on it. Yeah. And we should,

we should do it. I've recorded with mine before like, oh yeah. 11th study says, TLDR is processed. Yeah, it's basically processed and tuned specifically for voice

with Discord. Imagine a place where you can't play music. It's basically what the tagline should be. That's even a more, a good reason why you would want to have a microphone with as clean of a slate as possible going in. Got them.

Because, because OBS does the same thing. Obviously, Discord. It's going to color your sound in this way that Discord thinks it should be colored. So if you were to layer in a whole other level of coloring on top of that, it's going to just make everything wacky and weird. So it's good to have as clean as slate as you can. And that's, by the way, that's audio 101 for anybody to have, like, as, on the input side,

it's be as clean as you possibly can going in. And then from that point on, anything that's processed, if that's handled by OBS, then you can just go into OBS and tweak it. So what you're saying is that if you buy this microphone, you will be able to see sounds with colors. Yeah, exactly. Mind-blown, okay. That's great. I mean, it's true, right? Like you want to make the best use of all your equipment.

I'm going to make best use of, you know, one of your best instruments, which is your voice, right? Why not get a good microphone? Whether it's ours or another. mic right? Yeah, exactly. Be good to you. It's like getting a good, I don't know, like a good pair of shoes, like a good chair, you know, like, you don't think about it, but once you do it, like the differences is like night and day. Yep. Exactly. I have a question for chat. I'm sorry I haven't actually. I heard you. No, go for it. Yeah. So for the people that stream slash when you have your microphone, um, do you intentionally turn off or try to like limit the amount you can hear yourself? Because. this is something that Pat and I are talking about. And since we already talked about kind of side tone adjustment or that feedback,

there's something where it's like, hey, this is something that when you are a broadcaster or you're going to be sending your voice over the air and, you know, in some kind of show, like just like how important is to hear yourself. And like crossing that chasm of cringing at your own voice, being able to get through that is so important. Yes. Because otherwise, it's like just coming to like to grips with how your voice sounds and being like, okay, this is just how my voice sounds. It's different from when I talk and I hear myself, but when I put it on my headphones and I'm hearing my voice through mic and like, wait, is that how I really sound? Like that, once you get over that, like kind of embracing that. And so that was something that we're kind of like talking about. Like how much is this really like a big topic?

Because I know a lot of Twitch streamers, they just straight up like don't want to monitor their own voice. I can answer that a little bit for the chat because people are giving some answers here in chat too but I would say as someone who does streaming who has worked in production and I know you have as well you have to get over the fact you don't like your own voice

to know what you sound like especially when you're like saying a word for like myself I say like a lot and I know it's a filler word for me I say an excessive amount trust me chat I know I see you but also also so you can tell what you sound like, and especially if you're monitoring, monitoring all of your

audio, right? For myself, I have it sat on my way up to 50-50 because I do like to hear myself a little bit, but not excessively so. Like I still want to hear my game, my music, the call that I'm in way more than when you hear myself, but at the same time, I recognize that I need to know what I sound like, especially for streaming. But if it's not one-to-one, I can't do it, right? It has to be one to one. It has to be like that instant feedback, which is why I don't like certain softers that do it for you because there's always like that like point five millisecond. And it messes you up hearing yourself come back, not in real time. Right.

Yeah. You end up talking much slower. Yes. Yes. It messes up with you. There's straight up. Isn't there like a game that you, I'm pretty sure there's a game where like something like an app on the phone where the challenge is to read through a prompt, but they play your voice back at a delay. And so the funny thing is that you, you just sound.

Your brain just stops working. And so you're talking and then all of a sudden you just start jumbling your words or you're speaking inconsistently. So it's something I think it's a blog topic, but also something that it's like, okay, this is a challenge of just the people learning to, like when people do you complain about like, oh, I want to turn my voice off. I don't want to hear myself. It's like, well, it's an important part of the process of becoming a broadcaster or anytime you're doing a show. is to know what you sound like and so that you can have that be something that you can control

and so yeah just it's cool to see the responses here well there's two things about monitoring one is if you don't have any monitoring you tend to talk way louder because you can't hear yourself

and if you're talking way louder then you're going to clip your input and you're going to sound like shit and we don't want you to sound like shit now the other side of this thing too is a lot of times if you can hear yourself kind of back in your in your in your in your in your in your in your in your in your can's monitoring yourself creatively speaking you tend to kind of play with the voice a little bit you tend to kind of like be more of an actor a little bit more I kind of like Alex and I were talking about this I think two weeks ago which is basically like when you have your camera turned on in in in like for a work call for example what do you do you're looking at yourself all time right yes we all do we all are like you know You making sure the right angle is hit.

What is that? I do it all the time. Exactly. Someone clip that, please. But what you're doing is you're monitoring yourself visually. Yes. And if you weren't to have that camera on, in the same way that if you weren't to have your side tone on,

you'd probably interact with your audience a little bit differently. Yes. And so if you want to have that side tone on or monitoring on, then you're kind of going to be a little bit more of a personality. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Now, ultimately, at the end of the day, it's just preference. Ultimately. But I think to kind of blend that stage, you said it yourself, you had yours that kind of 50-50.

Yes. That's exactly where we default the microphone to. Ultimately, I think you're going to want to have it. And by the way, on your cell phone, the next time you go to make a phone call, check this out, you can hear just a little teeny tiny baby bit of your own voice mixed into your cell phone. Oh, no. And so what they're doing is they're piping that, your microphone, right? right into your earpiece.

And if you didn't have that, you would feel real weird. That would be a really weird experience. You ever taking a call with noise cancelling headphones, you know the feel. Everything is... That sounds like you're talking.

It's sucked out or something. Yeah. I was wondering what that was. I never knew. Yeah, I can't use... Your body does want to hear itself. And that is why, like, if you are talking with,

especially the noise canceling headphones that don't give you side tone back, you're just going to end up yelling, right? like you'll get looks. Like I'm sure people have had experience with this with someone on the phone and that's like yelling. Yeah,

or talking way too loud. Have you ever talked to your old grandpa who can't hear? He's screaming all the time. Oh, true. Yeah, because you can't hear yourself. And it sounds terrible, but, you know,

it's, that's why, because they're like, they can't hear themselves. So therefore they can't, you know, and this is part of the reason why it's kind of a catch-22, I guess,

because part of the reason why people hate the sounds of their own voice is because, the resonant frequencies that they hearing within their own body, resonating within their own chest, within their own mouth, going up to their own ear canals. It's a different kind of tone

than as you're hearing it played back. And the reason why a lot of people hate their own voice is because there's like this weird tension between what you think you sound like versus what you are and you kind of tend to suffer an ego crisis because now you don't know who you are anymore. So there's also that.

I don't blame either. I'm always going through that same crisis. Every morning I wake up. Like, who am I? What am I doing here? What do I sound like, every day? I'm like, man, I sound sexy.

All right, Drake. Have you guys ever stared into a mirror? And this is actually a good question for chat. Have you ever stared into the mirror and have like locked eyes with yourself? And for a moment of time, a brief moment of time, you disassociate yourself from yourself.

And you realize that it's you, staring at you, staring at you, staring at you and you kind of suffer an ego death? Yeah, I have done that. Weird, right? What is that? Thanks for reminding me about that. Look at it after a horror movie.

And you kind of have to, like, sit down and go like, oh, my God. You kind of have, like, like, gather yourself a little bit. So anyway, don't ever do that, though. I've had that weird feeling, not looking in the mirror, but believe it or not, like, in the shower. Weird. Like, I'll just be, like, washing my hair or something. And then I'll, like, like, that thought, that same thought just pop into my mind for some reason. It's kind of a...

Oh, boy. Maybe I'm having to have a midlife crisis. Who knows? No, it's, it's like a disassociation. It's like, it's you, you are tied to yourself like this in a lot more ways than you realize. And I swear to God, there's a point to this. So when you, like, have those brief moments of separation from yourself. to yourself.

And again, this is why people, I think, why people hate hearing the sounds of their own voice. Because there's some disassociation there. It's like, well, that's not me, but it is you,

but it's not you. And there's like this weird kind of thing that happens in sort of internally. I don't know when this turned into a Joe Rogan podcast, by the way. You did you open your third eye, Patrick. Yeah. It's been open, baby.

It's been open. My third eye, I can literally, like, without joking, right even though it is kind of a funny situation i can say that october of 2019 specifically that month and i haven't knows because i told i've been about this is when my third eye was officially open and that's when i realized my like sense of self and like that whole

ego death thing and it was really bad for like for like two months because i think it's like just it was like right when i started the job i literally told i'm a hey dude so you know i'm growing I'm going to do something right now. I literally happen like the weekend after got hired or something. I was like, hey, just by the way, dude, like there's something going on. Just FYI. I'm cool, but I might be dying and not in the way that you think. Now let's make some means.

What, uh, what do you think triggered that? I can tell you, but I don't want to sit on the air. Oh, okay. Okay. It's not, it's not like dark. It's just more like, uh, not appropriate for work setting, you know? If I was talking Deeply personal, you know, and that story is your own.

I want to say it's personal because like, because like I've said this like publicly before, but not like in a NZC podcast setting before. But I'd just say that, yeah, that I realized some things about myself and about other people. I was like, man, like, I need to be a little bit better to people and need to be like more conscious of like their own lives.

Because like you don't realize, right, that every single person walking around on the internet that you're speaking to is their own person with their own experiences. And they're probably thinking the exact same thing that you're thinking in the sense of like, who am I, what am I doing? My life is very important to me, right? Everybody is important to themselves, as you should be, right?

Because it's you, it's your life. It's the only life you got. So I would argue that you did not suffer an ego death. I would say you were simply reborn. You're here first, folks. How about that? All right, breaking news, guys. The giveaway just ended.

Dun dun dun dun dun Anyway It is yeah Anyway let's give away a microphone I gotta change this subject before we all Start crying on here I say anyway let's give away a microphone Congratulations to

Bianca L and Jose A Yay You guys just won capsule mics I got one hold up hold up I got on for you guys Congratulations you just won yourself a capsule Mike in a three no I'm going to say like a three net getaway and click you for a free iPod. I wish but yeah congrats and keep an eye on your email we'll email you guys shortly about how to redeem your prizes. Thank you everyone who entered and shout out to

everyone saying congrats in chat because I'd be like salty I can get it at yeah yeah well I have I have good good news for those of you who did not win oh yeah we actually actually have another giveaway going on right now. I'm going to drop the link. Oh, snap. Where, Ivan? Drop the link down below. Right there.

nzxte.c.co slash capsule. And all you got to do is go on Twitter and tell us how you will use a capsule microphone with the hashtag NZXT capsule or sorry, pound sign NZT capsule. No way. So plug and blank, fill in the blank. How will you use the capsule? and this giveaway ends next week. So if you haven't entered that one, please do so.

Also, I just thought about this. It's not a task. It's literally put in whatever you want to put in there. Within reason. Don't be a butthead. But, yeah. Fair enough. I will feed you some personal answers that I would do to this.

So you can do plug and dub anime. Dob and say, He's one, he's one, he's one, he's one, he's one, when they're not really one. They're actually more like three or four shot, so you can stop lying. You could also say, duh, they were one. Yeah, you could also plug and blame lag. That's the good one, too. You can also plug and admit that maybe you're not that good and that you could get better,

and it just takes time and effort, and you will eventually, are you drinking soilent, dude? Nope. No? Do you hear about that guy who drank nothing but. So I went for like two months or something. You see if he could live off of it? Is he dead? No, he got super depressed, though, because apparently a lot of, like, your, like, happiness

is also tied to, like, experiences. And the experience of drinking a soy-based drink all day, every day is, like, not delicious. And, like, because it's just, like, consuming nutrients, but you're not, like, enjoying your meals. And he said that he actually got sad for a bit. Well, I enjoy it. Did you get all the time? I mean, I, no, no, no, well, it's, it's mostly, it's, it's, it's, especially when I am trying to cut.

Yeah. Or just, yeah, I've been eating a lot of food lately. I love to cook. Dude. And so anything that, because whenever I cook, I cook like one and a half meals. Yeah.

And I eat the whole thing, you know? I always make way too much. Yeah. Anyways. No shot, no shot, dude. I mean, that's cool.

I had no shot on. His thing was, his thing was he did nothing but drink soilant. forever. And I think that's where it was. I think if it's like for meal replacement, like totally cool, right? It's like, it's like having a shit or thing in the morning. Yeah, I'll do it through like where if I'm trying to, you know, not like, yeah, reduce calories in a day. Because I'm, especially if it's like a meaningful day like today. Yeah. I'm not going to like get to the gym. So is it meaningful because you're here with us? Or meaningful and meaningful.

And never mind. Whatever. I thought, I thought you were like saying that you were like really happy to be on the show, but it's okay. I'm really happy to be on the show. To be honest, I should probably pick some up. I heard they got flavors now, right? And they're pretty tasty. So anyway, anyway, folks. Yeah, they're good. Real quick, before we wrap this up, Dennis, with the announcements.

I've seen like four or five comments about this, so I'm going to have to address it. But people are saying that Patrick looks like some guy from a movie. So, Pat, I don't know. you want to let people know, but Patrick was actually the character Wesley and Mr. Belvedere. It was, yeah. Back in the 80s, yeah, he grew up and now he works

at in ZXT. Yeah, it was actually I got the part actually through Ivan's uncle. He was a talent manager at ICM as one of the big talent agencies out there. And he basically asked me, he said, look, hey, do you want to act in one of these

obscure 80s movies? And I said, yeah, that sounds good. but do you how can I how much money can I have and he said well we got to negotiate and I said well how do I negotiate he goes well we'll work with Ivan uh-huh get my nephew a job at nzxte one day exactly yourself a deal right as a line item right in the contract yeah so now I'm here what movie by the way what are they talking about I don't know I've seen like four or five people saying that you look like you've been in a movie or like you look like an actor or something the something that you're really handsome is basically what they're trying to say thank you

I, like, thank you. No one said that about me, but, you know, whatever. I'm, like, I'm going to point that out. Well, I'm, I'm pretty ugly and like, and like, like, like, stupid, you know? So, like, any, any, you know, ego I can get would be, this is great. Says the guy who designed a whole microphone, I mean. Listen, we, I, I, I, we, it was all a team effort, man. There was no.

Oh, I love that answer. That's good. I didn't do, I didn't do, I showed up. I plugged it in. I made sure it did what it's, supposed to do and the in order for this thing to be successful beyond launch we we are all going to have to work together and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and if they need to be tweaked and even if they don't need to be tweaked listen listen to what

our customers are saying uh embrace everything and just do a little better each time that's the win I love that that's great it's really really good really good It ended off on, yeah. snaps in chat. I'm inspired. I'm inspired. I'm inspired right now. Yeah.

Thank you. I'm actually my Oscar speech next. Last bit here. Ivan, we have announcements, right? We have a lot of announcements. We have like three announcements or so. That's a lot to me. You want me to do them?

Yeah, please. All righty, Dennis. No problem. So first announcement for y'all is a thank you for participating in last week's NST summer party. It was a blast. We know there's still a bunch of prizes that need to go out. Please be patient.

We're just a little slow right now because we launched a microphone this week. So don't worry, the prizes, if you haven't got them already, they are all going out soon. So Hank tight. And speaking of the microphone, like I said, if you've listened to this podcast, we did launch a new microphone and boom arm. Go to nzxt.com slash capsule.

You guys can check it out, learn all about it. I know the boom arm is sold out right now currently. I'm not sure when they'll be back in stock, but keep checking back and hopefully they'll be back soon. Next order of business here is I want to tell y'all, even though he's not an actor, you know, he does have a link tree. So go to link tree whatever slash musho beef.

and follow him all over social media, especially Twitter. Tag him, if you have questions about streaming especially. He's like the smartest human being on this planet when it comes to streaming. He doesn't see that. Yeah, he is.

Patrick, is it cool if I dropped your Instagram? Yeah. All right, if you want to follow J. Patrick Butler. There's this link right there. Bradley Cooper look-alike Oh, stop. Geez, Louise. And last...

He's got nothing on me, baby. Last but not least, I want to give a huge shout out to Carter's PC for forcing Dennis to finally start uploading videos to TikTok. So NZXT has a TikTok

channel now. And you guys can follow at NZXT on TikTok and we'll be uploading some funny videos there. I think we have like three or four videos now, but we filmed a bunch already last week, and we're going to be uploading them throughout the next couple of days.

And I'll start responding to you folks as well, you know. So give us those hot comments. We have some content to reply to. I actually want to talk about that a little bit. It's really funny because I always thought Carter was kind of funny, and I would just like go into his comments on the NZ60 TikTok account and just like just respond like really like dumb stuff. Just like we always do ever, right?

And I think, I guess people aren't used to our social media style or our social media voice on TikTok yet. So they're like, yo, N60 come in here. They're savage or these guys are crazy. Like, what are they talking about? Like, they're really weird. And I guess Carter noticed and he made a video saying that we should post something. And just so happened that we were literally about to launch your TikTok like the day before because we wanted to do it like around the same time we did the microphone. So we're like, oh, let's just do it a day early.

Like, why not? You know, like, he called us out. everyone's like looking at us now this is like the perfect timing to do this thing so we done did it so we have a TikTok now enjoy it dude I love the hangover

but that's it for me Dennis you want to just wrap it up yeah any parting words from Alex and Patrick the main takeaway that I want people to understand from this microphone is that

we wanted to minimize as much pilot errors we could from this product. We wanted to make this as truly as plug and play of an experience as we possibly can. And the thing just kind of works and it just kind of sounds good. And I'm very blessed. I'm very lucky to work at a company that gets that, work at a company that is always with a gamer in mind, the streaming gamer in mind, everything we do. and if you have any questions about anything

regarding anything NZT certainly anything streaming we have the smartest most talented people in the industry or fight anyone on that but work at NZXT and they will be more than happy including myself

to answer any questions you may have about anything at all. There you go. Yeah, I'll throw us in two cents as well we're all here to learn and grow and we want to one together. I mean we say I kind of like half jokingly say these company

values that we have. But, no, it is true, though. Like, we're definitely listening. We are excited for, you know, what we're, what we have now, but also excited for the future as well. And you just want to reiterate, this is not something we're going to abandon. It's going to continue to, you know, expand the capability. And we have some really exciting stuff coming in the next couple of years.

And, yeah, I mean, you guys know. You all know where to find us, so feel free to tag us anytime. We are listening and we do care. And I think the challenging part is always like that there's, we try to listen and do the best thing that we can for as many people as possible. And while upholding, you know, what our values are, what our perspective on what a product should be. But yeah, we're going to keep at it. This is not something that we're just doing a one and done. So can't stop, won't stop, right?

Pretty much. All right, guys, thank you very much. Let me throw this up here. A, thank you for joining us, Alex and Patrick. Thank you. Anytime. Hey, thanks. And thank you to everybody who tuned in.

Remember to tune in next week at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time of the official N60 Twitch and follow at N60 on all relevant and irrelevant social media. And if one asks this question off the air, you can send an email. email to podcast at n6.com. That is P-O-D-C-A-S-T, if you don't want to spell a podcast, at N-Z-X-T, just like how it's spelled.com.

And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud, and also TwitchBods, too, if they're up or not up. And, yeah, you know, send us a positive review. If you like what you hear,

and if you don't, share the show with the friend, share the show with your, with your local, Bradley Cooper lookalike. I'm sure they might enjoy it as well. Send it to your friendly neighborhood streaming guru as well or even online. You know, if you want to send the podcast to Alex, so you can listen to it after the fact, that'd be even cooler. I'm sure he would love to have all DMs just with the same link over and over.

And thank you to Poppy. I've been for being my left-hand man. Anytime. Because I do be left and up here. Thank you very much, folks. And we'll see you next time. Bye.