#goxlr

So, I occasionally post tech stuff here, so have some thoughts on the GoXLR Mini after owning one for a few weeks:

Here's some dumb thoughts on the GoXLR mini after having owned it for a while. I dunno if this is the right channel, but lemme know if you want me to relocate

Short version: It's... Okay. Long version... Well.

First things first, this cunt only has 24V phantom power. This is a downgrade from the big boy GoXLR, and is mentioned nowhere (except in tiny text on the datasheet). This is a huge fucking deal, because 24V is basically not a thing any more. If you're gonna use this with a condenser mic, bring your own power supply. That said, for dynamic mics, or condensers with your own power, the input is pretty clean. If you're after squeaky clean, go for a Focusrite, but for podcasting or streaming, this is a perfectly cromulent preamp setup. As I understand it, it's just a Behringer pre, which makes sense as TC Helicon is owned by them.

Having optical in is nifty as fuck, especially if you wanted to use an external input in your streams. If you've got a console, it's designed for that, but if you wanted to run an external player or PC as an input, it's great for that too. Being optical, it's squeaky clean too, and sounds good.

On the output side of things, you've got a headphone output, which sounds pretty alright, but it's not the most powerful. Again, I suspect this is Behringer's electronics here, which for all the shit we give them, are pretty decent. It's got a 3.5mm mic in on the front too, which is fine for capturing headset input, but I wouldn't want to use it for more than that. It's not great, but anything you'd want to plug into it is probably pretty shit anyway, so no biggie.

Now for the weird.

The software is a pretty inconsistent mix of good and woeful. Going back to my main issue with this, the phantom power is labelled as 48V, likely just the devs being lazy and copy/pasting from the GoXLR software. They include a little mic gain tool to set your gain. It's functional, but a bit shit, and you're better off just making your own recordings to set your input gain. on the positive side, you get a full blown parametric EQ for your mic, a passable compressor, and a passable gate, and you get the option of basic controls or full blown turbonerd controls. This is great, especially for a device aimed at people who don't know shit about audio.

On the theme of newbie friendly, the routing is stupidly easy to set up, especially compared to setups like Voicemeeter and the like. 10/10 here.

A weird niggle, but you can't remap the microphone bleep button, and having a hardware button for something that specific is both very dumb and very weird.