HUGE AUDIO UPGRADE WITH ACOUSTIC PANELS
THESE are going to help me with the audio quality of these videos. If you’ve watched any of my videos before you’ll know the audio quality isn’t as good as it could be. Now that’s not from a lack of trying, I’ve tried a lot over the years but nothing could save me from the echoing you can hear plain as day with my other mic – a Rode NTG4+. Seriously, this thing sounds awful. I’m hoping that with these panels I might have a chance at using this much better quality mic, although I’ll settle for my usual lavalier mic sounding better too. Let’s get this box opened and I’ll explain what’s so special about these panels.
I’ve tried to buy acoustic panels before but my god that’s a pain. Most come vacuum packed and the instructions recommend leaving them out for days to air out, or soak them in your bath and then let them dry out, and on top of that the reviews for different panels all say wildly contradictory things. Of course you’ve got options from people like Elgato – and those do look great – but something that makes these Streamplify panels stand out is these. These are desk clamps. In short the idea is that instead of trying to soundproof your whole room, if you only want to make your desk a bit quieter, say for a voice recording booth, you can just clamp these to your desk and away you go.
Now that’s not what I’m planning on doing, I’m going to use these – the clips that let them clip together – so I don’t have to mount them to the walls. They do come with an inordinate amount of 3M adhesive strips, likely due to their rather dense nature, but I’m planning on clipping a few of these together to have them just rest against my walls rather than permanently mounting them. You’ll see what I mean in a second.
One of the other interesting things are these lines – while these are a stylistic choice, they are also cut lines so you can split them up – either to trim them to the size of your desk, or to create cool patterns like their promo photos. You might be surprised by just how slim these are too – unlike the basic pyramid panels, these are just 12mm thick, or 1.2cm, but are super dense. There’s no dual density foam here though, something I think the Elgato ones do offer. Let me get these set up and I’ll do some before and after tests so we can see if there’s a difference.
Check out the video for the full sound tests!
