My Elgato Wave XLR finally took a pooper last week. Or at least it appeared like it did. While on Mooch’s “Crossfire” episode, the mixer threw every fit that it had been throwing for the last several weeks. I would lose everyone else’s audio, they would lose my mic, I would hear crackling voices…I force-closed Discord and re-entered the call several times. I changed USB ports. Then replaced the USB-A cable with a USB-C cable. Finally I gave up and just changed out the whole mixer.
While I ended that show feeling the Elgato was done for, I was reminded that I’d been about to throw out a Thrustmaster controller out a few weeks ago that I thought had gotten bricked during a firmware update. At the last minute, I’d decided to give it another go and it worked. I’d been convincing myself for months that the Wave XLR and my Mac mini M4 just did not get along and had an occasional spat. But all of the times before, unplugging and reconnecting had fixed the problem and I would only have the problem once. The episode of Crossfire was the first one where I’d experienced a cascading, repeating set of failures.
Still, I didn’t chuck it but sat it over at the160Stack, my gaming PC with the Ryzen 5950X+32GB DDR4+RTX 4070 GPU. Last night I decided to give it a test while playing some of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC. I used nVidia’s ShadowPlay (I have no idea what it is really called now and insist on continuing to use the old branding; LoL) to capture the game video and my mic, an Audio Technica AT-2035. the160Stack is my loudest gaming PC by far, boasting 10 fans.
And it gives off an audible roar that I can hear whenever I am mic’d up with headphones on and unmute. The Wave XLR worked fine. And using the Voice Focus plus the Noise Suppresor handled the wind noise with aplomb. If the mixer and those plugins can handle the160Stack, every other PC will be a breeze.
In the meantime, I’ve replaced it as a podcast mixer with the Maono E2 Gen2, which has performed pretty well although I have not QA’d its results thoroughly. I thought I could hear an airy kind of backdraft sound whenever I unmuted on the last podcast I was on. It has what looks like 3 different inputs to control the Mic level and I will have to play with those.
In other SysAdmin news, I migrated anything and everything I needed to out of Notion and into Apple Notes. Then closed and deleted my account. This was a major step towards prepping to be on Macs and iDevices only for my personal life-management and production work; I’ll only use Windows machines for gaming. The next major move is to get everything out of OneDrive so I can cancel my subscription to Office/Microsoft 365. There’s some synergy there because the only reason I ever started using Notion was because OneNote, which I used for 25 years, become so absolutely horrible. Now the primary reason I have kept a 365 subscription was for photo storage and my Apple One plan and all of my Apple devices handle that with aplomb. I’ll use a mix of Journal and Pages for daily tech diaries and blogging. The one nit I am concerned about is moving my Master Lifting Exercise spreadsheet from Excel to Numbers. I have never been efficient with navigating the differences between those two. I am starting to use Numbers at work and in small personal tasks to get used to the shift and to look for any gotchas. Worst case I’ll just move it to a Pages doc or a Note for now. Good times ahead.
Rounding Off Infinity 