Gaming's Second Greatest Scam: GAMING FOAM. 

just note, this specific product is targeting RU-vid\streaming content creation (simple vocal work) which is why I take such issue with it. as opposed to how this product performs in a professional studio environment targeting full spectrum sound attenuation.

My personal favorite is the Razer BattleLight. The description reads: The Razer BattleLight plugs into Razer’s Tarantula Keyboard’s BattleDock illuminating your Tarantula in a cool blue glow. Now you can take a full advantage of your Tarantula Keyboard’a gaming features in lowlight conditions giving you the unfair advantage over your adversaries.

These foam pads are a complete rip off. For most RU-vidrs sound blankets are more user-friendly and perform infinitely better for less money. Glad to see this overpriced junk finally being called out. Nice work 👍

This channel is a hidden gem. I keep getting impressed with overall quality of video edit, script and personality. Fantastic job dude 👊

More content creators need to include a completion bar for their sponsored content ads. It feels so much less intrusive that way and I never realized how much I actually wanted it to be normal practice until now.

I am wary about cheaping out on foam due to fire risk. While I won’t be doing any pyrotechnics in my room, the video from the station night club fire still haunts me.

apholstery foam and rockwool work very well as replacements for the more high end panels, I took the foam from some thick couch cushions and stacked them in the corners and just that deadened the room a lot, you can also use cushy furniture like couches or lounge chairs to cover a large portion of your bare wall space, also find moving blankets to be good materials (I use one effectively like a rug) for covering things like doors

I actually learned alot here, you rock! Also, moving blankets are pretty amazing too (only really to be used as a small, SMALL room setup for vocals or acoustic, i hang mine from the ceiling dor my vocal booth hehe)

Even tho I have some severe anxiety issues, this video gave me the motivation to start a youtube career. The sheer positive aura this man is emitting just feels so great!

Appreciate the foam breakdown and details, and good call on the command strips! Thinking of kitting out my home office as I'll need to record audio for my job so this has been an invaluable little guide. Cheers!

Great video! I had no idea that studio foam was so cheap, but this seems pretty accessible.

You know what would also help? Streaming in an open field. Just dead ass call up a farmer and be like "Can I game in your corn?"

Pro tip from someone with a decently treated home recording studio... get or build some actual acoustic panels that use insulation and are 4+" thick. Foam in general, especially 2" or 1" thicknesses, are really just attenuating high frequencies and you need a TON of it to be effective. A couple legitimate bass traps and a few acoustic panels will take up much less wall space and have a more uniform frequency coverage compared to covering every square foot of your walls and ceiling with foam. Actual rockwool or fiberglass insulation is much more effective per inch of thickness in absorbing sound than foam. The thickness matters because the lower the frequency, the longer the sound wave in physical space. A 500 Hz sound wave is about 2 feet long, but its really the quarter wavelength of the wave that matters due to where the highest amplitude of the wave sits which brings this down to 6". Since a wave has to travel into and out of an acoustic panel your 4" panel is effectively 8" thick to the wave, which makes it very effective at absorbing that 500 Hz wave. Its incredibly complicated to treat the sub range in a room since waves in that frequency range can be the entire length of your room, so special tools exist to combat those. Bass traps can help since the diagonal distance is much thicker and the waves will bounce in corners, and for many people that will do just fine in a home recording scenario. This is especially true if what you're recording is the human voice, just throw a hi-pass filter on the audio and remove everything in the sub range. To treat a room with professional acoustic panels can easily be $1k-$2k, but if you build them yourself you can get away with $300-$500 in material cost and only a few hours of time. Granted for the average video creator you probably don't care about uniform frequency coverage, and acoustic panels do cost more, but for those of you that DO care and don't want to coverage your entire walls they are the better option.

this wasnt even a video about the gaming foam it was just a foam tutorial liked and subscribed

You got me at the Homeless part

Liam you are a RU-vid legend already.

To be a bit technical here, some shapes absorbs more bass and others higher frequencies and so on. The room size or the sound source position also affects which and where frequencies reflects or dies. So, size, shapes, positioning, amount, even mic position in the room, all matters when there is a need to hear EXACTALY what is being played. And even If you look at professional studios you will noticed some aren't completely covered in foam. So, unless you want to work with music production or sound fx or other thing sound related that requires this absurd amount of precision, you can put some rugs, sofas, tables, shelves or even old mattresses in good positioning and get a pretty good acoustics for videos and streaming. Also, there are ways to calculate or speculate where you need to place things, and the internet is there, just search for room/acoustics treatment. Also I believe there are lists and pics with room sizes and where the sound reflects in it and even simulations that can help with that as well.

Just beware of how flammable the foam you're getting is. If you're not careful or buy the ultra cheapo AliExpress stuff, you might be turning your room into a giant match.

Another trick I learned from Spectre Sound Studios is that if you're in your bedroom, having a closet full of hanging clothes directly behind you will also work. One less wall to cover.

Cardboard on every surface: House fire: Allow us to introduce ourselves

Imagine having more then 4 walls in your room, couldn’t be me

I guess the weird architecture of my room where the roof is causing my room to be weirdly diagonal is why my room sounds decent.

2:19 Physically speaking what happens is that most of the waves get bounced against each other cancling each other out- Thats why they have a pyramid shape because that way when the soundwave hits on the two seperate sides the fly into each other and practically die due to opposing forces of roughly the same strenght

Came for the gaming foam roast, stayed for the studio setup advice

This channel is bound to blow up any day

Hey, stage technician here, I have a diploma in audiovisual and I just want to address a few things about sound and microphones that you didn't mention, first of dynamic mic aside, make sure that the mic you chose is a VOCAL MICROPHONE, I say that because some of the mics showed in that example were drum mics and so they could sound pretty weird for vocals, after that different mics have different sound signatures and what you like is different from everyone although there are different frequencies responses that sound better depending on the voice and etc, also low cut filters is pretty much a standard when mixing vocals, cuts out a lot of noise, and lastly, make sure to use either a cardioid polar patern mic or in other cases a shotgun mic if you really don't want to have a mic in your frame

That roast at the end got me 😂

The old car in GTA SA honk noise as a censor caught me off guard

Brah you nailed it when you said youtube and twitch streaming quality.

Gaming lights, gaming color, gaming food, gaming energy suppliments, Gaming audio, gaming table, Gaming rack, gaming gloves, gaming paper, gaming pens, gaming headphone stand. Anything can be slapped with gaming. There is gaming pawn too

I'm sure there is a Twitter post out there with Elgato quoting 'they will never raise their prices after being bought by Corsair'.. A year later their products went up 50-120%..

This is good for getting rid of the intense garbage but I would strongly recommend upgrading to fibre glass style panels to avoid that low-tone resonance that foam rooms always have. That way you can cover less space and get better results. I identified it within your own room as well. Pricier, but worth it. Love the style and content. Zero misinformation. Earned a sub.

I only just found this Channel about 10 minutes ago, and I am impressed at the editing and the amount of work that goes into making these videos. Subbed.

lol I watched that other guys video right before this lmao this ending was perfect! Thanks man! Subbed, great attitude!

"Tips to make sure your room sounds find" *shows SAW trap room*

2 years late, but if you're just doing edited content no face or anything, you can legit take a blanket and throw it over you and your monitor and have the same effect

The sequel we didn’t even know that we needed 🙌

I was thinking I was the only one who thought the $100.00 for the hex tiles was tooooo much...

I'm just tryna make my room less echoey, and for 100 bucks, they're the cheapest sound absorption panels you can get compared to the professional stuff.

Dynamic mics are the solution if you can't build a home booth or if you're planning to record very loud audio. If you combine a booth with a dynamic you're defeating the purpose

RU-vid randomly suggested this to me, and I feel you on the paint ruiner. If I may offer some experience on the various ways I got the 3M mounting tape off my walls to you and/or others passing by this comment. This was used on acrylic paint, which is the most common nowadays in at least the USA. 1: Acetone, aka nail polish. Nope. That will also break down acrylic paint in addition to the glue, and probably quicker. (It even says don't use on acrylic nails) 2: Isopropyl Alcohol, both 70% and 91%. Less breaking down of the acrylic paint, but still not close enough to nill to avoid damage with the scraping afterwards. 3: Steam cleaner. My best results and what I used on the rest after the failed attempts. You can get cheaper ones (or possibly even rent from some supermarkets) that are small and hand portable. Just make sure it has an attachment to scrub, or at least have a finer nozzle. It broke down the glue and allowed it to be scrapped off with very little damage. If impatient, the only in difference is having it be the absolute brightest white in that spot because of aging over time.

*Audio advice from RU-vid* Credentials: An actual professional musician. For once. Finally.

thanks just moved my mic really close to me and now my keyboard loud but sound better

i have a big thick heavy blanket screwed into the top of my loft bed and it works *amazing*, i have no need for sound panels

GAMER FOAM. I just pay for Krisp, $5 a month (annual subscription, $12 monthly). Helps with noise cancellation and echoing. While it's not as good as a good foam setup, I don't make content. I just don't like the super echoy room while playing a game with VoIP. So I can have my fan running and players won't hear it. It's the same cancellation that Discord uses. I like it personally.

Can we also talk about how the Elgado foam is hexagonal. Walls are typically rectangular...what the heck sort of wall do they expect people to fill with hexagonal tiles?

that logo in the back looks slick as hell bro

Yeah whether you’re buying Gamer Foamᵗᵐ or cheap ‘studio’ foam, you’re wasting your money and it isn’t absorbing much at all. Foam panels don’t have the density or thickness to absorb anything but super high frequencies. Proper fiberglass or rockwool wall panels are orders of magnitude more effective at absorbing high and mid frequencies, and putting thicker panels or superchunks in the corners can absorb all the way down to sub low frequency range. If you build them DIY they aren’t much more expensive than foam, either. Putting fiberglass or rockwool panels at your first reflection points and bass traps in the corners will be more effective at treating room reflections than covering every surface with foam, will cost you less money and in my opinion looks better and more professional too.

You forget to mention you can use too much foam / treatment if you really want a studio. Diffusion panels on the ceiling work great but there is some custom work and measuring involved. Less but higher quality panels with be much better than covering every square inch. Bass traps are probably some of the most important, foam works okay just spend decent money and get at least 12" traps. I used over 30 of them in a 12x15 room Large owens corning panels 2 - 4 inch thick work wonders for walls and they measure 2 x 4ft. If you have a hand saw, nails, and a stapler, and head to home depot you can make them for pretty cheap and you can use just about any fabric with a design or color that you want to cover it up.

I just got a thick carpet and some framed art. No more echo

I actually think the way you have the wall set up with the red panels looks fucking dope.

I only found this channel the other day and love it. I have no reason to care about foam, I'm not a RU-vidr or streamer and have no plans to be. But this was fascinating and hooked me the whole time lol. Love the channel, love all the videos.

Loved the alchemy reference :)

Watched the video. Opened the Elgato website and ordered a pack of Wave Panels.

I've found that having a bed and a mess of clothes on the floor are just as effective.

I remember you had a tutorial on how to make your mic sound really good, am I imagining this? or did it get deleted? I've looked everywhere for the video!

Great info, and the sound is what initially made me like your videos... Then the energy you display

i've finally been blessed by the yt algorithm. thanks.

When he said "rug" I became super self aware that I'm wearing shoes, I then felt an urge to take them off.

The ultimate gaming chair is a recliner chair with a cupholder.

This is a really obscure idea, but whatabout having a round room to stop the bouncing? Or will that make it even worse?

Thank You I really needed all of these information on studio foam, where to get it tho for the best possible price and what will basically do the work I appreciate, really You have an Awesome channel! :')

This video ended up being about a lot more than just tearing down a crappy product. Nice!

thx bro took your advice from the video and will say im very happy whit my sealing it looks good i didnt even want it for sound proofing i just wanted it for looks

I categorically avoid things with "gaming" in their name cause 90% of the time this is a placeholder for increased price with absolutely 0 benefit.

Yeah I picked up a large amount of panels for my voice work for a fraction of the cost of that Elgato crap. What a scam.

imagine buying a high end PC and then spending more than double on foam to cover the walls

You should do a similar video on gaming headphones

Small tip, if your mic sounds really bad all the time when you speak closer than 20cm to it, try decreasing your gain or removing it completely, then speaking as close to it as possible.

"Buy a rug." Sooooo........cover walls in rugs? Got it!

"No? fuck it, Whatever! " lmfao! Good coverage Thanks. 👍

I have the same wallpaper, nice

Gamer socks: "Finally a worthy opponent, our battle will be legendary!"

You sir have earned my sub with just 2 videos

Life of Boris using eggtrays: amateurs

Damn inflation what use to be $150 for a whole room is now a single wall. Rip

4:38 How dare you call me out.

Dude your channel is amazing you deserve subs 😂

You've handled reflections well, but your voice comes off as a bit boomy. A touch of EQ or a leaner mic could come in handy.

ey man, very good video. waiting for you to get more views

Linus tech tips did a test on the elgato panels and the results came out well for the panels. Soooo thanks for the anecdotal video.

No mention of a pop filter? Dude, that's even more important than any foam, I hate those annoying P's and B's from people breathing on their microphone. Also, when people make themselves sound way too bassy, it makes them sound like they have a congested nose.

This is a scam version of a scam (foam in general can be considered that when you realize you can just buy mineral wool in bulk and build your own panels that are high end studio grade for less money)

Didn't age well considering you found something potentially dangerous after haha. Gaming inhaler hands down far worse

Ehhh the thing about pyramid shaped foam is it actually makes the reflections more sporadic because of the shape which is ideal if you want a more dead space. That's why a lot of vocal booths have pyramid shaped foam and why the world's most soundproofed room (in Minneapolis) is completely made of pyramid shaped foam. Anyway, you'll still get some notice-able reflections to some degree unless you get reeally thick stuff that's also dense.. usually that kind of stuff isn't what you'll find on amazon at $40 for 24 panels. But yeah dense, absorbent material is ideal. The cheapest and most effective way is to make some basic wooden frames, fill em with rockwool, and cover it with cloth with very fine pours. Very easy to make and loooooots of videos out there on how to do it. Plus you can make them hang-able so you don't have to fuck up the paint on your walls, js :p The gamer foam is definitely a scam though. If it isn't from a company that specifies in making soundproofing, and it isn't dense and therefor expensive; you're more than likely better off making it yourself. Decent panels don't have to cover an entire room usually though. Just cover common reflection points.

Your current wall looks great. So creative. But is it really totally sound proof??

Im surprised you didnt make a video on the Gamer Gum.

Dude sent a shot at the end😂😂

I just got flags for my walls. They work remarkably well.

After searching for so damn long, I got my answers, THANK YOU

This is great i was wondering how much it would cost

It looks neat but damn that price tag is stupid

Take a look at what "normal" acoustics panels cost, then you'll understand the elgato panels are not really expensive

LTT already tested this and it works

blankets and or pictures on the wall...That is all you need

"Einstein's Law..." Isaac Newton has entered the chat

this channel is so good

Also, just the way the Elgato Gaming Foam panels are shaped you wouldn't be able to cover every square inch of a wall.

the word you were looking for was thermoacoustics lol close enough

sir. I am a sound engineer. You cannot get mad at gaming foam when you have plastered your wall ENTIRELY in studio foam. You DO NOT need anywhere near as much foam as that my man. Put foam directly behind the source of your audio (your voice) that is to say, put it behind where U speak at, in front and to the sides. You only needs like 4 or 6 pannels on each of your walls placed perpendicular to the walls. If you want to reduce echo, sound panels are not an effective way to do this, instead u want to make sure the room has no perpendicular edges, as u mentioned. Do this with some fabric sheets placed at 45 degrees to all the vertices, with frames. Also omg, U have so much bass in the EQ u r usng. Please realise that high and mid end frequencies exist in other bands, with most vocal clarity being around 2.5-2.7k And dynamics aren't all great at rejecting off-axis sound sources. The At804 in particular, one of my favourite mics, is a particularly good example of a dynamic that does not reject off-axis sound as it has an omnidirectional pickup patter. Pickup pattern properties are generally the most important thing to look at for how the mic will react to off-axis sound