Re: Looking for a mixer
I bought a GoXLR 2 weeks ago after Talon got one a few months back, because he seemd to like and recommend it. I wanted to write a review about it with an emphasis on accessibility, and I'll still do this to give people detailed information about it and expand on what I'm about to say. But in short, for the person that it was aimed for, it's an excellent device. What I mean by that is the GoXLR is designed for people streaming games on Twitch or YouTube from a computer. So instead of having a ton of physical inputs, either as RCA or 6.3 MM jacks, you get just a single line-in apart from your microphone which can be either XLR or 3.5 MM.
However, on-top of these, you get 5 channels over USB which are all exposed as separate audio devices in Windows that you can direct sound to, as well as 2 input devices. These are also available as ASIO if used in a DAW like Reaper. You can root the audio from these channels in any way you wish and assign the 4 faders to any of the channels or your microphone gain to quickly adjust their volume.
For your Microphone, the GoXLR has a built-in EQ, compressor, Deesser and noise gate which can help you sound better without buying additional hardware or making you have to run your audeio through software effects. There are 2 models, the regular GoXLR as well as the recently released goXLRMini, the main difference being in addition to everything described, the regular model also has an additional effects processor that can do pitch shifting, reverb, distortion and auto-tune and a sampler which lets you play and record samples quickly using 4 large pads.
Software wise, the device itself is all physical buttons and faders. You need the software and drivers, which are Windows only, to use it. This is where you run into the one major annoyance. The GoXLR app was written using the juice UI toolkit, which is famous for being completely inaccessible and whose developers have made a concious effort in not caring about improving the situation. That being said, TC-helicon gaming were extremely helpful here. When Talon bought his GoXLR and discovered the problems and reached out to them on Twitter, they hooked him up with the main software developer. Hopefully, we will see accessibility improvements in the software in the future as from what I know they are investigating things like Tolk to work around the UI problem. In the meantime though, said developer helped us out with figuring out a way to use it.
All of the configuration for the GoXLR is stored as plain text in XML files, which can just be edited in any text editor like notepad. This way you can enter in pretty much everything you need (Adjust the compressor, Gate and EQ, set volumes, change audio routing, put the 4 faders in different channels, etc). So even though the software itself isn't accessible, you can still adjust your settings and the workaround of manually editing XML files isn't as bad as some of the software used by other audio interfaces where there's sometimes literarly nothing you can do or use autohotkey scripts that click on mouse coordinates which could break if a window is moved in the wrong place.
For your particular use case, you can definitely hook up an echo to the GoXLR via the line-in. For Google, it might be more of a problem because none of the Google home speakers have an audio output on them. So I don't think there's any mixer that would be able to support a Google home, unless you get something like an Android phone with a headphone jack and use that as a fake google home speaker.
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