this product was purchased with private funding
no paid endorsements
This is an early impression of the Rode Caster Duo.
The production staff is evaluating this unit for use field mixing at track side live streams.
If you get on Reddit and inquire about if this model has monitoring latency, you will get two very opposite viewpoints on the subject. Some folks adamantly insist that there is a very real very noticeable latency when monitoring with headphones. Other insist there is no latency. What we found is in a stand alone setup there is no latency, but if you plug the USB interface into a PC or laptop running broadcast software (we use OBS) then suddenly there is latency in the monitoring. What we found was the unit itself had created a virtual channel for the output from the computer. It was this virtual channel that had latency and turning it off makes headphones monitoring of the Rode Caster directly have zero latency.
This is actually a new feature in the latest firmware. The Rode Caster (Duo and Pro II) both share the same firmware and have exactly the same capabilities. One of the awesome features is to be able to add virtual channels. These virtual channels can come from almost anywhere. The Rode Caster has bluetooth and wifi available. You can connect your phone, or any other source to a virtual channel and mix it in. I think a total of 4 virtual channels can be added.
The overall layout of the console is crazy colorful. Luckily, the buttons have a dimmer in settings separate from another dimmer for the display. The touch screen display is awesome, clear and readable. Navigating by touch works well and the big knob speeds things along. The two knobs in the upper right are volume for the two headphone channels