Zoom H4 Review
Recently, SeguinSound acquired a Zoom H4 Recorder. I had been looking at various portable recorders for quite some time that were capable of performing the following functions:
- Be battery powered so that I might take the recorder into the field to record sound effects without lugging a laptop and audio interface with me.
- Include built-in microphones to be used (even if they weren’t of incredibly good quality) for making things like recording my student’s lessons very easy (I teach guitar, piano and voice) so that I could post the recording on my website for them to review later.
- Provide sampling rates of 24-bit/96khz for high-definition recording.
- Provide XLR, phantom powered inputs for powering my shotgun microphone in doing said field work back at point #1.
- Standard stuff like not look impossible to use and get decent reviews by others, etc.
- Not be incredibly costly.
There were a few contendors on the table that ALMOST met these specifications, including the M-Audio, Edirol and Marantz. Fortunately, before I was able to pick up one of these, Zoom introduced the H4 at the low-ball price of $299. Amazing!
Not only does it do all of the things in the feature list I describe above, but it additionally has some other great features — such as serving as an audio interface (though I would probably do this only if REALLY in a jam rather than use my MOTU 828mkII) and it allows you to use the x-y style condensor microphones by themselves, passing the monitoring output through a mini-jack located on the left-hand side of the unit.
The unit comes with a 128 MB SD digital card, which is great to get about an hour of recording on 128 kbps/MP3 mode. NOT so great when you went to use the higher end recording capabilities such as 24-bit/96khz WAV! I picked up a secure digital card like this one shown at Amazon.com. If you watch you can get them for around $30-40.
In all, I highly recommend this product. A few “problems” as I see it is the lack of a hard shell case. Or reall, any case at all! As a portable unit, most folks will also like to use this sort of thing on the move, so a dedicated hardshell case would be GREAT. Also, there is a HUGE amount of handling noise, so if you were hoping to use this thing with the internal microphones to do “hand-held” interviews, think again. You will have to put it on a table and also make sure you isolate the vibrations of the table as well! Of course, when using an external microphone, none of this is a problem.
Enjoy!
