Homebrewed Music

The H4n has made quite a splash, with its terrific feature set and dramatic appearance. Brad Linder has posted some clips at his blog comparing the H4n to the Sony PCM-D50. He seems to think the Zoom is disappointing, but I’m not sure I’m hearing the same problems he describes.

I got a long and interesting email from Mark McPherson of Portland, describing his evaluation of the H4n:

Hi Fran,

Mark McPherson here, up in sunny Portland, proud owner of a shiny new Zoom H4N.

I’ve been enjoying your slack-key recordings and gear commentary for some time, and thought I might pass along a few preliminary observations regarding the H4N.

To begin, let me say that I have a modest technical bent. I’m a retired engineering guy, with now-ancient education in engineering physics and math, and an increasingly-ancient career in the semiconductor and electronics industries. Now I dabble in music, and have an ongoing interest in amateur recording, tempered by the fact that I don’t play well enough to make anything worth recording.

I’ve been using an H2 for the past 18 months or so, and have had excellent results with it — there can’t be a better value in small digital recorders. I’ve had particularly rewarding experiences when using it in four-channel mode, mounted on a photographic tripod in the middle of an ensemble jam. I had an H4 for a short period, but returned it after finding lots of wide-spectrum noise in the preamps, the infamous beep problem, and various whistles and descending and ascending tones in recordings made with external mics with phantom power applied. And I hated the user interface passionately.

I think Samson/Zoom fixed some of this with the H2. Much better user interface, decent mics, simultaneous four-channel recordings, simple yet useful software to pan, mix and normalize the four-channel recordings in the recorder — wonderful stuff for the price.

So I was mighty hopeful when I saw word of the impending release of the H4n, thinking that the light had been seen at Zoom, and the H4’s defects perhaps laid to rest.

I’ve had my new H4n for a week now, and have found a few things that might be of interest.

Overall, I’m hugely impressed with improvements in the mechanical design, build quality, and can live with the user interface, which is better, but far, far from intuitive. I’d appreciate better display resolution, but it’s bigger, brighter, and it works well enough. I really like the use of more durable metal 1/8″ jacks for frequently-used I/O ports.

I’m anxious to learn where the single gain control for the preamps is placed in the input circuitry. I haven’t yet tried to determine this. The onboard microphones seem adequate, if perhaps a trifle bright for my taste.

Last night I decided to check on the phantom power situation, having read a post or two on the Nature Recordist’ site about problems. My only mics requiring phantom power are a pair of MXL 604s, Chinese small-condenser devices. Nothing particularly special about them, and certainly not low-noise.

After attaching them to the recorder I turned on 48V phantom power and made a 2-channel recording. I heard a fair amount of hiss, and the old familiar ascending and descending “whistle” tones at low levels, too, and was quite discouraged. Adding or removing the AC power adaptor made little difference. No “beep”, though.

Then I decided to set up the recorder with a 16 GB Transcend HDSC card, put it in four-track mode, and let it run overnight on AC power to see how the recorder handled the transitions at the 2 GB file size limit, and also what happened when the card filled up. I left a pair of half-discharged NiMH batteries in the recorder, set the record gain to “50” for all mics, and let it run over night.

I’m happy to report that the recorder with 16 GB Transcend HDSC card installed ran smoothly all night long, making several sets of files smoothly and apparently seamlessly, and that the final file terminated properly when the card filled up. The recorder seems to handle that 16 GB card without problems. I think I’ll order another one.

Another interesting thing was that, after about ten minutes of recording, much of the unwanted whistling and noise I associated with the phantom-powered external mics disappeared and did not return. These mics are not used frequently, so there may be some interaction between the Zoom’s phantom power supply and some temporary mic behavior which disappeared with use. Anyway, the message here might be that if you encounter noise, particularly ‘whistles’ of ascending or descending frequency on the H4n’s external inputs with phantom power applied, it may make sense to let a recording run for an hour or two and then re-examine the noise profile.

It also appears that the NiMH batteries in the Zoom received a charge while the AC power adapter was in use overnight — they were pretty flat when the recording started, but by the next morning were apparently fully charged again. Not sure I saw anything about this in the manual, but I may have missed it. Nice if true.

So I’ve gone from thinking the H4n to be no better than the H4 at recording to thinking that it may just fill the bill for a decent four-channel-capable machine, without high expectations for low-sound-pressure recordings because of the preamp noise, which appears to be a little better, but not exactly transformed. I’ll repeat some of this stuff to validate it, but right now I’m pretty happy, and thinking this is a good value and can be a useful tool. I considered purchasing the Sony PCM-D50, but really wanted the four-channel recording option and like having the ability to plug in a couple of mics requiring phantom power.

Hope this is of some interest, and would be happy to share any other data or try some simple tests with the gear I have here if it’s useful to the cause…

Cheers,
Mark McPherson

In further discussions with Mark we’re questioning whether the odd noises he heard were in fact coming from his microphones rather than the recorder. We’re both talking about ways to do more rigorous testing.

In the meantime I’ve been exploring the Mid-Side recording feature of the H4n, and I hope to have a post about that soon.