Zoom H4n Digital Recorder

Easy to use, Very powerful and wonderful sound. Working light and low budget is important for me, as is quality. With the H4N and Canon 7D I am producing broadcast quality video and sound for a very small cost. The H4N is small enough to mount on camera or carry in a coat pocket. The in-built mics are surprisingly good. The battery life is good for very long sessions. The product is quite rugged and very versatile. For live musicians the included tuner can be particularly useful. Lastly the H4N easily hooks up to a Mac or PC to share files or as an Audio I/O device.

I've recorded a few live sessions with the H4N and the performers have been consistently impressed.

I don't actually own one of these but I have just spent two long days using one of these to record sound for a short film. When I was playing back the first scene I had just recorded I panicked because I thought that the actors were re-doing the scene and that I'd missed my cue... it wasn't until I looked at their mouths that I realised it was simply the stunning quality of the recording.

At one point during the session I was using the recorder in 4-track mode to capture the noise of some action that was happening in the background on the built-in crossed-pair microphones (with the unit mounted on a camera tripod) whilst simultaneously capturing clean stereo dialogue with two mics attached to the boom pole. The result was very powerful and of course it opens up the possibility of using the built-in mics to capture true surround channel detail on location if you want to make a surround production.

I found the built-in mics to be extremely sensitive, picking up the most minute and distant sound details which sounded quite cacophonous in my headphones, but the stereo imaging during action shots is absolutely stunning.

I should also confess that I dropped this thing onto a hard stone floor on no less than 4 occasions (so many cables to trip over) and it didn't affect the performance one bit. And because the device records to solid-state flash memory there is zero machine noise.

There are a wealth of built-in portastudio functions and effects, options for dynamic compression, automatic limiting and automatic record level for those unconcerned with dynamic range, and the option of recording to mp3 for those not fussed about getting razor-sharp uncompressed sound but want to get more on the flash cards.

The only thing I found slightly irksome was the fact that this sucks batteries dry very quickly especially when you are using the built-in phantom power for the external microphones and recording at anything other than 44.1k/16-bit. It does have a "stamina mode" however for those who are content with 16-bit recording which will probably be most people.

FOLLOW-UP
I bought one within days of writing this review. I am using it to record location sound for a 75-minute HD drama and various backgrounds for different scenes on a short film. This little recorder is worth its weight in gold. As well as the stunning quality of the stereo sound when recording in 96/24 I like the ability to automatically name tracks by the date they were recorded (plus numbered suffix) and the straightforward filing system that separates the four-track recordings from the stereo recordings. The four-track recordings are stored as an almost identically-named pair of stereo recordings differentiated only by the suffixes "m" and "l" to let you know which input created the files.

In addition to the film work I have been doing with this it came in very useful at a south London squat party when I was roped in as sound engineer at very short notice for a band who also wanted me to record the gig. I piped the desk output to the XLR inputs and used the inbuilt mics to get up close to the drummer and the violinist who were not going through the desk. The very loud volume did not overload the mics, but I did have to reduce the input level to something like 0.2%.

This little machine ought to be an industry standard workhorse. The only way Zoom could improve on this model is by making a belt-clip or some sort of wrist-strap or pole attachment to make it easier for boom-opping.

I'm sorry, I don't know very much about sound production so you'd better read a report from one of the other reviewers. I bought this machine because I am an amateur theatre director. At the beginning of rehearsals, I sit the cast in a large semi-circle and set up my H4n on a camera stand in the centre. We read the parts from the script and I produce a copy on CD for them to learn. Oh, and I have managed to record my own voice and a kareoke track and mix the two together using 'Audacity'. I did sit listening to my partner talking to her collegue the other day and as they chatted I decided to record them as I had nothing better to do. After I'd finished i plugged in some cheap earphones to listen to the recording - wow! When I took the phones out the sound of their voices was exactly the same as the recording. This was strange and very weird and my brain became really confused as to which was the live sound and which was the recording.
What I can comment on is the quality of construction. I'm sixty - and this piece of equipment takes me back to the good old fifties and sixties, when most electrical field equipment was built for the army. Too many of todays gagets are flimsy by comparison and most have a built in design fault, like a battery compartment door which breaks off when you look at it. These days manufacturers seem to talk about light weight as though it's agood thing. Give me rugged and robust anytime.
Regarding faults in construction design - I can't find one. I just have a confidence that this machine will serve me for quite a few years and if it does have the ability to carry out much more useful recording techniques, well I'll be glad to pass it on to my son, who knows about these things.