I gave church an email a few minutes ago. Thanks for the replies. I actually have (2) H2's to feed. I am no pro audio guy and I have some beat up ears from playing with loud cars and working in a factory setting. However, I have made some really great recordings with the H2. The only times I get poor sound are inside tents or smaller sized buildings when the sound is way up. Not sure what to do there.
I love these H2's. I set them at the festival stages and forget them. Let them run all day long. I made a homemade battery box for them. Just a 6 D-cell battery holder with plug. I have used the battery for 2 festivals, one furthur show, and two bar bands. Still 25% life on the 6 D-cells. IF the batteries die, then the zoom will still run for 4-6 hours on the internal AA batteries. If they got stolen, I'd porobably be more upset over loosing the sound then the rig itself.
I put the mic gain on low, usually set the recording level to 75% or whatever I need to get the peaks to about -8 to -6. I shut off the compression and any other digital gizmo the zoom has. If it is a calm acoustic set and I am well isolated from crowd noise, I get it to about -3db peaks. I then divide the show into songs, then use the zooms normalize feature to adjust the level. I rarely do anything else with the sound. I wish the recordings were a touch louder. Especially because I listen to them mostly from my MP3 player through a FM converter and then into my car. The FM converter looses a bit of signal. I have a niuce factory bose' system in my chevy blazer. I turn up the the sound about 3/4 to 7/8's. However, the car has close to 200k miles and offroad tires or studded snows in the winter, so the car has more background noise That is the biggest reason I am looking forward to a new car next year, a aux input jack!
I prefer to record stuff no-one else gets. Those small side stages where 50-100 people are hanging out. I prefer smaller festivals over big commercial stuff. I love rocking out to Reverend Tor, Juggling Suns, Max Creek, Flipper Dave, Deadbeats, and other Northeast / NYC/NJ jam bands. Now with the 2 zoom rigs I can not run to another stage to get the setup running before the next band. Or have to choose which band to record. About 1/2 the time I do record a dead show just because I can say I taped a dead show. Phil has been making me upset though. His bass is up too high. Instead of 15 minutes to get a show fixed up, it's been taking me hours. I also cheat sometimes and blend someone else show into mine. Seems like a waste of time to me, but it's good practice when blending mics with board.
Stealth would be a nice option, however, I never did stealth yet. IF it's not taper friendly, then its probably not my cup of tea. However, I'd love to go to the ringo star show and tape this summer. With Levon Helm dying, I got to thinking I should see my favorite 60's bands. I getting allmans and Santanna again and hearing a Beatles band member.
I was on the fence about buying a tascam that could record 4 channels, both mics and board together. I am happy I passed this year. I needed some decent light stands first. I only paid $120 at B&H for the second zoom H2. The 6-D battery enclosure was $1.70 and the plug is $2.50. My wife sews up some patchwork to make a good fitting bag for the battery case. I will be making a battery monitor for it sometime this summer. I'd be glad to share the project in the forum.