At last, mine has arrived and I've spent about half an hour out in my suburban garden with it, on a beautiful summer morning with no breeze.
It's small. It fits nicely in the hand if you wanted to walk around with it, ready to grab ambient sounds without looking like someone walking around ready to grab ambient sounds. Subjectively it is heavier than I expected when I saw it, but having said that, it's light, if that makes any sense. The colour display is small but sharp and clear and bright (brightness is selectable and it can dim night down after a settable time period). Buttons on top are likewise fine to see on a sunny day but can also be dimmed.
Appearance is kind of matt black for the most part. I will probably take a black felt tip pen to the 'Zoom' logo and to the black silver bars below the grille. Maybe a bit of black insulation tape on the battery cover which has some lettering on it. Overall it looks quite classy.
Handling noise - well, just don't handle it. There is probably no capsule suspension whatever. But I attached one of those folding tabletop tripod things to the base to make a small handle, and holding that with a non-fidget grip made it ok for using in the hand.
Recording quality - self noise isn't something my ears are good at hearing these days, but recording suburban garden 'silence' seemed fine to me. On replay I could hear little sounds I didn't notice while recording. I would rate it as 'no disaster' in this respect. And at the price, what can you reasonably expect? If the stuff you record actually needs very low self noise equipment, go pay for it.
Frequency response - well, I had the feeling from some YouTube reviews that it's bass light, and it's certainly not bass heavy, but again, no disaster I would think. Probably there's enough there to tweak with a bit of EQ later. There's enough LF to hear the effect of the LF cut settings beginning at 80Hz, if you see what I mean. I will test the sound against other devices as soon as I get the chance.
I did do a comparison with my Roland binaural in-ear mics. Although I am not at home and don't have much gear with me, doing that comparison was helped by the neat feature which allows you to record external mics on the 'rear' stereo channel while recording the front facing built in mics to the 'front' channel. (Four channel recording). Then when you replay, you can use the simple built in mixer to mute either channel to compare during playback. (There's a certain amount of button pressing required to achieve that but it's better than nothing). The Roland sound was, as I suspected, a bit fuller right at the bottom end (as shown when a noisy sports car drove past on the adjacent road). As far as I could judge there wasn't a radical difference at the top end. The fact that its mic input recorded the kind of sound that I would expect from the Rolands indicates that any lack of LF in the device is at the mic end rather than the preamp end - as you'd expect. A nice touch when playing back is that the display shows the waveform of the two stereo files one above the other, with the source labelled (so you can see whether the rear channel came from the internal mics or external).
A factor in the sound might be due to the front and rear mics being labelled as hypercardioid. I believe that piclup pattern tends to be thinner in sound than cardiod or omni. Unless you pay a lot.
There is a comprehensive "export" function which allows you to choose bit depth, normalisation, and whether the export goes via the mixer or not. So having recorded the front internal and the plugin mics you can export with either muted (or mixed to your liking) and with the output format selected. This is kind of handy if you had no other way of doing it, but the device cannot play back files in its 'export' folder (nor in its 'trash' folder). So you can't check the result on location. Time to export with normalising is probably real time, or not much quicker, so again, handy if really needed but otherwise, wait till you are in front of your DAW.
But that exemplifies what a remarkably full-featured this device is, at the price. In my pro recording days (classical music) I usually had a device with me which I could deploy if all else failed, in other words in the event of mic, cable, mixer or recorder failure. If I was still doing that stuff, I think the H2e would be a good candidate. Takes up almost no space in the bag, sets up in seconds with no need to set levels, very nice stereo image which could include the rear as well on its separate tracks to include more or less ambience and applause in post production, and with an appropriate lead it could take the output from a mixer if the recorder had failed, and so on.
I may have time tomorrow when home with all my gear to do a quick comparison with the sound of the H2n which might interest some people. Meanwhile I am now able to answer questions if any.
[Edited to add that this thing may be small but it has a total of 15 buttons on it...]
Topic: Zoom H2essential. It seems to be a 6 channel device! (Read 33511 times)