ZOOM H8 Audio Recorder Review: A Swiss Army Knife Audio Recorder

in this episode we'll take a look at the zoom h8 from the perspective of a filmmaker and a podcaster [Music] first up the entire episode here is being recorded with the zoom h8 and we're recording with a rode ntg5 shotgun microphone which is boom just above me right here now just to kind of run over the specs a little bit first of all you have two xlr trs combination inputs those are for both microphones and you can also plug in hi-z instruments so that's going to be guitars and basses as well there are also four additional xlr only inputs which can be switched between microphone level or line level you can also switch on phantom power for each individual input so you don't have to apply to all the inputs necessarily just the ones you want the h8 records to sd cards there's a single slot and it records to sd sdhc or sdxc cards that means you can record on an up to 512 gigabyte card now one thing that i really like about the h8 is it has a 3.5 millimeter line output and that line output also has a tone generator if none of that makes sense to you what this means in practical terms is of all of the handy recorders from zoom this one makes it the easiest of any of them to connect it to your camera so if you need to run the audio out of your zoom h8 into your camera this makes it super easy to set it up and to calibrate the level so that you get distortion free audio from your h8 into your camera it does happen in built speakers so if you don't happen to have headphones for whatever reason or you want to play back something for a variety of different crew members or people on set it's not a hi-fi experience but it is enough just to make sure you got the take on the bottom of the unit there is a slot where you can add an optional bluetooth adapter which then means you can control the h8 from an ios app now it is ios only not android don't shoot the messenger but that is a nice addition if you do have an ios device the ios device allows you to do some kind of basic things it does not allow you to do everything and honestly that'd be kind of an entire episode to dive into all the details there but it is nice to be able to have some remote control power is a really strong point of the h8 you do of course have a usb micro connector we'll come back to that the choice of micro over usbc but you can power it via that usb microport you can of course also power it with four double a batteries which go into the back of the unit here and with four eneloop batteries just the original eneloops i was able to power this powering a single dynamic microphone so all the phantom power was off and a set of headphones with an 80 ohm impedance rating recording the entire time for 13 hours and 20 minutes so i did it that way so that i could get a sense for the longest possible recording time you could get now of course if you use phantom power it's going to be significantly less than that but if you use eneloop pro or other higher capacity nickel metal hydride batteries or perhaps lithium batteries then you could potentially get longer powering times as well so that's just to give you an idea now for me for for eneloop just standard antelope batteries which have probably at least 50 maybe 100 recharge cycles on them that was really impressive i was super impressed that you could do that so it looks pretty positive on powering this with the double a batteries now of course via that usb port you could power it with a usb battery bank for even longer or if it's connected to your computer the computer can provide bus power and power the unit as well speaking of connecting it to your computer it is capable of running as an audio interface to your computer in 24 bit up to 96 kilohertz sample rates and again if you don't understand what any of this means it just means you can connect your computer and you can record your computer in more detail it can be used in class compliant mode and just record a stereo mix of all of your inputs to the computer or you can go into multi-track mode and it can record up to 12 tracks to your computer that includes the six xlr inputs plus if you got an additional module to add on with four more xlr inputs you could record all of those individual microphone inputs plus a stereo mix of all those making a total of 12 tracks so in the case of windows you will need an azio driver to make that happen which you can download from the zoom site in the case of mac you just plug it in and you can configure it to run all 12 channels in it is also a 2 out which means you can play back audio from your computer to the headphone jack here if you wanted to there's a six second pre-record the pre-record option is nice because what that means is if you are late pressing the record button it actually as soon as you press the record button it goes back six seconds in time and captures all that audio as well so if you're a little bit slow on that record you can still capture some of that as a first in the h series of recorders from zoom you have a color touch screen and it's surprisingly good i expected i guess my expectations were lower and they actually came through it's a very nice screen the resolution is good enough it's not super high resolution but it is i would say it's fairly similar to the h6 screen except larger and touchscreen and it has the same problem so if you go outdoors it's a little bit difficult to read to be honest but otherwise it's been very nice to work with so far included with the h8 is the xy stereo recording module that has a stereo set of microphones that can be angled to record at 90 degrees or 120 degrees so you can get a couple of different stereo pickups there and that also has a 3.5 millimeter microphone input so if you want to attach for example a lavalier microphone you can do that there now the cool thing is of course you can use all of the interchangeable modules that you could use on the h6 or the h5 and there are some new ones coming out as well including a vr module which is pretty exciting so there's also an ortf stereo recording module so if you're into that kind of thing there's a mid-side recording module and you just got a lot of different options at shotgun module kind of nice to have that interface on this type of recorder now one of the interesting things i did here with the h8 which i have not done in the previous h series recorders is basically when you first turn on the unit you're presented with three different modes to operate in one for field recording one for podcasting and one for music so it really kind of tunes the interface and the display based on the type of thing that you're recording so here for example in field recording it just shows the meters of all of the microphone inputs that are on in the podcast module it gives you some sound pads as well so you can press those to playback pre-recorded sound clips little jingles stingers things like that or even pre-recorded interviews if you wanted to do something like that so that makes it very much optimized for those different types of things and i think that's going to be pretty important as we talk about a little bit later the h8 is a really kind of interesting device from the standpoint that it's set up to do a lot of different things and the challenge when you do that is that when you're set up to do a lot of different things you generally don't do any of them very well but the nice thing about this interface with the color touch screen is that it really sort of customizes the experience based on what you're recording to make it better for that particular case now there are compressors limiters and gates for each individual channel on the h8 now the only limitation is you can only use one of those three at a time which was a little bit of a bummer for me but on the other hand it's nice that they have them so compressor will even out your overall sound the limiter will help prevent you from clipping and the noise gate will help reduce noise if you're in a kind of a noisy room there are metal quarter 20 threads on the back which means you can attach this to a tripod or maybe to your camera a friction arm all those types of things makes it very versatile in terms of attaching it to other devices the headphone output on the h8 seemed decent to me it is not something i've done extensive testing with yet so far but i wasn't getting a lot of hiss or anything like that in the headphone output so that's a good sign so i was using a set of sony mdr 7506 headphones so i believe those are somewhere they're less than 100 ohms i think they're 70 some ohms so something like that so again as long as you're not using audiophile headphones i think this headphone amp is going to be good and for all this it's priced at 399 u.s at the time of this review now no product is perfect let's kind of talk about some of the things that i found so far that didn't really love first of all there's that usb micro port now this is a little bit of a head scratcher i just recently reviewed the zoom pod track p4 and it has two usbc ports on it so i i have no explanation for why there's a usb micro port on this thing um i don't know i is it a deal killer you can decide that for yourself it's just a little bit of an annoyance to me and i don't really understand why they did that as i mentioned before the app is ios only so i'm very sorry on behalf of zoom although i don't know why i'm apologizing for zoom i paid for this with my own money but you cannot control it remotely with an android device it has to be an ios device and then one other thing that i've noticed is that zoom has kind of a tendency to do this in a lot of their field recorders and handy recorders is that in many cases you can only use a certain feature at a time and it kind of disables the opportunity to use other features so a great example of that is if you use a compressor for example you cannot also use the noise gate at the same time on that same channel so i think that's a limit in terms of its overall processing power because i assume that's all implemented in the digital domain it's all digital processing software so for whatever reason some of those things get disabled when you're using one or the other let's get you a couple sample recordings here first of all some sound effects recordings outdoors and then a podcast sample [Applause] um what i'd like to talk about is first the favorite your favorite class in university that you've taken so far emma and that you took in an undergraduate i will oh emma okay because i have an easy answer and that is i don't know what i've only been through one year so far okay i would say marching band marching band's a fun course oh wow okay well yeah that would be a fun one for sure yeah i uh yeah there i met a lot of good people in my university marching band that was fun cool yeah okay all right danny what was your favorite course i had a lot of courses that i really enjoyed but i'd have to say just for total impact would be geology 210 which was a two-week geology field class that met before the start of the fall semester oh distorted guitars [Music] guitars distorted guitars one burning question i think a lot of people will ask is can you run game hungry microphones like the sure sm7b into the h8 and get a good clean signal and i think the answer is yes here's a sample probably the most common question i would expect to hear from this is if i'm using something like a sure sm7b microphone it's dynamic microphone very popular amongst podcasters and in the broadcast industry can i do that directly into the zoom h8 or do i need something like a cloud lifter or a fet head and the answer is it seems like you do not i'm at max gain here so i'm at 10 out of 10 on the gain dial for this input we're peaking somewhere around -6 maybe a little bit more and so there's an example of what you can expect let me go ahead and just i'll be silent for just a minute and we'll see how much noise it picks up here in the room we did a little bit of a self-noise performance test with the dummy xlr connector which has a 150 ohm resistor across pins two and three for those that don't understand what i'm talking about just stick with me here we're going to make sense of this really soon essentially what this does is it simulates a load of a dynamic microphone without picking up any sort of outside sound so it's like putting a dynamic microphone into an input but without the microphone picking up any sound and what we found was that the self noise sat at minus 70 db rms max which is actually really quite good and i think a significant improvement over the other h series recorders so nice step forward there now when i plugged in and recorded with an sm7b measuring that silent portion after normalizing to minus 23 l ufs stereo we found it was basically the same it was right around minus 70 minus 69 db rms max so it seems like these preamplifiers are significantly better now zoom doesn't put the specifications on their website i don't know how much gain these supply but they do put the specifications for their new pod track p4 and they say that that one can supply 70 db of gain and what i found was that this one doesn't seem to supply as much gain as the pod track p4 so uh they're clearly not using the same pre-amplifiers or maybe a similar design but that one has you know can supply even more gain because you're you know they've designed it for podcasting and so a lot of times when you're podcasting you're using a dynamic microphone like a sure sm7b you need more gain i don't know what they're doing here exactly but these do not appear to be the exact same pre-amplifiers however the performance on the h8 pre-amplifier seems quite good and i think it's enough gain for most people unless you have a super quiet voice to work with very gain-hungry dynamic microphones like the sm7b alright let's wrap things up here with who is this device for and i think what's very interesting about the handy recorders and i think they've been designed this way from the very start they are meant to be very versatile recorders something that can be used in a lot of different types of situations for a lot of different types of recordings and that i think is definitely showing through here with the h8 when you first turn it on you're presented with the three main modes it can operate in field recorder music and podcast so they're really trying to create a device that can work for a lot of situations and i think that's important to keep in mind because when you have something that is designed to fill a lot of different scenarios it's not usually super good at any of them it usually has to make some compromises and i think that's the case with the h8 now i don't want that to be discouraging what i'm saying with this is really if you need something that's versatile and can work in a lot of different situations that's where i think the h8 is a good choice let me give you one example here for podcasting if you're a podcaster and you're going to be podcasting with say three or four people all in the same room normally what you'd like to do is plug all the microphones of course into the recorder and then have a set of headphones for each of the participants in the podcast and i think the reason that headphones for everyone is important is because a lot of people when they first at least start working with microphones don't have very good microphone techniques so they tend to look off in other directions and their voice falls off especially if they're using a dynamic microphone so for me it's really important for everyone to have a set of headphones well that's where the h8 while it can do podcast recording isn't really set up to do a separate headphone feed for every single participant now you can do six different inputs at the same time that's really cool but you don't have a separate headphone output for every person you have one headphone output and so that's something that's important to keep in mind if you are just buying for podcasting then i think the potrak p4 or the live track l8 are probably better choices because you do have multiple outputs for more than one set of headphones all right if you're a filmmaker then that's another thing so there is the field recording mode on here which can work for filmmaking and you can connect and feed the audio out of the h8 into your camera so that all works i think that if you are serious about filmmaking then one of the zoom f series recorders is probably going to be a better option for you so that's an example where those recorders the field series recorders are definitely optimized for filmmaking they each have more outputs so you can send audio to a wireless feed for a director for example plus another one to the camera a lot of times they have two balanced outputs plus a 3.5 millimeter output on the f4 and the f8n so that gives you more options as well you can run maybe to a consumer grade camera plus you can run a two line out left and right stereo mix somewhere else or you can use those to feed wireless feeds to two different groups and have different mixes going to each group so there's a lot more flexibility there for filmmaking in particular but if you're doing just very simple straightforward filmmaking without a big crew then an h8 could work so those are the kind of nuances that i think are really important to keep in mind so if you're serious about filmmaking probably go with the zoom f series if you again need something that's versatile that could work for podcasting and working with consumer grade cameras for filmmaking then that's something where the h8 could work very well for you overall there is a look at the zoom h8 i hope that was helpful for you if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 115,311

Keywords: audio, sound, recorder, ZOOM, H8, ZOOM H8, podcast, video, film, review

Id: sHPIO7MYvho

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020