Zoom Podtrak P4 Review and Audio Demo

podrak p4 from zoom a lot of features packed into a relatively small recorder i'm gonna try to stick with that theme and get through a lot of stuff in a short amount of time we're gonna go fast [Music] okay first impressions of the p4 is it a little odd looking yeah i'd say so looks a little funky but it performs a lot better than it looks looking around the side you have a full sd card so it makes it very easy not to have to use an adapter and then next to that we have two usbc plugs which everyone loves usbc one for a usb battery brick and if you wanted to run all day you could go to a plug and run off of the wall and then a usbc connection to the computer so you can use this as an interface and the cool thing is this can be a recorder at the same time that it's an interface if you are connected via the usb to the computer that will also bust power so you don't need any additional power you get it from the computer and when you are going to computer one downside might be that this is only going to record a stereo mix not the individual channels however because it does record to the sd card while it's also an audio interface you can do your separate channels to the sd card as well as send a mix to the computer for recording and maybe because of the price point or because it's targeted to podcasters and they think it's all we need 44.1 16 bit is the only option that may be a downside for you for me in an audio only podcast setup it's not a big deal it's gonna sound fantastic on the bottom we have four separate headphone outputs four separate headphone amplifiers so that everyone has control over their own volume all the channels have an option for phantom power the phantom power is selectable per channel so if you only need one or two channels with phantom power a lot of mixers it's a push of a button and it goes to all channels this you get to select which channel you want the phantom power to go to which could help with battery life and using different types of microphones each of the mic inputs also has its own individual mute button and you might hear me clicking through those ideally these wouldn't make a click sound because that could get in your audio when you're recording and you want to mute you could hear a click in the background a soft push button here would have been nice and with four xlr inputs comes four individual channels of audio so this is great because you're going to get separated tracks that you can use in post-production but you'll also get a recorded mix if you were just going to go out to a finished podcast bringing in sound boards or just recording a mix of you and whoever else is plugged in or just yourself you notice long boot up times but pretty much like any other zoom recorder i've used they're slow to load up and another fantastic option for podcasters especially is the option to go oops what what just happened that sucked all right that was actually a very helpful coincidence there the battery ran out and one of the questions i had is if the battery does run out because there is only two batteries two double a batteries what happens to the recording do you lose it i pulled out a battery and you lose the recording if you just take it out all of a sudden but if you saw there it kind of said goodbye so it shut down it made sure to save the file that we were on and then it shut off the bottom line is i would not rely on the double a's only unless you know you have full batteries or at least two bars and you keep an eye on it because it's not uncommon for a podcast to be an hour long and i would not rely on the batteries inside of it to last you long enough i would choose to run with the usbc battery brick where you don't have to worry about it something else i'm not seeing immediately is card space so like a battery there was no indicator that told me i was about to lose battery it just went away i also do not see an indicator that's telling me how much time i have left on my sd card which also would stop your recording if you ran out of space on your sd card so obviously with the audio it's not too hard to have even a 16 gigabyte card or 32 gigabyte card which are cheap and you'll have plenty of space even for all of the tracks that it records as long as you make sure that your card has plenty of space when you start the recording another thing i would have liked to see on the back would have been a quarter 20 screw hole somewhere around here so that i could attach this to a small tripod which allows me to mount it somewhere securely but also kind of see the screen better than when it's flat on the desk the build is all plastic at 1.99 it's not surprising especially since there are so many features inside the device typically it's going to be something that lives on a desk certainly this is a travel friendly device and as long as you are relatively careful with it i don't think you'll have an issue one of the many features it has but especially catering i think to podcasters is on this third channel the ability to plug in your smartphone so this third channel obviously you're going to lose one of your xlr inputs you would have to have less than four xlr microphones in order to use this channel for the phone but you'd switch it to phone and you could plug in a phone with a 3.5 millimeter jack likely adapted from lightning or usbc or there's an optional bluetooth adapter you can plug in here that you have to buy separately that would allow you to connect via bluetooth i preferred hardwired anyways because i tend to find that the audio is better than over bluetooth very important to note if you are going to record this way you're going to need a special cable that does not come with it it's a trrs2trrs you'll see the three black rings there that allows the audio to go out of your phone and then back in all through the same input output and these are a dime a dozen online i just bought a cheap one i'll link it in the description lav microphone usb lav microphone this right here which is hard to see on a black t-shirt but the power button being flush with the device itself it's flat i really like this because you're not going to accidentally turn the power off or turn it on if it's in your bag xlr inputs are not lockable but they fit in quite snugly i'm not worried about them coming out and then if you're going to use this as an audio interface and you want to record the usb channel that would go on this fourth channel here you would select usb and now you are recording usb input from the computer onto channel 4. unlike the sound pads here which actually have their own channel if i play one here you can see that's being recorded on its own sound pad channel separate from your four microphone inputs but not to be confused with separate channels for each sound pad whichever sound pad you click is going to be recorded on the same sound pad channel so for example you can't roll in music and then something over the top of that essentially you can't use two of these at the same time the sound pad also has its own volume control so you can select how loud you want any one of these sound effects coming in at any given time and again for podcasters this is really cool because it has a mix minus option in here which means the person that is coming in from the computer will be recorded on channel 4 and they will hear your microphone and anyone else that is plugged into the zoom so whether that's another person in the room with you or even a person on the remote call those two people will hear each other without hearing themselves looped back to them so that's the mix minus option which is traditionally a much more difficult setup with aux sends and more cables and various routing now you just enable it in the menu and you'll have a mix minus automatically built in to the p4 and always most important to me is the preamp itself how does it sound these have great preamps amazingly this goes up to 70db of gain and when you go up that high it is noisy when i see a recorder has a high amount of gain what i'm hoping is that it's going to boost any dynamic microphone to a clean level so not using it full but that 60 and 70 of the preamp is cleaner than if it only had 50 db and you had to crank it all the way so with these samples you can hear and see that the preamp up all the way is going to create considerable noise but the good news is with most dynamic microphones like the e835 even the pr40 an sm58 atr 2100 those are going to work in the 5 to 7 range now i find that when you get around 7 that's when you introduce some noise and the sm7b the most gain hungry of my microphones and one of the most gain hungry microphones is gonna need to be around seven and i feel like you're going to have to do a little bit of post-production noise removal if you want it to be completely clean so if you're going sm-7b to the p4 it might not be as clean as you want that said i recorded with the sm7b i only had to do very light touch noise removal and it sounded fantastic you can see when i plug in the battery pack it actually switches from internal battery over to the usbc battery pack which is also very handy if you're running low which actually was i could transfer the power over to here without interruption to my recording and then again if your battery pack was to run out it would roll over to the battery and you wouldn't have lost your recording all right having four headphone outputs is nice but one thing i was concerned about is that when you have several people plugged in here when people turn their heads it's going to move the recorder around however it feels as if they've put some type of weight here in the bottom to help prevent that which is really a nice detail and it has rubberized feet down here at the bottom and the top so hopefully that won't be much of an issue when you turn the limiter on which i have on now it's not affecting the gain sometimes i feel like limiters can attenuate the signal a little bit it's not affecting the gain and in fact this is a digital limiter after the analog to digital conversion and yet it still is working really well so better limiters in this p4 than you typically get in these more affordable lower grade audio recorders the screen is really small but i can definitely see my levels okay but it's going to be limited information that you get on there it would be nice to know that the limiters are on if you could see it on the channel as well when the phantom power is on you don't get any indication of that usually you would get some type of red light we don't have that here not a huge deal just these are some of the things that they're going to leave out on a lower grade recorder doesn't affect the capabilities this thing does so much all right that's the podrack p4 i borrowed this from b h thanks for sending that out i'll send it back to you if you're a podcaster that just needs a recorder and you have multiple people on your podcast this is probably a good option for you i like that the preamps are clean up to almost 7 on the gain 70 percent sound pads are cool it's not something that i generally use much of but this could allow you to record a podcast start to finish you should do a little post-production on that in terms of leveling everything out and then making it to a loudness standard so that you have the best experience for your audience of course then you need to turn that into mp3 but if you wanted to press record roll in some intro and outro with the sound pads you could do that or play a clip that you preload into there you could do that and then essentially be done with little to no editing some post processing but maybe not much editing and then move on to your next one after you upload so that could make it easier to produce a podcast almost two hundred dollars small device runs most dynamic microphones cleanly that's a bargain and making it pretty easy to record a podcast i personally love working with a recorder more than going into software because it eliminates the computer computers can make noise extra things can go wrong and it's just simple mic direct to recorder record be done and of course i'm going to do post-production on the computer but this part of the process this part of the production easy you probably have questions about the p4 hopefully i answered some of those that you haven't seen before but leave those in the comments i'll get back to you as soon as possible and i'll see you next time

Channel: Ray Ortega

Views: 10,332

Keywords: thepodcastersstudio, ray ortega, zoom podtrak p4, p4, zoom p4, podtrack, podtrak, zoom, audio recorder, podcasting, podcast recorder, audio interface, p4 review, p4 mix minus

Id: YXAvhkEncvM

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020