mdlbear | Gadget lust nicely sated... (Reply)

The Zoom H2 I ordered two Saturdays ago arrived this afternoon, too late for me to show it off at our 2pm group meeting, but early enough to mostly destroy my productivity after that. It's pretty nice.

It has its limitations. The recording medium is an SD card (or up to a 4GB SDHD card); since it's DOS formatted the max file size is 2GB. At two channels x 24 bits x 44.1kHz a 2GB card will give me a shade over 2 hours (based on the fact that the display shows 32 minutes for an empty 512GB card). Easily enough for a typical concert set, but I'd have to swap cards if there were two hour-long concerts back-to-back. They're getting cheap. I get the same two hours recording 4 tracks onto a 4GB card.

Of course, if I want lots of recording time I can always switch it over to MP3 mode.

It takes line or microphone in, which of course resetricts it to 2 channels. For what I intend to do with it, it's fine. Making it pretend to be a USB drive isn't completely trivial, but it's close enough (plug it in with the power off, and press a button); fortunately card readers are ubiquitous (except that I can't seem to find mine at the moment...)

So far I've only tried a little hand-held, spoken word recording; it sounds fantastic, to my (distinctly non-golden) ears. It's nicely pocket-sized, and has a camera tripod mount (with a "mic clip adapter" -- basically a conical piece of plastic -- that screws into it). Has a 9vdc adapter, and runs on two AA batteries.

On the whole a fantastic little ~~toy~~ tool. I look forward to ~~playing with~~ using it in the near future. A review will be coming soon -- after I get done with the shipping!