The Mandelbear's Musings

A couple of minor annoyances with my current gaggle of gadgets:

• The Samsung monitor is fscking gorgeous, but with its 2ms response time and 3000:1 contrast the jitter coming through the VGA input is annoying as heck. I'll have to get either a graphics card or a motherboard with a DVI output. (The jitter could be coming from the KVM switch, but that would open yet another can of worms. I'll have to deal with it pretty soon in any case.)
• The Zoom H2 won't record four channels in any mode but 44.1KHz, 16-bit WAV. So much for recording concerts with audience reaction, or an evening's worth of surround-sound at a circle. Minor; it'll do two channel surround-sound, and that's good enough for circles. I can get audience reaction by recording from the first or second row.

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!