ZoomH2n Stereo/Surround-Sound Portable Recorder, 5 Built-in Microphones, X/Y, Mid-Side, Surround Sound, Ambisonics Mode, Records to SD Card, for Recording Music, Audio for Video, and Interviews

So many great reviews have been written, and I'm not going to repeat.I was a ZOOM H2 owner. An excellent device. But it had terrible power management. For example, if the battery is out and not changed for a long time, you'd lose the user settings completely and will have to set up everything again. Extremely painful and frustrating. Also, if you happen to run out of battery in the middle of a recording, you will lose the entire recording. There is no safe-proof partial recording in any event of unattended battery exhaustion like the Sony recorders do. These things are extremely frustrating and essentially made an otherwise excellent device unusable to me, especially because I don't use it very frequently. Whenever I picked up the device when I needed it, the chances were that it had lost its settings because I had not used it for long time and the battery had run out long ago.I was hesitating before buying the Zoom H2N, because I could not confirm whether the new product had resolved those major issues even after I had read many of these reviews.But I finally went ahead and bought the H2N despite the unanswered questions. I'm glad I did. Here are the quick findings in my initial tests (yes, the first thing I did was to test):(1) The recorder would keep the file even after an event of unexpected power interruption. I intentionally removed the battery during recording, and lo and behold, the file was kept and could be replayed. This is a big save. For this reason alone, one should buy the new H2N instead of the old H2, which failed to do this.However, I tested only using the MP3 format. I'm not sure what happens when the wave format is used. I would assume that it should behave the same. Why shouldn't it?Also, I did not test the scenario when the battery runs out during recording, because it is difficult to artificially create that condition. However, if the unit keeps the file at a sudden removal of the battery, you would naturally expect it to do the same when the battery dies. I think sudden removal of the battery is the most severe test for this function.(2) Yes, the unit keeps the user settings except for the clock. I left it without power for about an hour, and put back the batteries. All settings are still kept, except that the clock is automatically reset to the default time.I then tested removing and reinserting batteries without much waiting in between to see what happens. I did not do an extensive test, but I can tell you that if you insert batteries quickly, say within a minute, the clock will maintain its user set time. This is great. But certainly, if you wait too long before you put batteries back, the clock will reset itself. I don't know how long you can wait, but certainly not an hour, and my guess is that it's it's probably under 2 min., just long enough for you to replace the batteries.This means that H2N uses an nonvolatile memory for user settings, and also has an internal battery to briefly power the clock when the device is not externally powered, but it uses that internal battery very frugally. This makes sense to me. If the internal battery has to keep the clock to run for a very long time when no batteries are present, it could significantly shorten the internal battery life.(3) User interface is much better than the original H2. I figured everything out without looking at the manual. It is very intuitive.(4) The display, although not a high-resolution one, works just fine and is better than H2's.(5) The record button is designed so that when the unit is on a tripod, or standing vertically on a surface, you can press the button using one finger without touching other parts of the recorder. This is very considerate because this could reduce the operation noise significantly. The original H2 is not like this. Unless the H2 is lying on a surface, you can't press the buttons without holding the thing using two hands. If you're making high-quality recording on a tripod, that would be a problem with the original H2. Besides, because both the H2 and H2N has microphones facing two directions, the vertical standing position on the surface is the natural position which properly positions the microphones. The H2's requiring that the unit lie on the surface was simply a mistake. So this is another welcome change with the H2N.However, pressing the record button still kind of shakes the unit, thus creating a bit of noise when you operate the button. So it's much better, but not completely trouble-free.(6) H2N is thicker than the original H2, but the handling is nonetheless very good. Overall size is about the same. Quite bulky if you are used to the smart phone slickness, but is not heavy and clumsy at all. Besides, you need to have a relatively thick base to place the recorder on a surface to stand vertically in order to properly use this microphones facing two directions. So there's absolutely no complaints on its size.(7) There is no Pause button. You will have to reprogram the Play button to make it a Pause button during recording (it can be easily done in the user menu). The bright side is that the record button is extremely simple and not confusing. You press it, it starts to record. If you press it again, it stops recording. Again, an improvement in my opinion.I have not found time to use the device much yet, and I can't comment on the performance. The microphone on the origin of H2 was so good, so even if the H2n is somewhat a step down the microphone quality, I would still be satisfied.

This is an absolutely fantastic little unit. It came out half a decade ago but even despite huge technological advancements in other areas (smartphones, computers, etc) this thing really does holds its own still and will be a great product for years to come.This thing is like a little Swiss army knife for general purpose recording. You can record high quality tracks directly on the unit itself, you can import these tracks to your favorite DAW (digital audio workstation) for further processing, you can use it as a great little USB mic, and it even doubles as an audio interface with a stereo input. There are some great options for mic configurations. You can configure it for X/Y, mid-side, 2 channel, and 4 channel, easily adjusted with the turn of a little dial. A pair of handy LED lights tell you which side (or sides) of the mics are active. These same lights will flicker when the signal is clipping, which is a very nice visual indicator. Furthermore, it can be mounted on a tripod or you can buy the super cheap mic stand adapter for around $10 which allows you to mount this unit on a mic stand (plus it doubles as a useful handle). It has an onboard speaker so you can listen back to recordings, or you can plug in a pair of headphones to the line out. The on board speaker is terrible, but what do you expect? It’s a recording device, not a mini boom box. You can also plug in a remote which is useful for creating WAV markers. I like this because with a DAW that supports it allows you to easily navigate through your recordings.There are some useful options, such as auto-gain (to help prevent clipping and such), a compressor/limiter, a low cut filter, and a few other options.This unit operates on a pair of AA batteries and it’s amazing how long the batteries last given the quality of recordings. Zoom claims about 20 hours of battery life which I find to be a bit optimistic, but even still at around ~15 hours the battery life is great.The interface on the device is quite nice. It has a backlit LED screen and navigation is simple with a selector switch that allows you to move up/down or press it in to make a selection. It only took me a few minutes to get used to it.This recorder uses a single SD card for storage, up to 32GB which is plenty adequate for my needs. I record at 44.1 kHz / 24 bit (any higher is overkill for something like this IMO) and with a 32GB SD card I can get about 33.5 hours of recording. If you record at CD quality, which is 44.1 kHz / 16 bit, then you get a little over 50 hours of recording time. The max setting of 96 kHz / 24 bit will give you over 15 hours of time, and if you don’t mind recording in mp3 then 128 kbps (said to be CD quality, but debatable) gives you over 550 hours! 256 kbps will give you half that.I primarily use this for recording band rehearsals and even demos. Recording rehearsals in the past was annoying, either I would use a smartphone which would provide terrible recordings, or I would use a laptop, dedicated recording interface, and microphones, which did give me better recordings but it became really cumbersome dragging that stuff around to every practice/demo session. Plus it’s annoying dealing with all the extra wires/cables and such. Also, I believe it’s a law that when you introduce a computer into the mix then you’re going to have glitches and other issues. The H2n solves all my problems, all I have to do is plop it down and hit record and I feel confident that my recordings are going to sound good every time.The negatives are pretty minor. The biggest issue being that it only has a single universal gain knob, it would really be nice to have separate gains for each side of the mic. A minor issue is that it doesn’t come with a USB cable in the box (my H6 did), I have plenty of USB cables lying around but including one in the box would have been useful for a lot of people. It does feel a little cheap-ish being all plastic, but I haven’t had any issues with durability yet, though thankfully I haven’t dropped it. Also for the best results you really need to mount it on something, whether that be a tripod or mic stand (using the adapter, not included), recording while handling the device introduces a lot of noise, though this is probably just the nature of the device.Despite the minor issues noted above, this is an easy 5-star product. 5 stars doesn’t mean “perfect in every single way” it means “I love it!” and I certainly do love this thing. It’s super useful and feature-rich, all in a device that can fit in my pocket.