Ask A Zoom Rep

[IronFilm]

You're familiar enough with the entire Zoom product line to state that as fact?

I'm a big gear nerd, and a professional soundie, who keenly follows Zoom and other companies, thus yes I can very easily tell you that Zoom doesn't have a product with all four of those things in it

Do any models offer only 2? (I can use pads to knock down the line level signal.)

I think you are massively overstating the importance of analogue limiters in your own mind.

Yes they are nice, but are they 100% essential?

Would you not buy Zaxcom recorders because they lack them? No. That is madness.

I own a Zoom F4 and a Sound Devices 552.
The 552 has analogue limiters, the F4 doesn't.
Yet when going on a shoot I'll always reach for the F4 first!

Well, after watching a review of the F4, I'm not convinced. Curtis Judd was able to make the input clip (and hence overmodulate). In the environment I will be using the device, there is a very real possibility of this happening to me.

Curtis Judd made a mistake in his review of the F4.
And you can make ANYTHING clip if you try hard enough.

What will you be using a sound recorder for, in what environment? And what are you using now?

 

[Jaime Valles]

Hello, Samuel! Not sure if you're still reading this thread, but I'm wondering if Zoom is planning on making a 32-bit float version of the F8 recorder. I love my F8, with its dual SD card backup recording, 8 XLR inputs and good power options, but I'm lusting after the 32-bit float recording to avoid the audio clipping in loud music concerts. Any chance you'll add 32-bit float to a new version of the F8?

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

May be buying a F6 soon.

 

[Jaime Valles]

I know, I'm very torn about it. I could deal with the six XLR inputs (instead of 8), limited battery options and smaller F6 form factor if I had to, but I'm terrified of an SD card failing during an important recording. Dual SD card slots are a must-have, in my opinion, so I'm holding out hope that the F8 will someday soon get 32-bit float!

 

[NorBro]

I wouldn't worry about it; chances are extremely slim with good cards, IMO. And if something is super important, most people use two-three different sources to capture the audio. The F6 is one of the best investments anyone in video production can make.

 

[Paul F]

I think it will be a must for all lines of recorders to move to 32 bit. I don't have the same application as you, so liimiters are doing the job for me. I can't give up the F8 for the F6. So I'm waiting.

 

[Jaime Valles]

I wouldn't worry about it; chances are extremely slim with good cards, IMO.

I've had two different SD cards (Transcend and SanDisk Extreme Pro) fail while recording video (one in a GH4, the other in a C100). Media failures happen, even with the best quality cards. I haven't had a card fail in my F8 yet, but it's only a matter of WHEN, not IF.

And if something is super important, most people use two-three different sources to capture the audio.

As a one-person crew juggling two or three video cameras and a separate sound system by myself, I'm usually not able to record audio from multiple sources. I mostly shoot theatrical events (concerts, musicals, etc.) and the only audio source I get is a feed from the theater's sound board via XLR so I can record the performers' lav mics directly. No other audio source will sound nearly as good as that, and certainly not the microphones built into my cameras shooting from the rear of the audience. Dual SD card slots with redundant recording is essential for me. That's why I'll never use a camera without two card slots anymore. When the card in my GH4 died in the middle of a show, I would have been screwed if I had only been using one camera (luckily I had a second camera running to which I could cut while I fumbled to swap out the damaged card). Since then, I got C100s and the dual SD slots have saved my bacon, because when one card failed, the other card kept running without a hitch. That time it WAS a one-camera shoot, so I would have missed 30 seconds of performance swapping out cards. And while 30 seconds isn't much in real life, it's entirely unacceptable to my clients to be missing half a minute of their expensive show. Now, you can say that if I'm only using one camera and that camera dies then I'm really screwed, and you'd be right. But media cards generally fail a lot more than cameras do.

You are right that the chances of a card dying mid shoot are very slim, but it happens frequently enough that it's not worth the risk to my business. Just like I wouldn't buy a bunch of expensive camera equipment without having dedicated equipment insurance in case of theft or damage, I need the insurance that dual SD card slots provides.

 

[NorBro]

That comment was only about the audio recorder.

For video, it's a different story as I think we've all had media trouble at least once in our careers.

But for audio, the difference in data and demand vs. video is astronomical. You'd have to be the unluckiest person in the world, but I bet it's going to happen to me now after saying it.

 

[Noiz2]

Well I guess I qualify as one of the unluckiest people alive then because I have had a card fail.
It's kind of the give and take of technology. The chances for a problem go down but the consequences when it does happen go up. With 1/4" tape and DAT there were any number of issues that could come up and did but with tape your looking at 15 min and DAT maybe 60 min. You could blow a shot or two but most problems were salvageable to some extent. Even DAT was often salvageable with the right box. Now we have drives and cards and if it goes south you can potentially lose many days of files, and they are often not salvageable.

The issue with memory devices is that spots go bad on all of them, always. One of the jobs of any DOS like system is to keep track of bad blocks and keep the system from trying to write to them. You will notice that over time the capacity of cards and drives slowly shrinks. So other than infant mortality which should be close to nonexistent with a name brand, the card goes bad usually when a block crucial to the directory goes bad. With hard drives there is also a fairly common issue of the controller card glitching out.

Backup is the only real safeguard. I have a device that you can stick a card in and it will copy all the files to a built in hard drive. Works but doesn't save what hasn't been backed up. So the dual record mode on the F series is a real plus and a time saver. I don't think I would opt to go back to backing up after the fact now.

 

[NorBro]

Have you ever had a SDXC card fail in any audio recorder? (Just wondering...I know you mentioned a failure in your first sentence.)

 

[Paul F]

I'm with Drift. I'm ruined for 2x copies during recording. Regardless of reliability, whether real or imagined, the confidence and comfort 2x recording brings to me is so worth it.

Even if everything goes ok, there is still risk. I hand one over at the end of the day. They preferably make a copy then and there and hand it back to me. But if they need to walk off with it, I have another copy if something goes wrong. Backups, backups, backups. You can never have too many.

 

[Noiz2]

Yes. I don't shoot much video I'm a sound guy. I also don't do a lot of production work, I mostly do SFX recording. Admittedly SFX work can be pretty hard on equipment so...
1/4" tape was pretty bulet proof, though there was a hunk of years when a bunch of companies used a coating on the back that could (and did) bond to the magnetic coating and just shred the tape. That usually took a bunch of time to happen so more of an archive/ sound library issue. And of course there were maintenance issues, especially with field recorders. MiniDisk had a bad habit of shutting down on low battery and not writing the directory on the way down toasting the whole disk. DAT would periodically eat a tape. You could usually manage to get the tape out with out breaking it but it was then kinked and you had to be really carful and only try to play it back on a decent studio deck or it would get eaten again at the same place because of the creases on the tape. Also some machines (I am looking at you HHB) would let you get past the end of the record part of the tape and then let you go into "record". Problem is that with out the continuous track the timing info was all out of whack and so everything you "recorded" you didn't. No way to recover any of it because all the DATs, including the one you recorded with, considered that "recording" blank tape. I had a NAGRA digitals hard drive shut down while recording because of low end vibrations caused by an F14 engine start up (it was really loud). I have had whole cards go bad and I have had corrupted files on cards. Not much you can do if the card goes but you can sometimes salvage a corrupted file or at least part of it. Cassette recorders were pretty bulet proof.

In a weird twist consumer stuff is often more bulet proof than pro gear. Probably because in the former they expect really stupid failures and the later expects you to know what you are doing. That DAT record issue I mentioned was never a problem with consumer DAT recorders. You could stick a tape in a sony Walkman DAT and record anywhere. That could cause it's own problems because if the tape was not recorded from the start a lot of pro decks would stop because the tape was "blank", so you would have to cue it up on the Walkman to get the studio deck to play the recording.

So back to your question. Anything that can fail will at some point do so. Use a card long enough and it will fail. There is a certain amount of wear and tear recording to the card and there is a certain amount of wear and tear moving the card and transferring etc. Cards, if you can find the spec., will have a rating for how many read write cycles they are rated for. It's a LOT but not infinite. And weird things like heat and "cosmic rays" (you think I'm kidding about that but at high altitudes computer memories are constantly doing battles with particles hitting and randomly flipping a bit hear and there), EMF etc. can all lead to failures.