H4n vu meter reference (in car audio)

[-Tom-]

Now that I've finally got my Giant Squid omni to work with H4n, I did a little test, recording a friend's car sound from inside the cabin. As he was driving, I noticed that the vu meters on the h4n were constantly on 0, with barely any falloff.

The mic was @ 70, and the vu meters only begun to really move below 0 when I dropped it down to 10, but it still seemed like it was hitting the 0 way too much, and I thought the audio was clipping. Only when I've put the levels on 0.5 the vu meter was barely touching the 0, so I figured this is good audio.

Later when I checked the recording, it turns out I was pretty wrong about reading the meter. When the recording was @ 70, even though the vu meters were basically solid black bars, the recording turned out fine, maybe too much bass but that was just the nature of a loud in car noise/humm.

The 0.5 audio is, of course, barely audible.

Am I using the vu meter reference wrong? The sound in car was too loud for me to monitor on my headphones, I presume that some pro level headphones with dead-silence feature could enable me to monitor the actual input but I don't have those at disposal right now. Are there any advices on using zooms vu meters for reference?

Because from this example they clearly didn't serve me much purpose.

 

[Rick R]

Excessive low frequency content in a 'running' vehicle is common. This can usually be filtered out in post, (if the file was not distorted) but it's better to use high-pass filter when recording. A process trailer is better another option as well.

 

[Noiz2]

If he was "recording a friends "car sound"" I'm assuming he was recording FX not dialog, so a process trailer would be the wrong choice here.

You can't really trust the meters on budget recorders. It's good for a ball park and usually good for clipping, but basically you can't trust that what they are telling you is correct. I don't know if this is true but it's certainly possible that Zoom hypes the meter readings a bit so that consumers trying to "get the best" signal by hitting zero wont come and complain about the recorder sounding bad because it clips. I know of at least one major player in consumer audio who sets their zero at about -12.

That said, it may have been the low end cranking the levels on the meters and they may have a low pass before the converter that is removing it? If the meters are reading before the filter there would be a large discrepancy in your situation.

 

[Rick R]

I just assumed (ass me) the OP was recording dialog.. with a Giant Squid and all.
Recording automotive S/FX is a whole other ballgame.

 

[Noiz2]

Hey don't feel bad 99.9% of the recording in a car questions have to do with dialog. And he may be aiming at recording dialog and just didn't explain it correctly.

both will have the same problem with subharmonic sound though.