Zoom H4 Mobile doubts

rawfa

rawfa

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Hi guys,

So, I've been looking into the forum for some info on the Zoom H4 Mobile and all I could find was one or 2 people saying it's good. Could anyone here elaborate on that? I'm on the pre-production phase of a feature and my "sound guys" said I should get such a gizmo...and this one looks like the best "quality/price" option. I can't find it here in Spain so another doubt that I have is: does it have universal AC supply? can I plug it anywhere? Of course I'll be using it on the field with batteries, but indoors I plan to plug into an outlet.
How about quality wise? Is it good. I'm going to use it with an oktawa and a rode ntg 2.
Does anyone know which would be the least expensive place to buy it? Bh sells them for 300$ plus shipping to spain (30$).
 
Never mind. I just bought the darn thing. I checked out a bunch of sound samples from a guy at dvinfo that sounded really good. I also found a great deal of online reviews saying a lot of good things about...
 
Dude,
On RAMPS I read that the H4 has an ALWAYS-ON user un-defeatable noise-gate. That is NOT cool for field recording. Here is the quote from Ramps:

______________________________________

From: Martin Harrington - view profile
Date: Fri, Oct 6 2006 12:15 am
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Forget it..it's a piece of domestic cr*p.
I bought on thinking the same thing, but the firmware has been updated
because punters were complaining that the input was noisy, so what did they
do??, they added a noise gate to the circuitry, so that when it hears a bit
of (what it interprets as silence), it gates down and then clips the
beginning of the next word.
When I complained about this, they couldn't hear what I was talking about
even though I sent them files to listen to.
One more thing...probably even more important, it says that it works with
MP3 players, not so, not with most of them anyhow, and also won't work with
a USB drive, they both need external powering as the bus powering from the
iKey is not enough.
I did eventually get it working with a 1gb USB key drive, but that's all
Stay away...great idea but not for pro use.
--
Martin Harrington
www.lendanear-sound.com
- Show quoted text -

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Not sure if Zoom has since fixed that noise gate circuitry, but you don't want that thing clamping a door around your signal if they are going to be used as your main audio files OR as back-ups that you may HAVE TO USE if something happens to the audio you are sending to the camera. You are sending audio to the camera as well as the recorder RIGHT??????????

After reading about this, I got the Edirol R-09 for line-level 2-channel back-up recordings. AND IT WORKS LIKE A MIGHTY LITTLE CHAMP!!!! (with no noise gate F-ing up my audio)


-Vic Rattlehead
 
I think the quote on RAMPS about the noise gate, while part of a thread on the Zoom, is actually about a product called the iKey. Note the reference to domestic; the Zoom H4 comes from Asia. I have no idea if the Zoom has a noise gate or not.
 
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