The Zoom H2n recorder. Small but powerful!
I picked up a new field recorder, the nifty little Zoom H2n!
I've been getting more into stealth field recording after reading Paul Virostek's Field Recording: From Research to Wrap book, and I wanted to get a recording setup better suited to capturing sounds surreptitiously. After hearing lots of good things about the H2n and seeing several sound designers I follow use the device, I decided to take the plunge and grab one myself.
As it's quite a small recorder, the H2n is really good for capturing sounds in public spaces without people noticing that you're recording them! So far, I've been having a lot of fun recording train ambiences. The recording below is from inside a train carriage where I was able to capture some nice and quiet train walla from people indistinctly chatting. I used the H2n's onboard mics in the X/Y configuration:
This next recording is from a pair of Roland CS-10EMs plugged into the H2n, where I captured the sound of the train pulling into Dewsbury station. Really like how this one turned out, as you can really get the impression of the train going past your ears from left to right!
While it lacks some of the basic features, such as XLR inputs found on my other recorder, the Zoom H4n, the cool thing about the H2n is that it has a lot more mics built into it as preset configurations. The four main recording modes are Mid-side, X/Y, 2-channel surround and 4-channel surround, and each of these can be tweaked further for greater/lesser stereo width. This means that it's a really useful recorder to grab spontaneous recordings with when I'm out and about, without having to lug around a bunch of extra stands, cables and mics with me on the off-chance I find something interesting to record.
The slight drawback I've encountered with the unit so far is that the surround sound recording capabilities are not as good as I was hoping for. The H2n can record to a max sample rate of 96kHz and to 24-bit depth for the mid-side, X/Y and 2-channel blended surround modes, but if you want to make a discrete 4-channel surround recording, the device can only record to 48kHz/24-bit. Though 48kHz is the post-production standard sample rate, it would have been nice to be able to record at max quality to make it easier to pitch-shift your recordings without introducing a load of unwanted artefacts into your sounds.
Still, I'm having a lot of fun using the H2n as my go-to stealth recorder. Time to slink back into the shadows and find more things to record!