Zoom H6
George Graves wrote:
In article ,
Marc Wielage wrote:
On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:44:44 -0700, Scott Dorsey wrote
(in article ):
The same reason most folks buy them; they are cheap and disposable,
great for applications where that's needed. They are a lifesaver
for reporters and sound effects guys can keep one in the glove
compartment if they are needed. You can't beat it for that sort of
thing.
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I agree -- the Zoom would be a perfect small recorder for emergency
situations. But for serious music? Nope.
I have used an H2 for that purpose for years.
I don't think it'd be a terrible backup recorder if you fed it line
level from a real console and used real microphones placed in
optimum positions. But that's a lotta if's.
That's the way I usually use it. It even saved my butt once when I
failed to properly configure the laptop computer I was using as a
capture device. By the time I noticed the problem, the concert I was
recording was close to half over! The H2 recorder captured it all,
though in 24/96 stereo. When I substituted the H2 recording for the
first half of the concert and used the (now fixed) laptop recording
for the second half, nobody could tell the difference because the
same mikes and console were used for both.
I notice Mr. Eickmeier is ignoring the suggestion to try a Sound
Devices recorder before he dismisses it. Sad.
I've known Gary for some time. He's a good guy and an interesting
one, but he is somewhat stubborn and generally goes his own way. Once
he latches on to an idea that he likes, he cannot be easily
dissuaded. For instance, he loves spaced omnis for some reason and
doesn't like X-Y. Why, I don't know. The stereo is obviously much
better with X-Y, but for some reason, he doesn't agree. It might be
because of his monitor speakers (Bose 901's !) and the way he has
them configured. Your guess is as good as mine
Your confusion is understandable George. You are coming into this thread a
little late. Please read on through.
George and I exchange recordings occasionally, and he has sent me some great
ones, naturally recorded (i.e. not multimiked) at live events. I actually
have conversed with him on many occasions in Emails and really do find his
advice good and worth considering. He is a little hard headed on multimiking
and accent mikes, but he has not done solo vocalists (apparently).
All of this high minded stereo purist talk is fine until you come up against
your first amplified rock or jazz group. That is a whole nuther ball of wax,
and worth discussing in some other thread. I have tried it twice now in
conjunction with video work, and the problems are monumental.
One last general comment. The truest truism we can state about all of this
recording and playback of live sounds is that you can't tell what your
recordings sound like until they are played back. This sounds like a
triviality, but what it means is, when I send George a recording or when he
sends me one, we don't really know what the other will hear from it! It's
kind of like Floyd Toole's circle of confusion. We make recordings that will
sound good on our systems, then we make judgements about the recording based
on that system and judgements about our systems based on our recordings.
So how do we know which is correct? My answer is the same way I know how to
adjust my color TV or projector by eye, which is to play a lot of good
material on it and make it look (or sound) good on most of them, or the best
of them. Then, when I play my own videos on that monitor, or my own
recordings on my system, I know that the standard is what the best
recordings sound like and that I can differentiate the good from the bad on
my system. For example, I can tell the qualities of George's recordings by
listening on my system, and I can hear the spatial qualities of all
recordings and differentiate among them. I have more faith in my system's
ability to do this than other systems that I have heard in a long history of
listening for imaging, timbre, soundstaging, the ability of the speakers to
disappear, and my personal ultimate standard of realism. To me most other
systems have a sameness that bespeaks a number that they are doing to the
spatial qualities that is not natural, i.e. changing the lifelike qualities
of live sound to "speakery" sound, as in "Hey mofo, listen to these
tweeters," or "Hey, you want honky, wait till you hear this."
Bottom line, all I can do is restate that I can hear all of these things, I
can judge my own recordings and those of others using my sound system in a
room that I designed that may even be better than most of yours, that it is
calibrated correctly and that I am not an idiot reading pamphlets, not doing
the work, and not using everything I know and can hear for myself. I am a
lifelong photographer, filmmaker, videographer, audiophile and graduate
industrial designer. Learning recording is instructive because it finishes
this feedback loop that starts from listening to others' work and constantly
refining, recalibrating if you will, based on all factors of the circle of
confusion.
If I am to be faulted because I have my own ideas about audio, then join the
crowd because very few audio engineers agree about anything, much less
recording or playback technology. We are all on our own, but I do indeed
listen.
Gary Eickmeier
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