Zoom H4n Noise Floor

H4 is the quietest but still a little noisy.

Zoom h4n noise floor.

I tested the same dynamic microphones with the zoom h4n pro and it also had a noise floor that i could hear but it was a bit quieter than the two tascam units. Without the 20 db pad the recording is pretty much unusable from the distortion. The improved noise floor 120 dbu ein captures audio at lower volumes with less noise and fewer artifacts. The chirping however does sound like a hardware issue it s not normal.

With advanced x y microphones incredibly natural sounding preamps and a super low noise floor you can record everything from the indy 500 to the fluttering of a hummingbird with extraordinary realism. With the new h4n pro zoom has taken everything creators love about the h4n and brought it to the next level. I searched for a similar specification for the original h4n and could not find it. Subscribe for more standard film team.

The h4n pro isn t just improved it s superior in every way. The marantz pmd661 although more expensive than a zoom h4n is a lot quieter in the input stages. With the zoom h4n the line level noise floor is 66 db rms when using a 20 db pad to stop the zoom from overloading from the signal which is good as long as you don t have to make volume corrections in post. By practical noise floor i mean that after recording dialogue i loudness normalized the stereo clip to 16lufs and then measured the average rms amplitude of a section of silence.

Zoom has come a long way since the days of the h4 and h4n in terms of clean gain. I measured a practical noise floor of 60db. The h4n pro features high performance low noise mic preamps with recording resolutions up to 24 bit 96 khz. I asked us based zoom representatives for this specification and they did not have it.

If you already have an h4n however a good external pre amp like a sound devices unit should improve things dramatically. Specs that zoom uses to advertise the h4n pro zoom states the h4n pro has a noise floor of 120 dbu ein. The h4n pro s state of the art xy mics natural sounding preamps and ultra low noise floor let you record everything with stunning realism from the roar of a rocket to the drop of a pin. Aa stated elsewhere here yeah regretfully pretty much all zoom pre amps have a pretty high noise floor especially if you have the h5 or h6 because they started sacrificing the quality of pres for quantity.

Sometimes my old zoom h4n needs a little tough love.