Zoom H5 Noise Floor

They passed my question on to zoom headquarters who have not responded yet.

Zoom h5 noise floor.

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. I measured a practical noise floor of 60db. Before you get lost in the gear shopping vortex just remember that any one of these audio recorders will get you off the noise floor and onto the dance floor. In the range from 0 to 2 8 your audio can distort without visua.

Zoom states the h4n pro has a noise floor of 120 dbu ein. H4 is the quietest but still a little noisy the chirping however does sound like a hardware issue it s not normal. As i mentioned before the zoom h5 has a mic preamp noise floor typical of many most mid priced recorders. Let s consider differences pros and cons.

It is not easy to make low noise mic preamps especially using low voltage battery power supplies. For pro level in person podcast recording should you use the zoom h5 or zoom h6. When using mic level signals all of these recorders can become too noisy if you use a lot of gain so it s usually better to use no more than about half the maximum gain and then boost the volume in post. The now discontinued sony m10 was considered to be the quietest in this class of recorder but is not significantly better than the zoom.

But if you really want to make sure you never get pushed around by another intoxicated clubber again the zoom h5 is your bouncer. I searched for a similar specification for the original h4n and could not find it. 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. Also i have found that if you plug a very sensitive mic into the xlr instead you get a much lower noise floor.

I asked us based zoom representatives for this specification and they did not have it. For eg i used the h4n as an audio interface with an sm58 in the xlr input then i tried my rode condenser and the noise floor was lower by the amount of the difference in mic sensitivities. Zoom has come a long way since the days of the h4 and h4n in terms of clean gain.