[LAU] Looking for advice on a field recording device

[Johannes Kroll]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2013 15:26:21 +0200
Philipp Überbacher <hollunder at lavabit.com> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> I finally want to buy a small field recording device, a zoom H* or
> similar, and I hope that some of you have experience with some of those
> devices and can give me some advice.

I tried the H2N some time ago. I was impressed by the sound quality, I
liked the 4 built-in microphones which you can use in different
configurations. 

But I was underwhelmed by what is probably the self-noise of the thing.
Whenever I tried to record low-volume stuff, like someone talking
quietly a meter away or so, or animal noises in some distance, and later
digitally amplified that to a normal level, white noise became audible
quickly. I thought these devices would have a better signal-to-noise
ratio. I tried different settings (uncompressed, 16/24 bits, different
sampling rates) with no luck. Maybe I overestimated what devices in
that price range can do. 

In the end I returned it. Want to buy another one, but not sure which.