Hand held digital audio recorders have until now sacrificed ease of use and flexibility for size and convenience. With the Zoom H4n Zoom electronics has come up with an intelligent merger of both design and functionality, putting almost all of the functions of a desktop recording studio into a package that looks good, feels solid, and does its job very well.

 Zoom H4n Gets Top Marks As A Top Tier Portable

There is a reason that the Zoom H4-n has consistently scored as one of the top rated digital audio recorders almost every year since it debuted. It's one of the most solid, versatile portables that you can buy and the glowing customer reviews prove it.  I used the H4-n over a period of two weeks to record my school band rehearsals as well as to record general outdoor sound clips for use in a now defunct podcast series.  The thing that makes the H4-n so valuable to me as a teacher and as a musician in general is that it can serve so many different roles and do so with very high quality, clean audio recording capabilities.  

The first thing you notice when you look at the H4-n is that it is much larger than what you would think a hand held recorder would be.  It's big, roughly the size of three old cassette tapes stacked on top of each other, but inside that package are two high quality capsule microphones arranged in an X-Y coincident pair pattern.  If those two mics aren't sufficient, like if you want to record multiple audio sources at once you can also plug in two XLR mics into the H4-n's built in, full size XLR combo jacks.  This allows you to record up to four channels of audio at one time.  

In terms of audio quality there are very few recorders out there that do as good a job at accurate audio reproduction.  While recording my ensembles it picked up things that I never noticed in real time, and after things were done I could either listen to the files through the built in speaker or headphones or I could pop out the SD card to edit on the computer.  

While it's not the smallest recorder out there the features available on the Zoom H4-n make the inconvenience of the larger size totally worth it in terms of usability and versatility.  In many ways it's like having a full blown recording outfit in your briefcase and well worth the investment.

To compare this portable audio recorder with other similar recorders from other companies please visit our Portable Digital Audio Recorder Buying Guide or our Desktop Digital Recorder Buying Guide