Zoom recorders with or without external mic?

[audiogeek]

After some discussion about the difficulty getting decent low sounds with Zoom h? recorders with ther XY pattern mics, I made a comparison for you.
As you can hear the internal mics are very good, but the the sound they record are quit low noise. The effect is when cranking your volume up, you also crank up the background sound of the self-noise of these mics. The effect is that the sound you want to capture drown in the background noise.
So, what external mics to use. After some research I went for the Clippy lavalier mics with the EM272 high sensitive capsules. Habve a listen and please reply if you want me to test more.

[eros44]

WOW Impressive audiogeek !!! thank you for these tests ! thats incredible !!!
is it possible to share the exact configuration you used for ? there is some different configurations with EM272 on ebay for example.

Thats crazy about sensitivity and quality gain you have with it ! thanks for your time !

[Take]

After some discussion about the difficulty getting decent low sounds with Zoom h? recorders with ther XY pattern mics, I made a comparison for you.
As you can hear the internal mics are very good, but the the sound they record are quit low noise. The effect is when cranking your volume up, you also crank up the background sound of the self-noise of these mics. The effect is that the sound you want to capture drown in the background noise.
So, what external mics to use. After some research I went for the Clippy lavalier mics with the EM272 high sensitive capsules. Habve a listen and please reply if you want me to test more.

This is great audiogeek.

The Primo EM272 are really good for this purpose. What still surprises me is that your Zoom with it's own built-in mics is not as good as I thought, everybody recommended me in the past that recorder. I'm glad you found a solution that works good.

I did a test with several capsules and compared how Audacity showed the spectrum. Here is the test done: viewtopic.php?t=13002

[audiogeek]

The Zoom H-series are really good, the mics in the XY-pattern give a good and wide stereo spectrum. They work great for capturing birdsounds or louder environments like concerts of lectures. Downside is recording in very quiet environment, like we love to capture. Teh mics have to be pointed at the sweetspot of the sound. That isn't always possible in our situation. The Zoom mics also have self-noise thats quite anoying is such quiet environments.
Another thing I have to investigate is if and how I can get the 3.5mm mics work with my Zoom H4essential. In my quick run I didn't manage to get noise recorded. I was in a hurry, so I decided to go for connecting my H1essential with the Clippy em272. That works, as you heard, wonderful.
So, any help with connecting the H4essential with the Clippy's is apreciated!

[audiogeek]

I promised to keep you updated with my Clippy mics and the Zoom H1essential and Zoom H4essential.
First I hd to find the right spot to record the sounds we all love. I took the H1essential because this worked from scratch with the 3.5mm jacked Clippy's. I placed the recorder near the wall of the room where the magic happens. Unfortunately the couple was more than a week away, so I got the most beautiful bird, traffic and other sounds of our backyard and surroundings. All very impressive, I never recored natural sounds in that way!

Then I tried the Clippy's with the Zoom H4essential. You have to turn the power of the internal mic on in the menu. And then they work wonderful. Downside is that the internal mics are muted. So if you want best of both worlds you have to buy either the xlr version of the Clipp's, or buy an Xlr to 3.5mm plug with power converter. You find these e.g. in the Sarmonic c-XLR+ dongle. With this equipment you can capture the sound with the internal xy-mics on 1 track and the Clippy-sound on a left and right track. You can mix it with the Zoom recorder or in a daw on your computer.

After the couple was home again I recorded with the Clippy's the sound was good, but I made a mistake. I placed the mics against the wall. You can hear the couple, but you also hear the heatpump resonating through the wall. That disturbed the sound we love to hear a lot. I will post soon, but I have to do a lot of postmixing and filtering to make it in some way acceptable.

The good news is that I foud a better way to record! I placed the Clippy's 1 cm away from the wall. You hear the heatpump but don't have the humming direct in the microphone. I will post end of the week, because I'm busy next day and can't make the perfect audiomix.

So I hope you enjoy my findings on the Zoom recorders and the clippy mics.