Wow, this is pretty cool. I work in radio and with these devices. If anyone is curious, sound devices is everyones favourite, zoom f3 is the new workhorse on the block and the sony pcm d100 is the old discontinued legend… all three in top 11, which tells me it’s not all talk and we in the industry actually can somewhat tell what sounds good.
The F3 has great audio quality and it might work for a lot of use cases... but the physical format is terrible if you want to put it in a bag (which is what most people recording audio on set do).
It's great for field recording though where you attach the recorder to a tree branch or something.
Actually, i have it dangling from my belt straps in a snap hook! Then xlr to my mic. Pretty nifty.
I'm always anxious about breaking the headphones connector. And if you want to add a USB-C battery it's another dangling cable from the wrong place.
Very interesting... The F3 looks pretty reasonable in price...
Don't buy just yet, unless you want to buy my used one. :) Zoom is coming out with the Zoom H5Studio, which is supposed to have the same preamps as the F3. It also has a set of built-in stereo mics. On the other hand, the F3 is definitely more rugged, and a fair bit smaller, so it depends on your use-case.
Ha! Thanks! Haven't done recording in a while (bunch of times I've used a Zoom or similar device to record a concert or an interview), but I was thinking about a friend that does lots of field ambient recording.
Whats your opinion on f32, useful or gimmick?
(Not the OP) I use my Zoom F3 (which is a 32-bit float recorder) for field recordings for hobby music production. I'm not a professional in any respect.
But I've found f32 to be incredibly useful because it allows me to very spontaneously capture unexpected sounds with little to no setup or preparation. In fact, sometimes I even forego monitoring in favor of just quickly getting out the recorder and microphones and then hitting record -- since I don't have to fiddle with gain, I know that I can capture something usable rather than missing the opportunity altogether.
When I have time to prepare a recording and it's not going to have a crazy amount of dynamic range, then sure, f32 isn't a make-or-break feature, and needing to do post-processing 100% of the time before the audio is usable in non-f32 contexts could be seen as a drawback. But for my use cases, absolutely useful and worthwhile.
As you say, f32 requires post-processing. What is the most minimal post-processing needed?
For me personally, the minimum is 'normalization.'
There's a problem with f32 due to devices using two ADCs to implement it. Essentially, there's certain volume threshold when device switches DACs, and it's audible. If you record sources with varying loudness, you may see noise floor raising around loud bursts, and typical noise suppression tools won't work on files like this (there was a video or a blog post, I can't recall where I saw this). At least this is how Zoom implemented f32, don't know about Sound Devices.
I was wondering how they avoid being swamped by analog noise in the lower ranges with such a high dynamic range.
I suppose they use different gains per DAC and map that to the respective dynamic ranges of the f32 signal?
To my understanding, yes, but I'm just a hobbyist.
This compares sound recording hardware, not microphones.
If you scroll down, there are some sound sample files made with three different microphones across the numerous sound recorders, but no numbers comparing microphones. Only the recorders are quantitatively compared.
This is a great resource which I've used many times but the reality is that most of the noise will come from the mic itself.
I regularly record very quiet sources with the Rode NT1 (one of the mics with lowest self noise) and I've yet to hear any noise from any of my preamps.