Zoom H3-VR

Delivered on a Saturday and unboxed in a car, whilst parked-up at the seaside on Easter Saturday. I had brought with me a couple of rechargeable AA batteries and a suitable Micro SD card and set-it up on the dashboard, adjusted the recording level and pressed the record button.

When I got home, I switched the headphone output to Binaural, plugged in a pair of Audio Technica cans and pressed the Play button.

The sound quality was stunning, but I appeared to be talking behind myself and to my right. I then read the manual,, or at least parts of it and discovered that what I thought was the front, where the LCD panel is, was in fact the back of the unit. During the recording I had been sitting in a right-hand drive car, in the driver's seat with the Zoom H3-VR on the middle of the dashboard.

Upon further manual reading, I discovered that on playback if you turn the device, it moves the sound accordingly, so with a bit of hand twisting I was listening to myself speaking directly to me, in front of me!!!!!

I was utterly gob-smacked. I would have bought one of these when they first came out if I'd only known how spectacularly good this was.

I've also ordered an enormous dead cat and the optional Bluetooth adapter.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Initially wanted to use it to do field recording in nature. Its hardware is nice - lightweight, small, convenient (with bluetooth control option) with a very nice mount for use with a camera. However, it is not very sensitive to soft sound, and its pre-amp is a bit too noisy. There were also some handling noise which was not noticeable in the audio captured by camera while I was recording on the move. At the end, I had to use the audio file captured from camera. Perhaps it would be a good option for those recording an environment requiring less gain.

Its ambisonics player is quite nice and it exports audio file in different setting (e.g. stereo) quite easily.

I bought this to play around with and explore ambisonic recording a bit more. Is it a rode nuts or an ambeo? No not at all but it equally does come even close to their price. IT is an extremely compact recorder complete with a little tetrahedral ambisonic array! It does a great job and the recordings are perfectly usable and relatively clean and clear. Of course it hasn't got boutique preamps or 32 bit float recording - but it's a very modest price and opens up the world of ambisonics/surround/binaural in a very straightforward and easily accessed form. The recordings from it are great and I've recently added the little bluetooth adapter so that I can control from my phone. What's not to like. I own quite a few microphones that cost more than this - but it does a great job and is portable enough to take anywhere easily. It lasts ages on a couple of batteries and does a great job!