Zoom H6 or F6 – Which One for You?

Thursday, June 4th, 2020

I’ve recorded audio for many videos using the Zoom H6, it’s a terrific tool with decent audio quality, lots of features, and excellent battery life. But Zoom recently released the F6 recorder with a new level of capability. The F6 combines very low noise preamps with dual ADCs and 32 bit float recording, and the combination nearly eliminates any issue with setting input levels. But the F6 costs more and requires more external gear. Which one of these is right for you?

I’ve found the terrific dynamic range of the F6 to be a real benefit to my projects. For my hula show videos I no longer worry about the drums clipping while the chanting is down in the noise floor. With the F6 I can recover those extra loud and extra quiet parts in post in a way I never could with the H6. When I’m shooting “look at me play guitar” videos where I’m the whole video and audio crew as well as the talent I never lose a track that I played well but set levels poorly.

Still, there are trade-offs as there always are. Besides the extra cost of the F6 the H6 includes attached mics that are very handy – using the F6 means bringing mics, cables, mic bar, mic clips, and some kind of mic stand. The H6 has XLR and 1/4″ combo jacks so I can plug my guitar pickup directly in while the F6 needs some kind of adapter to attach a 1/4″ plug to the recorder.

I’ve done a couple of videos that examine the trade-offs and demonstrate the capabilities, hopefully these will be useful in helping you decide which recorder meets your needs.

First, here’s a visual look at the extra gear you’ll need for the F6 to handle the same project as the H6:

Next I did a little demo of the dynamic range capabilities of the two recorders along with some post-processing to demonstrate the recovery of a very low recording level and a badly clipped recording:

To really appreciate the differences between the results from these two recorders you might like to download some files and play with them yourself. I’ve uploaded .WAV files from each recorder for your enjoyment:

Although the H6 is wonderfully handy with its attached mics, combo jacks, and compact form factor, the F6 has captured me. Sure, carrying the extra gear is going to be a hassle, but in the past when I’ve compared the H6 mics to good standalone gear I could hear the improvement from the external mics. And having the ability to handle a guitar pickup when the player hits the strings just a bit too hard is going to make my videos sweeter sounding. All I need to do now is to stop fooling with equipment and start playing more slack key guitar!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2020 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Comparisons, Recording. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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About the Blog

    Howdy, my name is Fran Guidry and this is my Homebrewed Music blog.

    I play Hawaiian slack key guitar and recorded my solo acoustic CD at home. Most of the recording information I find on the internet seems focused on bands, drums, multitracking, and so on but my main focus is recording solo acoustic guitar. Lately I’ve been enjoying video recording along with audio, so that shows up in the blog as well.

    I’m also a guitar nut. I love big ones and little ones, handmades and factory guitars, cheap ones and expensive ones. So I’ll be sharing the fun of exploring guitars as well, along with the challenges of amplifying acoustic guitars for live performance.

    Welcome!

Philosophy

    My recording philosophy is pragmatic, skeptical, not super critical. After all, the performance is by far the most important component of a track, and every aspect of any recording is a matter of taste.

    But I do like to know “about stuff.” Back in hifi days I learned about double blind testing. I learned that we humans can easily hear differences that don’t really exist. The more I’ve learned about our human auditory system, the more I’m skeptical of what people say they hear, especially if they claim that a particular microphone or preamp or cable has some magical property.

    I’ve only been recording since 2001, and when I started I found the usual places on the internet. I sought advice and accepted it, thought I would improve my recordings by using more expensive equipment. It didn’t work.

    Two things that did seem to lead to better recordings were experience and room treatment. Getting an appealing sound is the combination of many small details, and learning those details only comes from experience. Amd the sound of the recording space is obviously a big factor.

    I’ve only recorded seriously using digital technology, but I remember trying to record rehearsals and gigs back in analog days. I don’t have any nostalgia for analog recording and playback systems at all. I think even low end digital systems can capture marvelous recordings. So when I look at gear, I look for good specs: low noise, broad flat frequency response, wide dynamic range, low distortion. I’m not interested in colorful components, mics and preamps with a sound, I want the sound to be the sound of my guitar.

    But the last word is that I’m just learning and I hope you find something useful in my posts.