Review on Portable recorder ZOOM H6 black by Chong Wong

In general, a fairly good device, and the price is adequate for such opportunities. With its pros. 1. A unique device of its kind - (a small box with autonomous power, recording without a computer, 6 inputs, 2 outputs), other manufacturers do not have this. 2. Quality preamps. 3. XLR + TSR combo inputs are balanced - it is possible to connect microphones with long cables without the risk of interference and interference. 4. Phantom power (any: 12, 24 or 48 volts), you can turn it on at any input or at all at once. 5. Power supply for electret microphones, lavaliers, for example. 6. The presence of hardware compressors, a low-cut filter. The settings for each channel are individual. 7. Convenient color display. 8. Long battery life, up to 20 hours. In my opinion, batteries are better than the built-in non-removable battery. Having a spare set, you always feel confident, and you can buy them at every corner. You can use NI-Mh batteries. 9. Microphones of good quality. Two types of microphones included. 10. Possibility to connect either a microphone or a linear stereo source instead of a standard stereo microphone. 11. Ability to use the device as a 6+2 sound card with ASIO driver. 12. Extremely convenient buttons for selecting the active channel for recording and playback. 13. Good looking Different cons: 1. Regular microphones with good sound quality are not without flaws. The main thing is a very poor vibration decoupling from the body. Any touch to the case during recording will result in noise on the recording, and sometimes clipping. The XY microphone suffers especially from this. The manufacturer made a microphone in a heavy case weighing as much as 130 grams, but this did not help at all. Strange, but a cheap, lightweight stereo microphone from the m-audio recorder is completely devoid of this shortcoming. 2. Microphones have rather low sensitivity. With the recording level at maximum, the voice of a calmly speaking person at a distance of 2 meters, we get -12 dB level on the indicator. While of course it doesn't matter much when recording at 24 bits, the dynamic range headroom is just huge. 3. There is no omnidirectional microphone included. This is more than weird! How to record, for example, a round table meeting? The MS microphone is not suitable, it has a “deaf” zone behind it. I would love to change the bundled MS microphone to a mono omnidirectional one. 4. The ASIO driver has a fairly noticeable output delay. 5. The ASIO panel has a minimum of adjustments: buffer and frequency. This makes using the device as a sound card not very convenient. Obviously there are not enough controls: headphone level, output level, direct monitoring level. It would be nice to be able to control input effects and phantom power from the ASIO panel. All these are firmware functions and require absolutely no hardware modifications. 6. The headphone amplifier is of very mediocre quality. Power for high-impedance headphones is not enough. 7. The menu rocker is just awful. 8. When connected to a computer or power supply, the device does not turn on automatically, although this would be very logical. For example, yes. I connected the power supply - the device turned on in the voice recorder mode. Connected to the computer - turned on the sound card mode. The USB media mode is not needed, it is much more convenient to work with the card via a USB-3 card reader.