Hello this is Darrell Hyatt of computers with ease, recently at the Black Friday sales. I purchased a Zoom h4n Pro recorder. As many of you know I had been using a zoom h4n recorder to do both this podcast as well as a separate audio recorder for doing my videos and it worked exceptionally well.

I had very little difficulty with it, It worked flawlessly until recently when I started having problems with the built-in microphones. One of the channels would peak at 100% and thereby ruin the recordings. So when Black Friday sales came up, I was able to find a very good deal on the h4n Pro so I upgraded.

I wanted to talk about my initial thoughts of the new recorder in terms of what I like and my other thoughts. As with the h4n the Pro is very solid has a good solid feel to it. Good weight and it doesn’t feel flimsy or too much like plastic.

So is very comfortable and easy to use and I’m not afraid of something breaking. One of the things that they changed from earlier versions was the screen colour, It’s now a very light blue and I find this much easier to use not only in sunlight but I find it much more comfortable overall, then the previous orange or amber colour that was on the earlier versions.

One of the other things that I like is the locking mic sockets at the bottom of the recorder. I like the fact that they’ve added the locking feature so that when you connect a mic it actually clicks in and you don’t have to worry about the microphone coming loose from the socket which may be a concern if you were doing interviews.

With the older version and your people were walking around or moving around on your recordings that depending on the length of your microphone cable it was possible to disconnect the microphone from one of the XLR sockets so that an improvement.

Another feature that I like is the fact that the power adapter from the h4n also works on the h4n Pro, which means that I don’t have to go out and spend another $40 on a new adapter because I don’t like using batteries just because of the expense and then you have to dispose of batteries. I much prefer having direct power to the recorder for most of the things that I do. It works much better.

Another thing that I really notice in using this recorder is that the preempts in the new one, are significantly more improved then in the old one and where this comes in handy is that as I sit here in my office recording this podcast, I’ve got a computer running very close to me and with the older recorder there was a significant amount of background noise from the computer and other things that I’ve got running that I had to edit out after doing the recording and sometimes it was a little difficult.

With the new recorder the background noise is significantly less, which makes my editing time a lot shorter and a lot easier for me. Which means I will be able to get more content created because of the time I’m saving in editing my material.

One of the things that I would suggest doing if you buy a new recorder like this is update the firmware. So what I did when I got the recorder was go to the zoom website and check in the download section for a firmware update, and indeed there was one. When I first powered recorder on it had firmware 1.01. When I checked the website the latest firmware was 1.10. So I followed the instructions and downloaded and installed the firmware just to make sure that I had the latest firmware which had some bug fixes and it specifically to do with Windows 10 and gave me the full functionality of the recorder.

So that’s one thing I would suggest when you buy a new recorder. The other thing that I did out of habit. was I formatted the SD card that I was going to use in this recorder in the recorder itself as per the instructions before I actually started using it to make sure that the card was compatible with the recorder and there was no issues with my recordings and being able to transfer th[...]