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Recording Mid-Sides Recording on a Zoom H2n

rhysonsax

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I've got a Zoom H2n portable digital recorder which is really convenient and surprisingly good for capturing live sound.

I think it has four separate condenser microphones built in and you can choose the way they are recorded, from:
  • XY (two cardiod microphones angled at 90 degrees)
  • 2 channel
  • 4 channel
  • MS (mid-sides)
Up to now I have always used the XY and taken the resulting recording directly as a stereo file. When I did this most recently on our saxophone quintet I found that the saxes on the outside (far left and far right) seemed louder than the instruments in between.

Now I am thinking of experimenting with the Mid-Sides recording set up. It produces just two audio channels, one from the forward-facing mid mic and one from the left and right -facing sides mic. It seems that you have to duplicate and then invert the sides-mic channel to get separate left and right channels, each panned hard over. You can then play around with the relative volumes of the mid and the sides channels to vary the stereo width. The MS technique is introduced in this video.


Do any of you use your Zoom devices in this way or use Mid-Sides on other devices ?

Rhys
 
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I use mid side quite often but don’t know the zoom.

It will work well for rebalancing and assuming the matrix cleverness is all done within the device then you will control the balance by widening or narrowing the stereo image.

But if it outputs unencoded then it would be a different kettle of fish and more complex. The side channel will need splitting into two and one side phase inverted then remixed in with the mid (mono)

I bet you wish you hadn’t asked.
 
Thanks @Pete Thomas . The Zoom website has VST Plug-Ins for Mid-Side Mic Decoders. Zoom H2n Handy Recorder

I think I need to do some experimentation, comparing the results of MS with XY and doing the MS decoding manually or with some automation. I use Audacity as my DAW and am not familiar with VST Plug-Ins.

Rhys
 
A late update to this thread after I used my Zoom H2n to record using Mid-Sides yesterday.

What the device seems to do when set to record with Mid-Sides is to use different microphones to the X-Y stereo pair and let the user adjust the balance between the Mid mic (pointing forwards) and the sides (pointing 180 degrees left and right).
The device can let you adjust the stereo width before recording by setting the S level relative to the M level. But what it produces is still a stereo recording with a left and a right channel.

So this doesn't allow the operator to take the separate Mid and Sides channels and play with them after the recording was made to adjust the stereo width.

If you record in high resolution mode (WAV files rather than mp3) then the device can produce an MS-RAW file. You can then listen back on the device and adjust the S level before it converts the RAW file into a stereo file of the chosen width.

Or maybe I'm missing something.

Rhys
 
As I understand it, if you set the MS mix to RAW it records Mid to Left and Side to Right. Then you can re mix them in a DAW etc. or on the device itself.

I cannot see I just checked! It restricts to .WAV BUT and that would be sensible anyway... Producing stereo from MS is all to do with phase difference and JPEG compression may well break or degrade that.
 
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Oh and. There's only one Side mic, but it's a figure-8 pattern compared to the Mid which is more cardiod.

So just two channels

Yes. Most people (including the writers of the Zoom handbook) do seem to call it Mid-Side but some call it Mid-Sides, such as this article from Sound on Sound.

The Zoom definitely does restrict MS-RAW to .WAV which eats up the space on the memory card I have. But I will try again with some short recordings in that format.

Rhys
 
The thing that does mildly frustrate me is that mono or MS is probably best for recording ones self in the practice room... But then the controls and monitor are facing away.

As for space on the SD card. Personally I treat the SD card as temporary, scratch space. Anything I want is copied off and I regularly just reformat it to clear old files.
 

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