This is a review and detailed measurements of the Zoom F6 battery operated, multi-channel portable balanced field recorder. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $650 from Amazon including Prime shipping.
I must say, the F6 is one sturdy feeling and looking recorder despite its small size:
There are six independent channels each with their own XLR input. They can all be configured as Microphone or Line inputs. I tested with the latter.
A camcorder/SLR style batter powers the unit but you can also use USB as I did in my testing:
For my testing, I took advantage of the ASIO driver which allows the F6 to be used as an input-only audio interface. This allowed me to run full suite of tests on it that would otherwise be very difficult to do with first recording on a card and then shuffling that to the PC. It is possible though that the USB noise has interfered with operation of the unit to some extent as you see later.
Also, while I did my best to disable limiters, set the inputs to lowest gain, etc., there may be obscure options that I did not see that impact performance.
ADC Audio Measurements
I quickly read the spec for the input to be 4 dBu but didn't realize until later that was for mic mode. For line level it is higher but my measurements were at 4 dBu: (not shown but performance didn't improve at higher levels)
This is very disappointing. Not only distortion rises up to -80 dB, we also have a strong rising noise the lower the frequency gets. As it is, the performance ranks way at the bottom of all (desktop) audio interfaces I have tested:
The dynamic range test uses AES filters and doesn't see the above noise, resulting in much better looking numbers:
But even here, we are struggling to get to dynamic range of 16 bit audio.
Frequency response is nice and flat:
Intermodulation versus level is not bad until it starts to clip and clip early:
Linearity shows the device to essentially be a 16 bit ADC despite all the claims of 32 bit capability in the manual:
THD+N versus input level shows the problems we have seen before:
Sweeping the frequency instead of level gives us this awful display:
The excessive low frequency noise gets confused with the test tone resulting in very poor THD+N/SINAD at lower frequencies.
Conclusions
The Zoom F6 has incredible build quality. Alas, that great mechanical engineering did not translate into great electronics engineering. No wonder they don't provide any distortion specification. I appreciate that there is a lot of functionality crammed into this little box but come on now, there is no excuse for high low frequency noise or distortion.
Note that noise and distortion are enemy of lossy compression so performance can degrade more there at anything but highest bit rates.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Zoom F6. I have another recorder to test and hopefully that does better.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Forty pounds! Can you count to forty? I can't either but that is how much the tomatoes I picked today weighed. Instead of doing reviews, I am doing manual labor. All because some of you have not emptied your bank account as much as you should have to support us. So please donate what you can using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
I must say, the F6 is one sturdy feeling and looking recorder despite its small size:
There are six independent channels each with their own XLR input. They can all be configured as Microphone or Line inputs. I tested with the latter.
A camcorder/SLR style batter powers the unit but you can also use USB as I did in my testing:
For my testing, I took advantage of the ASIO driver which allows the F6 to be used as an input-only audio interface. This allowed me to run full suite of tests on it that would otherwise be very difficult to do with first recording on a card and then shuffling that to the PC. It is possible though that the USB noise has interfered with operation of the unit to some extent as you see later.
Also, while I did my best to disable limiters, set the inputs to lowest gain, etc., there may be obscure options that I did not see that impact performance.
ADC Audio Measurements
I quickly read the spec for the input to be 4 dBu but didn't realize until later that was for mic mode. For line level it is higher but my measurements were at 4 dBu: (not shown but performance didn't improve at higher levels)
This is very disappointing. Not only distortion rises up to -80 dB, we also have a strong rising noise the lower the frequency gets. As it is, the performance ranks way at the bottom of all (desktop) audio interfaces I have tested:
The dynamic range test uses AES filters and doesn't see the above noise, resulting in much better looking numbers:
But even here, we are struggling to get to dynamic range of 16 bit audio.
Frequency response is nice and flat:
Intermodulation versus level is not bad until it starts to clip and clip early:
Linearity shows the device to essentially be a 16 bit ADC despite all the claims of 32 bit capability in the manual:
THD+N versus input level shows the problems we have seen before:
Sweeping the frequency instead of level gives us this awful display:
The excessive low frequency noise gets confused with the test tone resulting in very poor THD+N/SINAD at lower frequencies.
Conclusions
The Zoom F6 has incredible build quality. Alas, that great mechanical engineering did not translate into great electronics engineering. No wonder they don't provide any distortion specification. I appreciate that there is a lot of functionality crammed into this little box but come on now, there is no excuse for high low frequency noise or distortion.
Note that noise and distortion are enemy of lossy compression so performance can degrade more there at anything but highest bit rates.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Zoom F6. I have another recorder to test and hopefully that does better.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Forty pounds! Can you count to forty? I can't either but that is how much the tomatoes I picked today weighed. Instead of doing reviews, I am doing manual labor. All because some of you have not emptied your bank account as much as you should have to support us. So please donate what you can using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
