I just bought a Zoom H2 Essential handy recorder that I absolutely don’t need.

Patrick Perdue

It’s all lies! The Zoom H2 Essential was supposed to be delivered today. Looks like that will happen tomorrow. Tomorrow, of course, is #Thursday. So, it will probably be missing two of its microphones, record with a resolution of nine bits, and can only be powered from a 20 year old Sony gum stick battery that isn’t being made anymore, or something.

Patrick Perdue

Amazon now tells me that the recorder is not expected to arrive until November 26, so… Guess I’ll just have to wait for a while. But I want to play now, mommy!

Patrick Perdue

I just got the Zoom H2 Essential, and, wow, I don't think it could look any more different from the H1 Essential if it wanted to.
Where the H1E is kind of short and skinny with two exposed microphones on top, the H2E looks like a very short side-address condenser microphone with a bunch of buttons on it. It's much fatter than the H1E, and kind of square. The entire top half of the recorder's front and back, and most of the sides, is a mesh grill for the microphones. It has six buttons on the end of the top, four more on the display, five more on the very bottom, below the four softkeys.
The volume thumbwheel is on the left side, along with a USB C jack and a 3.5mm jack. On the right side is another 3.5mm jack, the lock/power switch, and a flap covering the slot where the bluetooth dongle goes if you have one. I do, and I'll try it later.
The MicroSD card slot is on the bottom, along with four little rubber feet for sitting the recorder on a table, and the tripod thread. Incidentally, this is the only Zoom recorder I've ever seen with the tripod thread on the bottom instead of the back.
I can definitely see why they sell a different windscreen for this one. The ones you would use for the H1E would cover most of the controls.
More to follow later when I've had time to play with it a little.

Patrick Perdue

A few observations after using the H2 Essential for a little bit:

Out of the box, the recorder picks up from it's front microphones, meaning if you are holding it directly in front of your face, it will pick things up in front of you really well, but you will be directly behind it, so you will sound odd. No biggie, just switch to recording from the rear inputs instead, unless you are not the subject of your own recording, then probably use the front inputs.

The front/rear microphones are always recorded as separate tracks. There is a mix file, but, HURRAY! Unlike the H4E and H6E, you can turn the mix on and off if you don't need or want it. I hope they bring that to their other multi-input recorders. I never use the mix on my H6E, as I prefer to load each track into my DAW for further processing if recording more than just a single mono or a stereo pair.

You can record from the 3.5mm input and the front microphones at the same time. These will be recorded to separate tracks and/or the mix file, depending on how you set that up. When something is plugged into the 3.5mm input, it is always assumed active. Pressing the button to toggle what would be the rear mics on and off does nothing, and produces an error beep. When the 3.5mm input is unplugged, the rear microphone, if it was already on before, is not re-enabled, so you'll have to turn it back on if you want to use it.

You can record in either stereo or raw M/S mode. Raw M/S gives you the ability to adjust the stereo width in post production with an M/S decoder, and allows for some further flexibility. In such a configuration, what would be the center of your sound stage is actually on channel 1, which would be the lefdt channel on a normal stereo recording, and the sides are on channel 2, or the right channel. What makes a realistic stereo image from this happen is basically making a copy of side, panning the original to the left, flipping one of those copies out of phase panned right, then mixing it back in with the mid. Or, you can reverse the panning or phasing of the side to flip the entire image around. Changing the side gain is what determines how wide the stereo image is.
If that all sounds really complicated, don't worry, the recorder's encoder does all that for you, and there are a ton of ways to do M/S decoding in a DAW or two track editor if you want to mess with a raw M/S recording. If you don't care about any of that, then just record in stereo, adjust your pickup pattern between 90 or 120 degrees, and you'll get something reasonable anyway.
When M/S raw is active, what you hear in your headphones as the device records is the same as what you would hear with the device set to 120 degrees. If you were, however, to play that raw M/S file back without the appropriate decoder, it would sound very odd.

As is typical with mid-side matrix configurations, I'm not really a fan of what they call 120 degrees pickup, which is essentially just mid and side at the same level going through an encoder. Yes, it has a wider stereo image than 90 degrees, but phasing is more obvious on the extreme left and right. I would probably decode a raw file with the side gain somewhere between where they have it for 90 degrees, and where it is even for both mid and side, which is what generates the image at 120. I'll experiment with that more later.

Plugin power on the 3.5mm input can be toggled on and off, unlike the H1 Essential. This is great if you use lavs with a battery box, a line level signal, or another microphone that provides it's own power, where you don't want DC power going to whatever is on the other side of the 3.5mm input. The H4 Essential also allows for this, as does the external module for the H6 Essential that adds two XLR inputs and a 3.5mm stereo jack, because the H6 Essential doesn't have a 3.5mm input by default.

I'm pretty sure the threshold is the same as the H1 Essential, as far as what it can handle before clipping occurs, but I haven't tested this thoroughly yet. As with all the other Essential recorders, there is no actual gain staging, however, you can adjust the output of the microphones and/or the mic/line input that gets sent to the file in the mixer, which operates pretty much like the mixxer on the H4E and H6E. This will do nothing about overloading at the hardware level, though. If something clips, you can turn the clipping up and down, but that's about it. The mixer is mostly useful when you are using multiple inputs at the same time, and you want to use the stereo mix file generated from the recorder.

Handling noise still exists, but is a bit better than that of the H1 Essential. Using a windscreen would be a good idea, but it's way more usable without one than the other Zoom recorders.

I have yet to read the manual, but I assume if you want to record something in "surround sound" and have it play back at least somewhat accurately, you would record from both front and rear at the same time, then build a track template in a daw that outputs front l/r to channels 1/2, and rear l/r to 3/4, then set your receiver up to output a composite mix of all that with a low pass filter to the sub. Save as a four channel file, or a two channel stereo mix with front and rear out-of-phase? Dunno. More on that later as well, at least to a limited extent. I have nothing on which to output 5.1 audio.

Patrick Perdue

I have not had someone look at the buttons yet, nor have I read the manual, but here's the layout of the device as I understand it so far.

The five round buttons on the very bottom of the unit are as follows ,from left to right:
stop, prev/rewind, play, next/fast forward, menu/enter.
The four keys directly under the display are softkeys. In rec standby, from left to right, they are:
Mixer, low cut, nothing, and trash. The third button becomes marker while recording, and mix doesn't work while recording.
I'll update this post when I figure out what softkeys 2 and 3 are in playback.
When setting various options, from left to right:
Back, previous, next, OK.

The top six buttons are arranged with the round, kind of mushy record button on the left, and a cluster of buttons to the right of that, two of which are rectangular, with three little round buttons between them. The rectangular buttons toggle which set of microphones are active. The one closest to the display controls the rear, while the one directly opposite is for front.
The small round buttons between the microphone selectors set the stereo width from 120 degrees on the left, 90 degrees in the middle, and mono on the right.

Patrick Perdue

Just so I have something to show for it, and so others can hear how this thing sounds, here's a stupid recording I made with the H2E at both 90 and 120 degrees.

Patrick Perdue

Another interesting observation about the Zoom H2E:

With an external signal connected to the 3.5mm input, it goes into input overload at +16.1dB. The Zoom H1E clips out at +24.1.
What? 8dB less headroom?
Well, not necessarily so.
I need to do some more testing, but it seems like the input on the H2E is a tad less sensitive, perhaps to better accommodate line level signals, so it could just be making up the difference digitally. The result could possibly mean that it is equivalent to the H1E on the DAC's input, as far as headroom is concerned, or maybe slightly better, despite not looking as good in the digital domain.

The built-in mics, meanwhile, clip at +22.1dB. This is interesting, because with the H1E, both the internal and external inputs reach input overload at the same +24.1dB threshold.

Meanwhile, the Zoom H6E hits input overload on it's X/Y microphone capsule at +19.1dB, but those microphones are intentionally much less sensitive than those of the H1E.
In this case, a higher maximum doesn't always mean more headroom. It's all relative.

Patrick Perdue

Is it just me, or is there no iOS app to control the Zoom H2 Essential as there is for the H6 and H4 Essential?
The custom windscreen and accessory pack are both currently sold out. Because of the way the controls are placed, you need to either use their windscreen, or cut holes in the top and front of an existing one so as to not cover controls.
I'm going to a thing next weekend, so I thought I would just install my Zoom BTA-1 Bluetooth Adapter, put on a more generic windscreen, then control the recorder from my phone. Kind of hard to do that when there is no app for it, though.
It will happily do timecode sync between itself and other Zoom BTA-1 equipped recorders, but that's not what I'm looking for.

Patrick Perdue

There is now an iOS app for controlling the Zoom H2 Essential with the BTA-1 bluetooth adapter. Seems this didn't exist in the very recent past.
I haven't yet played with it, but I imagine it's very much like the H6 Essential Control app.
You can apparently pair up to ten H2 Essentials to one app to synchronize them with timecode if you need to do that sort of thing.
I only have one BTA-1, or I'd try syncing my H2E and H6E's timecode.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/zoom-handy-control-sync/id6514314269

Patrick Perdue

I finally got around to playing with the Zoom Handy control/sync app. It's as basic as it gets, and does what it says on the tin.
If you insert the BTA-1 adapter into the H2 Essential, you just open the app, add a device (there is no menu to enable Bluetooth on the recorder or anything like that) and it just works.

With only one device connected (that's all I could test, since I only have one compatible device), There are only three controls -- set date/time, stop and record, as well as a status indicator that tells you what the recorder is currently doing, if anything, how much time is left on the SD card, and the battery level. There are no controls to change anything about the device, such as file format, what microphones are used, mixer settings, ,etc, so it's not as comprehensive as the app for the H6 Essential. But weirdly, the H6 Essential app doesn't have a sync date/time button, and this one does. Makes sense if you are syncing multiple devices at once for multi-channel recording.
So, if you've only got one compatible unit, it's best feature is possibly just using it as a remote start/stop button. The ability to set date/time to your phone's clock is nice though, since the unit tends to forget those pretty quickly with no batteries inserted, and setting it manually won't always be exactly right anyway.

Patrick Perdue

I just noticed that, with the BTA-1 adapter in the H2 Essential, it takes about 6 seconds longer to boot up. I've had the BTA-1 inside my H6 Essential since I got it, so now I'll have to see if it boots any quicker without it.

Patrick Perdue

Here is an annoying accessibility trend that I keep seeing lately.

The way that the Zoom Handy Control/Sync app exposes time recorded to Voiceover is by spelling everything out, I.E. ten minutes, twenty-seven seconds instead of 00:10:27, or 1 hour, fifty-five minutes, thirty-eight seconds instead of 01:55:38.

Since I am using Braille with my phone about 90% of the time these days, I thought it would be cool that I can now silently check the recording progress of my device, which is located somewhere not on my person, by using a Braille display connected to my phone.
Unfortunately, it's annoying, because, with everything spelled out like that, it takes up a ton of cells on the display for no good reason.

The Apple Watch does a variation on this when reporting seconds, by the way. So, it reads like 11:23 and 59 seconds instead of 11:23:59.

Why do people do this? Just give us numbers, and leave the interpretation up to whoever is reading it!

Of course, the Handy Control/sync app actually displays numeric format on the screen for the record counter, only Voiceover gets the expanded version. I verified this by taking a screenshot, then running OCR on it.

Time to send a note to Zoom about this one, I think. It isn't a show-stopper for most people, but it is also not necessary, and actively annoying in some cases. I have no idea if this affects language localization.

Simon Jaeger

@BorrisInABox I've been noticing this too, and even before I saw it in Braille I realized it would be horrible on Braille displays. I wish people would stop overthinking TTS and remember that Braille users exist. I don't understand this trend at all. I also have punctuation customized to report hyphens, so it's extremely obvious now. Definitely send a note to them. You could always ask if there's a reason they decided to do that.

James Scholes

@simon @BorrisInABox While I likewise wish people would stop overthinking TTS, the needs of speech and braille users are not equal, and hence there is a legitimate technical problem if the output of one is just being set up to mirror the other. There is always too much focus on speech in developer APIs, e.g. aria-label was present in the spec and widely supported long before aria-braillelabel.

to put it another way : if it's determined to be legitimately helpful for speech users to get a longer string, it should be technically possible and easy for developers to give braille users a shorter equivalent.

Simon Jaeger

@jscholes @BorrisInABox I see your point in theory, but I'm curious if you can think of examples of when a longer/different speech label might be useful. Most of the time it seems like the standard label could just be modified for conciseness.

Pitermach

@simon @jscholes @BorrisInABox Using the example of time, suppose an app is displaying relative time like 10 minutes ago, and visually shortening it to just M. It's up in the air whether TTS will say the M as "minutes" or "meters", I've seen it being interpreted wrong both ways. It's nice for Braille to have that shorter version while speech is also clear what is being meant. And I think there are definitely times when optimising labels for speech drags braille down where having separate labels would help. IE, in an email client you might want speech to say "unread, has attachments, important" etc where the braille versions could be shortened to something like unr, att, imp, leaving more space for the subject and other info with less scrolling. It's been a while since I used it seriously but iirc JAWS already does this in the email clients FS scripted

James Scholes

@pitermach Exactly this. I'd usually prefer the visible info to be understandable by as many audiences as possible, and for user experiences to match.

But at the same time, a lot of info is visually displayed with icons these days, and I despise unnecessary cognition. If your event details page says "November 5th, from 11 AM to 6 PM", I will be grateful that you've saved me the effort of working out what "five slash eleven eleven amm dash six pm" means. @simon @BorrisInABox

James Scholes

@pitermach Likewise, with the email example:

A lot of fundamental accessibility materials would tell you to give icons informative alt text if they mean something. But who wants to hear "graphic unread", down arrow, "graphic has attachment", down arrow, "graphic possible spam", down arrow, "graphic sender is not in your contact list", "down arrow, "link Earn $5,000 per week by doing nothing!"?

Much better to mark the icons as decorative, make the email element itself focusable, and give it a sensible name. Even more user-friendly if you then let me control which fields are included and in what order. @simon @BorrisInABox

Rebecca

@jscholes @pitermach @simon @BorrisInABox Sadly sighted testers don't think of braille when they should. Better yet have someone who uses braille test it. I recently learned that sighted testers use and think about screen readers differently than we do. They might see an issue that really isn't one.

Simon Jaeger

@silverleaf57 @jscholes @pitermach @BorrisInABox Yes. Throw a screen reader at a sighted developer who is on too much of a time crunch to read the manual enough to even figure out basic navigation, and suddenly that developer is throwing tab stops on static text and trying to turn the whole sight into a narrated experience instead of thinking about efficiency.