Zoom H4N Pro Limiter/Compressors

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Dan Finnegan

New member
Hello,
I could use some help from anyone who has used the different compressors and limiters from the Zoom H4N Pro.
Primarily interested in recording concert band music at a good input level while having a limiter on to prevent clipping/distortion.
I know that there's a general limiter and a concert limiter so I was aiming for one of those two.
Anyone who has used these different setting for limiters or compressors have any advice on which of them work best for my scenario?
Thank you!
 
I have the H4n but have never used the compressor during recording. Record at 24bit and you should have plenty of dynamic range. Leave the levels so they are peaking at -12 to-15 and you should be ok. I have put the limiter on at a few live events. I used the "studio" level which gives the lowest compression ration and the highest threshold. Set properly, the limiter should rarely engage, and with enough headroom, it never came close to peaking at 0dB.

I'm guessing that the ambient noise in the room will pretty much bury any preamp noise. Are you using external microphones in addition to the the internals? You can get a good idea of the system noise level if you can put the mics and unit under several layers of pillows in a quiet room. I've done that and the system noise was well below a quiet room at night. I tested with both my Rode M5 and AKG P170 SDC mics and both were lower in noise than the internal mics.
 
Interesting - had to go find the manual. The H4n has a bunch of stuff I never saw in my H2, H6 or F8s. I'm with the others on not using the compressor, assuming you're going to pull the recordings into a DAW for further processing. If you expect to dump these directly into a video or some other distribution, well, maybe experimenting with the settings wouldn't hurt.

On my F8s I do turn the "advanced" limiter on when recording other folks in a live setting. But, that's a "look-ahead" limiter that at least tries to do the limiting before the A/D phase, and its intention is to prevent recording something that's completely clipped when you likely don't have any recourse for a re-take. So, the short answer is that if you are doing "home recording" and set your input levels correctly, it's probably unnecessary.

If you do have concerns about some live use then I'd set the limiter (only) as you might expect, with a low level (low or high number? - no idea what the 0-50 numbers in the manual mean!) with a fast attack and release (again, high or low numbers?). Probably experimenting with the Live or Studio presets is the best place to start.
 
The H4nPro manual spells out the conditions for the compressor. This wasn't the case for the H4n. Studio would be a soft limiter but if you have the level set for max peaks of -10 to-15, then it would rarely kick in and at a lower level. The levels are all a tradeoff between safety and attack time. My second choice would be the vocal COMP2. Fast attack, high threshold.

H4nPro Comp.jpg
 
Best practice is to do your compression later when you can properly listen to the results, not during a live recording when you can't hear what it's doing to the sound.

One of the reasons for having 24 bit recording is to allow the leeway to record at a level that essentially makes clipping impossible. So if you set your gain so that the level averages around -18 dBFS and peaks well below 0 dBFS, you should not need any dynamics control. If you want it turned on just to feel better, that's fine, but if it were me, I'd probably use the Studio settings and run my gains even lower to avoid hitting it.
 
Dan Finnegan said:
Hello,
I could use some help from anyone who has used the different compressors and limiters from the Zoom H4N Pro.
Anyone who has used these different setting for limiters or compressors have any advice on which of them work best for my scenario?
Click to expand...
I haven't used the Zoom - but you are asking for trouble using the compressor without be able to listen to what it's doing.
 
Thank you everyone for your responses.
I primarily record in 96 khz/24 bit resolution (and have been for almost 5 years now), and I am just switching over to using a Zoom H4N Pro after using a TASCAM DR-22WL for many years. I just was trying to see how different it would be in terms of range (the Zoom goes 1-100 whereas Tascam goes 1-90) including the fact that there are several limiter/compressor options (the Tascam recorders only have one limiter and then a "peak reduction" setting which acts the same as the Zoom's "REC LEVEL AUTO" setting.
I'm not planning on using the compressor settings, just the limiters to avoid clipping/distortion in high peaks (I primarily record concert band concerts, so the dynamic range is different between ensembles).
 
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