Zoom F1 Field Recorder

An afternoon walk to West Bay and back seemed like a fine way to check out my new Zoom F1 Field Recorder. I've set the record level to max now (Hi++) so was keen to see how it performed...

This is my on-the-go recording set-up.

My camera bag strap goes across the body and over my left shoulder, so the clippy lavalier mic winds up just behind my left shoulder. A handy thing with these old Crumpler Muffin Top bags is that the strap padding grips your shoulder pretty well, so it tends to stay in place even as you pull the bag back and forth to get at the camera - the webbing simply slides through the padded bit - which means the microphone is generally where it's meant to be. Some birders clip the mic to the peak of their cap, but I don't often wear a cap.

The Zoom F1. My settings: Rec Format 48k 24bit, Lo Cut 160Hz, Limiter OFF, Rec Level Hi++

I made a note of the time I started recording, and headed off.

I am not in the habit of reviewing a whole recording like I would with noc-mig, rather I note the time of any interesting bird sounds and check them out on Audacity later by scrolling to the relevant time slot. So here are a couple from today, exactly as recorded...

First, Grey Wagtail, with trickling river...

And Rock Pipit, complete with surging sea...

Both recordings are comfortably as loud as I would have expected, and detailed enough to get a decent spectrogram out of them. This is the Rock Pipit...

Rock Pipit calls. Unedited. The dense background noise is caused by the sea.

I am confident that the Zoom F1 performed as well as my H4n Pro would have done. So far I've had about seven hours of recording from the 2xAAA batteries in the F1, and the charge indicator is still on two bars. The H4n Pro would have been long dead by now.

I am using my EM272 mono clippy microphone, a quality item which retails at almost 50 quid. The F1 is supplied with a Zoom clippy mic. Is it any good?

Zoom clippy on the left, EM272 right.

I took both mics to the garden cabin and tried a side-by-side test. I positioned each in exactly the same spot - without wind shields of any kind - and played them a bit of half-volume bird song from the Collins Bird Guide app on my phone. Obviously the phone was positioned identically for each mic too. So here are some side-by-side spectrograms from that session...

Garden Warbler - Zoom mic on the left, EM272 mic on the right.

It is easy to see subtle differences, and the EM272 is clearly a bit more sensitive. Listening back, the EM272 recording has a 'fuller' sound as well - it just has an air of quality which the Zoom mic lacks.

Chiffchaff. Again, Zoom left, EM272 right.

Notice those high-frequency bits marked with the yellow arrow which the EM272 picks up but are missed by the Zoom. Again, the sensitivity differences are quite obvious.

In practice, the Zoom mic was fine really. Playing back the recordings and comparing them, yes, you could hear the subtle difference in quality, but to my ear the volume was pretty much identical. And obviously you could tell it was a Garden Warbler and Chiffchaff! Would the Zoom mic successfully have recorded the Grey Wag and Rock Pipit featured above? Definitely!

Incidentally, the horizontal aberrations on those comparison spectrograms never appear on recordings done in the field, and are no doubt a quirk of my phone's speaker or the Bird Guide recordings themselves.

So there we go. Just a quick 'first impressions' type review of the Zoom F1.

Someone on Bluesky asked what I use the recordings for. Good question. I would say that 99.99% of my recorded material is discarded, whether it is from the field or noc-mig. I save the occasional good bits, adding them to my little collection of bird recordings. Of course the main reason I record anything at all is in case a mega happens. My noc-mig recordings of Stone-curlew and Night Heron, for example, are as treasured as any photo.