Some very weird measurements H4n
2014-03-20 16:47:08
Hi all, I was reading the SoX manual and found the spectrogram effect. I played with it, and by incident I found something which is think is really weird. I thought, I can measure the audio output of my laptop. I hooked the line out of my laptop to the inputs of my Zoom H4n recorder, which I thought would have a better input than the combined mic/line input of my laptop. I made a linear 20Hz to 20kHz sweep in Audacity, played it through aplay, set levels, recorded it through arecord, and I got this...H4n at lowest sensitivity, levels set to get -6dBFS H4n at middle sensitivity, levels set to get -6dBFS H4n at lowest sensitivity, levels set to get -12dBFS H4n at lowest sensitivity, levels set to get -24dBFS I was very surprised to see this, so I did the tests with my Sansa Fuse playing the files instead of my laptop, but it gave me the same results. Disconnecting the device from USB and running it standalone, recording to SD-card got me the same results as well. To me it looked like amplifier overload (instability) or something like that, so I tried a 440Hz sine combined with a sweep to check, but I got something even weirder! Sine + sweep input H4n at lowest sensitivity, levels set to get -6dBFS H4n at lowest sensitivity, levels set to get -24dBFS So my question to you is: what the hell is this? I know, this device is battery powered and can record for more than 10 hours on 2 AA batteries, but still, this looks like to much of a quality vs power consumption trade-off, right?