App-Driven Interface. The Zoom H8’s 2.4-inch color touchscreen LCD makes navigation simple, while its three apps split the recorder’s workflows into distinct modes. The Podcast App’s four mic channels and two sound-pad channels make podcast production a snap. The Music App lets you record up to ten tracks, and gives you overdub, mix, EQ, and compression capabilities along with levels, faders, and metering. The Music App is compatible with Zoom’s Guitar Lab, which gives you access to a range of modeled guitar and amp sounds. Finally, the Field App is designed for location sound, sound design, conferences, and the like. It gives you large meters for every track so that you can prevent clipping, and control over input type, lo-cut filtering, compression, limiting, noise gating, and other settings.

Interchangeable Microphones. The H8’s modular approach to sound recording allows you to swap between four different “recording capsules.” This recorder includes the X/Y microphone.

Eight Mic/Line Inputs. This recorder has four XLR inputs, two XLR-1/4" combo inputs, and a 3.5mm stereo mini-jack input (on the XYH-6 capsule), and can accommodate condenser mics via 12, 24, or 48 VDC phantom power; +4 dB balanced line-level sources; or signals from unbalanced instruments with active electronics. The H8’s preamps can provide low-noise performance from a range of sound sources, including wireless receivers, lav/shotgun combos, or studio condensers.

Recording and Overdubbing Flexibility. The H8 offers multichannel recording of audio on up to twelve tracks (mic capsule, backup recording, XLR 1-4, XLR-1/4" combo A and B, and LR stereo mix) at up to 24-bit/96 kHz, which is greater than CD quality. You can record to every channel simultaneously or overdub layers of audio on top of your initial recording. The level and panning settings let you get everything just so, after which you can use the internal mixdown function to render your tracks to a stereo file.

SD Card Recording. The H8 can record directly to SD cards at up to 2GB capacity, SDHC cards at up to 32GB capacity, and SDXC cards at up to 512GB capacity. A 2GB card will give you over three hours of 16-bit/44.1 kHz stereo recording time in WAV format. Please note that larger-capacity media cards will increase the recorder’s startup time.

Doubles as an Audio Interface. You can use the H8 as a 2-in/2-out USB 2.0 audio interface at up to 24-bit/96 kHz. Just connect it to your Mac or Windows PC and you’re ready to go.

Additional Features. The Zoom H8 operates on four AA batteries (not included), and offers WAV, MP3, and BWF recording at a wide variety of bit rates.