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Contents
Recording, Marking, and Playing.. 7
Overdubbing With the H1 Essential 19
Installing Firmware Updates. 24
Installing or Updating Accessibility Files. 30
Using the H1 Essential as a USB Microphone.. 32
This review of the Zoom H1 Essential is lengthy, and it’s segmented by chapter to help you navigate. So if you’re listening with a podcast app that supports chapter marks, feel free to bring up the chapter list and find the sections of interest.
Introduction
It’s Jonathan Mosen, welcoming you to this review and demonstration of the final member of the Zoom Essential series – this is the Zoom H1 Essential.
Just some important disclosure: Zoom has provided an H1 Essential unit for me to produce this podcast. They haven’t heard this review in advance. They haven’t given me any writing instructions. This is not a paid advertisement, so what you’re hearing are my opinions and my demonstration.
I described the Zoom H4 Essential as perhaps the Goldilocks device. Not too big, not too small, a pretty good price point.
Well, if that’s the Goldilocks of the device, this is the baby bear. The Zoom H1 Essential is a tiny device. It’s kind of like a chocolate bar style device. It’ll fit in any shirt pocket. It’ll fit in any pants pocket.
This gives you high quality recording on the go, and it’s also pretty simple to operate.
This is great for journalists, for podcasters who just want something always on them that’s capable of making a professional recording. But I think this also has a much wider use case, too. Even if you don’t do any high end audio things like podcasting, or journalism, or anything like that, but you want something with you that’s going to allow you to capture the moment, then this is great.
I’d actually like to take a point of personal privilege and dedicate this review to my late friend Marcel Oates. We knew each other from school days, and he died about 7 years ago. Marcel was ahead of his time, in that he would often take a cassette recorder along with him (Didn’t really matter what size the cassette recorder was, either.), and just record what went on.
It all seemed a bit odd to some of us at the time. Until a few years went by, and he was able to bring back for us some of our precious memories from our youth, and perhaps some memories from our youth we’d rather were not recorded. [laughs]
He was great at this, and he would have loved this little Zoom H1 Essential.
Orientation
So let’s give you some orientation to the device before we set it up.
At the top of the device, you’ve got your fixed Zoom XY microphone. This is a feature of all the Essential series. With the H6 Essential, it’s detachable. With the other members of the Essential family, it is not. So don’t try and detach this, or you will have broken your Zoom H1 Essential. [laughs] So that’s at the very top. You would have that pointing away from you.
And I do want to be clear for the avoidance of doubt that although the patterns of these mics is your typical XY pattern that Zoom has employed over the years, the microphones in the H1 Essential, H4 Essential, and H6 Essential are all different microphones. With the H6 Essential being the best quality mic.
Below that, you’ve got the display.
And below that, you’ve got a series of 4 buttons. These are soft controls. They perform different functions, depending on where you are in the recorder. We’ll cover those as we move through the user interface.
Below that, you’ve got the familiar Zoom Essential series transport controls. These are common to all the recorders.
At its center is the record button. It feels quite distinctive. There’s no other button like it, and it has a little round indentation on the record button. At the top left of the transport controls, to the left of the record button, you have the stop button. And to the top right, you have play pause.
And if you go down to the second row, the left one is skip back, and the right one is skip forward.
And those are all the controls that you have on the top of the unit. So it’s a very simple layout.
If we go to the left hand side of the device, then at the top, you have a 3.5mm headphone jack. You know it’s headphones because right below it, you have the volume control, which will control the volume of the speaker (which is quite small because it is a small unit), and also the volume of headphones when they are plugged in.
Below that, on the left hand side, you’ve got the familiar Essential Series power control. You slide it down and hold it for a little bit, and it will power the unit on, and it springs back into its central position. And if you slide it up, you’ll put the recorder into a hold mode. You might want to do this when you’re transporting the recorder. It’s particularly important I think, given that this is pocket-sized. You don’t want to do any butt recording, or anything like that. So you can put it in hold, and make sure that the recorder doesn’t get powered on. Also, when you are recording, if you want to ensure that the recording isn’t inadvertently stopped, then you can put it in hold mode as well, and that will disable any of the buttons from performing their function.
And on the right hand side, at the top, opposite the headphone jack is the input jack. This is kind of like the tape recorders of old. When you plug something into this input jack (which is a 3.5mm jack), you will mute the microphone. You may be able to use this input jack for lavalier microphones. I think that’s one of the key reasons for it being there. So you can clip a microphone onto your collar or something like that.
You can also potentially use it for a line in source. I should say, I haven’t had a lot of good luck with this. I don’t have a lot of 3.5mm accessories around. But when I’ve tried to use this from a line output source, I’m getting a lot of input overload messages, so we’ll see how others get on with this.
And below the input jack, you’ve got a USB-C port. It serves 3 purposes.
First, when you connect it to a computer or smartphone and put it in storage mode, it’ll become a drive on your smartphone or your computer, and you can copy files off the recorder and ready for use by your digital workstation app such as Reaper or SoundForge, or on your iPhone, Ferrite, and any number of other apps.
Second, because this is a much simpler recorder, it doesn’t really offer audio interface capabilities. But you can use it as a USB mic, and we’ll show you some use cases for that.
And third, if you want to power the recorder from a power bank, or even a wall outlet with the right kind of cable and plug, you can do that as well. So if you carry around one of those big Anker battery packs, or something from a similar manufacturer, you can make sure that you’ve got plenty of power to do all the recording that you want.
Below the USB port, we’ve got a menu button. And when you press that menu button, it’ll put the recorder into the menu mode, and the soft keys will perform functions pertinent to that mode.
Below the menu button, you’ll find a micro SD slot. It’s covered by a protective flap. You pull it loose (It doesn’t completely come off.), and that will expose the micro SD slot. You want to make sure that it gently goes into place. You’ll feel it give a little, and it has a spring-loaded mechanism. If it doesn’t feel like it’s going in in that way, then change the way you’re trying to insert it to avoid damaging the recorder.
You can use up to a whopping 1 terabyte of storage on this device, which, given that you’re only recording a single track of stereo 32-bit float is going to give you heaps of time. Of course, you can also put that into mono and get twice as much storage if you want to record in mono. That’s the micro SD slot.
On the rear side of the unit, you have a built-in speaker. And this is quite a small speaker because this is a very small unit.
I find myself having difficulty hearing this in even moderately noisy environments. But having the accessibility volume set to loud and the volume all the way up does help quite a bit. I guess in most noisy environments, I would be inclined to be wearing headphones if I was going to be doing any serious recording.
You’ve got a battery compartment. This takes 2 AAA batteries, and you also have the ability to attach it to something like a tripod.
This demonstration is going to be a little bit different from the H6 Essential and the H4 Essential demonstrations, in that you can’t mute the microphone.
So I’m going to be using the microphone of the H1 Essential a lot. And on this occasion, I have made sure that I have found my Zoom furry windscreen because you will need something on this microphone and indeed, all the built-in mics of the Essential series. When you walk through a room, even at a moderate pace, you generate a bit of air, and the microphone will even pick that up, and you’ll hear a kind of a wind sound. So this mic is really sensitive, and that applies to all 3 recorders. You absolutely must have something to protect those mics when you’re going to use it.
First Start
Armed with my big furry Zoom windscreen on the mic, I have the H1 Essential in my shirt pocket, and I’m going to power it on now. It has been reset, so we’re starting as if we were powering the unit on for the first time.
[Zoom H1 Essential power on sound]
Female voice: Guide sound. English plus beep.
Jonathan: English plus beep is the one we want. It means that we get voice prompts as well as beeps. You can’t have voice prompts without the beeps, but you can have beeps without the voice prompts.
I’m going to press enter to accept that selection, and that is the far right soft key, that is when the unit is facing with the microphone pointing away from you.
Guide sound: Language, English.
Jonathan: Let’s just review the languages. And to go through that, I can press the next soft key by the enter key, (so that’s the second one from the right), and that will take us down.
Guide sound: French
Deutsch
Italiano
Espanol
Chinese
Japanese
English.
Jonathan: And English is what I want, so I’ll press enter, the far right soft key.
Guide sound: Date format. Year, month, day.
Jonathan: I will accept that. So I’ll press enter.
Guide sound: Set date/time. Year.
Jonathan: I know that this defaults to 2024 because I’ve had a lot of quality time with the Essential Series lately, so I’ll go down.
Guide sound: Month.
Jonathan: And I need to set that.
Guide sound: 1, 2, 3.
Jonathan: 3 for March. I’ll press enter.
Guide sound: 3, set.
Day.
Jonathan: Now, we’ll set the day.
Guide sound: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Jonathan: it’s the 4th.
Guide sound: 4.
Set hour.
Jonathan: Now I need to set the hour, and you need to do this in 24 hour format. So I’ll press enter, …
Guide sound: 0.
Jonathan: and quickly press the right soft key.
Guide sound: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
Jonathan: So it’s quite responsive.
Guide sound: 14, set.
Jonathan: And now, we’ll go down…
Guide sound: Minute.
Jonathan: and we’ll set the minutes.
Guide sound: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. 4, set.
Okay.
Jonathan: I’ll press okay at this point.
Guide sound: Battery type: Alkaline.
Jonathan: And that’s correct. I don’t have rechargeable batteries in the H1 Essential at the moment.
So I’ll leave that there. And I believe that shortly, the microphone in the recorder will come on.
[silence]
Guide sound: Done.
Rec standby. Remaining time: 99 hour, 59 Minutes. Battery level, full. Stereo. Low cut, off.
Recording, Marking, and Playing
Jonathan: Now I’ve made some adjustments to optimise the recording.
So I’m talking into the Zoom H1 Essential now, and I’ve got the big furry windscreen on it. I think that this is a little bit too big for the microphone, but it is an accessory that works. And it’s a kind of a pressing problem. So we’re up and running anyway with this.
I’m holding the Zoom H1 Essential in my hand, and now we are at the standby screen. And as you heard, it’s giving a lot of information there, which is very useful. It seems to give a bit more information, actually, than the other two members of the Essential family do.
Let’s take a look at what the soft keys do when you’re in standby. If I press the left one, (and you’ll hear me fumbling the mic a bit), …
Guide sound: Mono.
Jonathan: It says mono. And this is something that you see in the standby mode that when you press a key, it tells you its status. If you want to change that status, then you have to press it twice fairly quickly.
So if I want to switch to stereo, for example, …
And here we are, recording in stereo. You can hear that I’m moving around a little bit, and we definitely have stereo selected now. I want to switch back to mono. I think that’s easier to deal with for a demonstration like this. So I have to press it twice quickly again.
Guide sound: Stereo. Mono.
Jonathan: and now, we’re in mono. There we go. It takes a wee while to perform the action.
Let’s take a look at the second one from the left.
Guide sound: Low cut, off.
Jonathan: This is a low cut filter. It is off by default.
A low cut filter will take away low frequency noises that could interfere with your recording. It could be wind noise, it could be traffic noise, some sort of constant hum that’s going on in the background. And while you can do this in post-production, there is a case that says, “Well, it’s annoying me listening to the low cut filter in my headphones, so I’d like to take care of it now.” And you can do that with this low cut filter.
But you have to be quite quick, because one of the challenges is that it’s taking so long to speak the different prompts, that it is timing out on itself. I’ll show you what I mean.
Guide sound: Low cut, off.
80 hertz.
160 hertz.
Low cut, 160 hurtz.
Jonathan: That’s where you run into a problem because it’s taking so long saying 160 hertz, it’s timed out on itself. [laughs] So you have to be quite quick. And
Guide sound: Low cut, off.
Jonathan: And it is responsive enough, it’s just taking a long time to speak the prompts. So I want the low cut filter to stay off. That’s the second from the left of these soft keys.
[3 short beeps]
The third one doesn’t do anything in standby like this. But as soon as you’re recording, it’ll allow you to insert a marker. So that’s useful for navigating around files. And your digital audio workstation may also be able to use that to help you to get to certain points in the file.
Let’s say you’re out in the field, and you’ve recorded something. Maybe you’re a journalist, you’re doing an interview, and somebody says something particularly significant, and you think, “I could use this for a news story.” Then you can just press that key while you’re recording, the 3rd one from the left of the soft keys, and you can insert a marker.
Also, if you’re like me, and you make lots of mistakes when you’re recording podcast interviews, [laughs] you can push that and it’s an easy reference point in the file to come back to, if you want to make a correction.
So I’ll press the record button.
[1 short beep]
We are now recording, and you heard a little beep on the headphones. Now, I’ll press the marker key, …
Guide sound: Mark.
Jonathan: and it actually speaks marked when you’re wearing headphones. If I waffle on a little bit longer, and we’ll press another mark key now, …
Guide sound: Mark.
Jonathan: we’ve inserted a second mark. I will just talk a little bit more, and press the mark button, …
Guide sound: Mark.
Jonathan: and it has marked again.
Now I’ll press stop.
[3 short beeps]
Now we’ll press play.
Recording: Playback recording, and you heard a little beep.
And it actually speaks mark.
We’ve inserted a second and It has marked. Okay.
Jonathan: When I pressed play, it sounded like the beginning of the recording had been cut off. it actually hasn’t.
What’s happening Here is that the speech is saying playback, and that’s overriding the beginning of the recording. But if you were to press the skip back button, you would find that the full recording is there.
So once you press record, unless you’ve got some of the other settings enabled that we’ll talk about a little bit later, You will instantly be recording.
I’m back on my studio microphone now. Because when we just press stop like this, We appear to be in a special mode. It’s not back in Standby, and we get no speech in this mode. What I think is going on (based on my experience of the H4 Essential and H6 Essential) is that we are in the play view at this point. What I worked out about this mode is that if I press the right hand soft key, …
Guide sound: Move to trash.
Jonathan: You get the chance to move it to trash.
Guide sound: Move to trash. Cancel.
Jonathan: I’ll choose cancel.
Guide sound: Playback.
Jonathan: And if I press the left soft key, …
Guide sound: File option. Move to trash.
Jonathan: We have some file options. And I can navigate now by pressing the second soft key from the right, which takes me down.
Guide sound: Normalize.
Jonathan: You can normalize a file here.
Guide sound: Normalize.
Cancel.
Execute.
Cancel.
Jonathan: If we choose execute, it will normalize the file. This is where you get the loudest point of the file to be set to a specific decibel value. I’ll cancel that for now.
Guide sound: Normalize.
Export.
Jonathan: You can export the recording as well. This is important because the only bit depth that the h1 essential supports is 32-bit float. That gives you very wide Resolution. It means the louds can be very loud, the softs can be very soft, and you can fix it all later in post-production. For this reason, there are no level controls on the H1 Essential at all.
32-bit float is a big plus for the series of recorders. Not everything that you might want to work with supports 32-bit float. And in that eventuality, you can export it to another type of file. Let’s press the very far right hand soft key and take a look at the options.
Guide sound: Format: 16-bit.
Jonathan: We’ll go down by pressing the second from the right key.
Guide sound: 24-bit.
16-bit.
Jonathan: And that’s what we have. I’ll press enter.
Guide sound: Normalize, off.
Jonathan: And I’ll press enter once again.
Guide sound: Export.
Jonathan: Now we can do the export, if we want to.
Guide sound: Execute.
Cancel.
Jonathan: But I want to cancel out of this by pressing the right hand soft key.
Guide sound: Export.
Jonathan: As well, on this menu, we have …
Guide sound: Mark.
Jonathan: the mark option, …
Guide sound: A B speed.
Jonathan: which I’ve not been able to get to work. It may well do. But I believe this should allow you to speed up the playback.
Guide sound: Information.
Jonathan: And when you bring the information screen up, it is also Completely inaccessible.
Guide sound: Move to trash.
Normalize.
Jonathan: And now we’ve wrapped around again, so I’ll press that left hand soft key.
Guide sound: Playback.
Jonathan: Now, we’re in playback mode.
There’s another thing that you should know about the H1 Essential, which makes it different in its user interface from the others in the Essential family.
If you are playing recordings on the H4 Essential or H6 Essential and you press the skip forward key, it will jump to the next file kind of like a CD player. And if you double press the skip back button, it will go to the previous file. That does not happen in the H1 Essential.
Unfortunately, if you press the skip forward button, you will end up in the inaccessible file list. And I’ve covered the inaccessible file list and my hope that eventually that will be addressed in other reviews of the Essential family. So this is a bit of a different user experience.
The other thing that’s different about the H1 Essential is that if you’re scrolling along with the other 2 members of the family, you eventually find a back button, and it will speak. It will say back, even though the file list at the moment does not speak at all. That gives you a point of reference because you know that you can easily get to the first file on your SD card and the last one that you recorded by using the back button in the file list as a point of reference.
You don’t get that back button with the H1 Essential, and it wraps. So you can just keep scrolling through with the skip forward and skip back buttons when you’re in the file list and it just keeps wrapping away, and you get no feedback about where you are.
So the way to do this is when you’re playing a file, press the skip forward button and you’ll be placed in the file list with focus on the next file. So you just press play, and you’ll be playing the next file in chronological order. Not quite as seamless as the other 2 recorders.
So that trick again – press the skip forward button, and then press play again, and you’ll be playing the next recording.
Similarly, press the skip backward button twice quickly and press play and you’ll get the previous file. When you’re in this mode, the microphone isn’t working, which is why I’m talking to you through my Heil PR40 mic in the studio. But now, I’m going to get out of this mode and we’ll have the Zoom H1 Essential talking again.
[1 short beep]
Guide sound: Rec standby.
Jonathan: When you’re in recording standby mode, the final key (the right hand one), will move the currently focused file to the trash. When you do this, a trash folder is created on your SD card. The file is not accessible on your H1 Essential anymore, but it is accessible on your computer or your smartphone if you look in the trash folder on your SD card.
That is the case until you choose to empty the trash. And once you’ve done that, that’s irrevocable.
There is another way in which the H1 Essential differs from the other members of the family (and I think this is a very positive thing), and that is that you can pause while you’re recording. If you press the play/pause key while you’re recording on the other devices, it’ll do this.
[3 short beeps]
That’s an error beep, and it’ll tell you that you can’t press this button and have any effect.
It is a whole different matter on the H1 Essential.
I’ll press record.
Welcome to yet another recording on the H1 Essential. Now, I’m going to press the play/pause key. Remember, that is just to the top right of the record button.
Guide sound: Mark.
Jonathan: And the voice says mark.
We are paused now, so what I’m saying is not being recorded. I’m going to press the pause key again.
We are resuming recording now. We get no feedback. So the moral of the story is when it says mark after you’ve pressed the pause key, it is not recording, and a mark is inserted so you can easily get back to that reference point in the file. When you press the key and it says nothing, you’re back recording again.
I’m going to press stop now.
[2 short beeps]
And let’s verify that by playing the recording back.
Guide sound: Playback.
Recording: Yet another recording on the H1 Essential.
Now, I’m going to press the play pause key. Remember, that is just to the top right of the record button.
We are resuming recording now. We get no feedback, so the moral of the story is when it says mark after you’ve pressed the pause key, it is not recording.
[1 short beep]
Marked recording: We are resuming…
Guide sound: Rec standby.
Jonathan: I’m back in stop now, and I did skip back to verify that the mark was inserted and I could use it to skip back to that point in the file. So this is a very nice feature of the H1 Essential.
H1 Essential Menus
Now, let’s take a look at the menu system on the H1 Essential. And to invoke that, we press the little menu button on the right hand side of the unit.
Guide sound: Menu. Rec settings.
Jonathan: At this point, the soft keys have become – the far left one will take you back, the middle two will go down and up respectively, and the far right one is enter or execute.
So let’s go into recording settings – rec settings.
Guide sound: Sample rate.
Jonathan: And we can choose the sample rate.
You can’t adjust the bit depth in the Essential series. It’s always going to be 32-bit float.
But we can choose the options here by pressing enter.
Guide sound: 48 kilohertz.
Jonathan: That is the default.
Guide sound: 96 kilohertz.
Jonathan: And finally, …
Guide sound: 44.1 kilohertz.
Jonathan: I think 48 kilohertz is just fine for the kind of spoken word that i want to do, so …
Guide sound: 48 kilohertz.
Jonathan: To choose, enter.
Guide sound: 48 kilohertz set.
Jonathan: Once this has been set, it doesn’t pop you out of the menu. And this is another difference between the H1 Essential, and the H4 and H6 Essentials, which would have popped you back into the previous menu.
To get to the previous menu, I need to press the back key which is the far left soft key.
Guide sound: Sample rate.
Jonathan: And now, I can go down.
Guide sound: Prerec.
Jonathan: The prerec option is available on all the Essential series, and it’s quite a handy feature particularly for certain use cases.
One of the examples i’ve been giving in these reviews is the idea that you might be a journalist. You might be at a press conference, and you don’t know when it’s about to start. But when he finally starts to talk or she finally starts to talk, you can press record, and it will record for you the last 2 seconds before you pressed record. it’s 2 seconds of pre-record if you have the sample rate set to 44.1 kilohertz or 48 kilohertz, but it’s only 1 second if you go up to 96 kilohertz.
Let’s have a look at the next option.
Guide sound: Auto rec.
Jonathan: Auto rec is one of those features that is not available on any other member of the Essential series. And there are a couple of these.
With auto rec, if you enable it when a sound exceeds a certain threshold of decibels, it will automatically start to record. Oh my goodness! This could be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes because you can leave it somewhere, presumably. And whenever there’s any kind of sound any kind of speech, then the recording will start by itself.
Let’s have a look at how this works. I’ll press enter.
Guide sound: Off.
Jonathan: It is off right now. So we’ll go right.
Guide sound: On.
Jonathan: Or down, and then we’ll press enter.
Now, what happens is unfortunately, this does not appear to be accessible because as I scroll through, it is not telling me what decibel thresholds I am reaching. I don’t know what the defaults are. So unfortunately, this is another option that appears inaccessible at the moment.
I’ll go back.
Guide sound: On.
Jonathan: And we’ll disable it.
Guide sound: Off set.
Jonathan: since it doesn’t appear to be accessible.
Now, the next option, …
Guide sound: Rec start tone.
Jonathan: This is something that many of us who’ve been Zoom users for a long time are well familiar with because in the past, it’s been useful for some sort of audible clue that we are in fact, recording. This will place the tone on the actual recording, and it can be quite loud.
Guide sound: Off.
-40db.
-20db.
Off.
Jonathan: This has fewer choices than the H4 Essential and the H6 Essential in the same option, but it’s still pretty loud and you won’t have any difficulty hearing it if you want to enable this.
I’ll go back.
Guide sound: Self timer.
Jonathan: This is another option that is not available in other members of the Essential series.
When you press record, the clock will tick down before it starts to record. And you can enable several time values for this feature.
If you enable it and you have the prerec option selected, the prerec option will be de-selected. These 2 options are not compatible with one another.
Guide sound: Off.
3 second.
5 second.
10 second.
Off.
Jonathan: And I’m happy to leave that feature off.
Guide sound: Self timer.
Jonathan: I don’t believe the countdown is accessible either, so you have to kind of work it out for yourself.
Guide sound: Rec delay timer.
Jonathan: Let me have a go at trying to explain the difference between the self timer and this rec delay timer.
With the self timer, you press record and the set number of seconds that you’ve specified count down, and it starts recording.
Once you’ve initiated the rec delay timer, you really can’t do very much with the recorder. The 4 soft keys do nothing, the play key does nothing, the menu key does nothing. What you can do, though, is you can press record to override the delay and start recording immediately. And if you press the stop key, it will get you out of the rec delay mode.
It becomes pretty minimalist until the time has elapsed. When the time has elapsed, the recorder will start to record. You can choose from 1 minute, all the way up to 60 minutes from now. And when the time has elapsed, it will automatically just go into recording.
In my experience, you don’t get any feedback whatsoever when that recording process has started. Even if you’re wearing headphones, you don’t seem to get a beep. It just does its thing at the time that you’ve specified. So if I go into this option, …
Guide sound: 1 minute.
Jonathan: I’ve been experimenting with it so it’s set to one minute. You can increment it all the way to …
Guide sound: 60 minutes.
Jonathan: If you’re recording from a line in source, I guess this could be particularly useful. Or maybe there’s a press conference scheduled, and you’re doing other things. You can leave your recorder lying on a desk or something like that, and set it to start recording at the time that the press conference is due to occur. So that’s the rec delay timer.
Guide sound: Rec filename.
Jonathan: This also gives us a bit more control over the recording file name, I guess because you’re only ever recording one file at a time with the H1 Essential. Whereas with the other members of the Essential family, it actually creates a folder with all of the stems and a stereo mix. You don’t get that kind of thing with this because it’s a much more straightforward basic recorder.
Guide sound: Date. Zoom ****.
Jonathan: I’m happy to have the default of date.
So we’ll back out of this.
Guide sound: Rec counter.
Jonathan: The rec counter shows you either the elapsed time or the remaining time. In other words, how much time is left on the SD card. I don’t know whether that makes any kind of difference to speech or not.
I’ll go down.
Guide sound: IXML chunk.
Jonathan: This is a feature that allows you to add some metadata to the file. Apparently, there are some apps that have difficulty with this if you enable it.
I don’t really see the point of enabling it because when you look at the file names, you can determine when the file was recorded. So I leave that one off.
I’ll go down.
Guide sound: Sample rate.
Jonathan: And we’re back to sample rate, so we’ll back out of this menu, …
Guide sound: Rec settings.
Jonathan: and move to the next item in the menu.
Guide sound: Repeat setting.
Jonathan: Let’s take a look at our options here.
Guide sound: Play all.
Repeat one.
Repeat all.
Play one.
Play all.
Repeat one.
Repeat all.
Jonathan: This is good. I don’t believe this option is available on the H4 Essential or H6 Essential. And it kind of loops around.
I’m a big fan of the play once options, so would choose that.
Guide sound: Play one, set.
Jonathan: That means that the file will play once, and then stop.
We’ll go back.
Guide sound: Repeat setting.
USB, USB mic.
Jonathan: If we go into USB mic, …
Guide sound: PC/Mac.
Jonathan: The PC/Mac option will try to take power from the bus of the computer. So if you want to use the H1 Essential as a USB mic for a long time and you’re using it with a computer that’s plugged into power, or maybe with oodles of battery life, you can save battery on your Zoom H1 Essential by choosing PC/Mac. It will do its best to get its power from the computer.
Otherwise, …
Guide sound: Mobile device.
Jonathan: If you choose mobile device, it assumes that battery capacity may be limited. Maybe it can’t draw enough power from the device, or it’s not desirable to draw power from the device because you don’t want to flatten your phone unnecessarily. Then it will keep using its own batteries when you use it as a USB mic in this mode.
I’m going to back out of this for now, …
Guide sound: USB mic.
Jonathan: and go down.
Guide sound: USB file transfer.
Jonathan: And we have the same options here.
Guide sound: PC/Mac.
Mobile device.
Jonathan: And they do the same thing.
And that’s all we have. We’ll give it a go a bit later using this as a USB microphone, and see how well it works.
Guide sound: USB.
SD card.
SD format.
Jonathan: You can format your SD card. If you’ve just inserted a new one, it may be a good idea to do that so it’s formatted optimally for a Zoom recorder. I’ve never really had any difficulty inserting brand new micro SD cards into Zoom recorders. But it’s a good safety measure, I guess, to just make sure it is working optimally.
Guide sound: Empty trash.
Jonathan: As I mentioned, when you move a file to the trash, it becomes inaccessible to the Zoom recorder but it is still there on the SD card. And that means that you could go into storage mode or alternatively, take the SD card out of the H1 Essential and put it in a card reader, if you have one. And then, you’ll find a folder in there called trash, and all your files will be there until you either delete them using your computer, or you use one of these empty trash options that are scattered throughout the user interface of the H1 Essential.
Guide sound: Full test.
Quick test.
SD format.
Jonathan: And that’s what we have in the SD options.
Overdubbing With the H1 Essential
Guide sound: Overdub.
Jonathan: Overdub is a unique feature of the H1 Essential. The overdub mode is not in the other 2 members of the Essential family.
And I was wondering, how should I best demonstrate overdubbing to you? And then, I heard a really cool demonstration of it from Drew Weber. So I wanna give a shout out to Drew, and thank him for some inspiration. And if you want to hear Drew’s really good review of the H1 Essential, you can find it at DrewSound.com. That’s D-R-E-WSound.com. And he sounds like he’s having a blast with his H1 Essential.
Drew and I go way back to the early days of Mushroom FM, and it’s good to hear him continuing to make magic. So thank you, Drew.
I’m not completely stealing your idea, but you’ve inspired me. So what I’ve done is put the H1 Essential in my pocket so it may sound a little bit different, but I need both hands free because I’m gonna do some body percussion. And what I’m gonna do first is back out of here.
Guide sound: Rec standby. Remaining time: 99 hour, 59 minute. Battery level, full. Mono. Low cut, 80 hertz.
Jonathan: Oh, we’ve got the low cut filter on. Okay. I didn’t notice that. So let’s just turn that off, actually.
Guide sound: Low cut. 80. 160. 240. Off.
Jonathan: That should be off now.
Let us do some recording, and this is going to be a bit of fun. So I’m just going to do some body percussion once we start recording, and we’ll see if we can make this work.
[1 short beep]
[body percussion]
[2 short beeps]
I forgot to push stop, didn’t I? So that’s our first little file. I can take my Zoom H1 Essential out of my pocket.
And now, we’ll go back into the menu.
Guide sound: Menu. Overdub.
Jonathan: And we’re on Overdub still.
So when I press Enter to activate this, we’re going to lose audio for a while because we’re going to be in the inaccessible file list. However, we know that if we go up one, we will be on the most recent file that we recorded, and that’s that body percussion. Let’s perform those steps. We’ll push Enter, and you’ll hear me go away.
Guide sound: Overdub.
Jonathan: I’m now back, and I’m ready to make my overdubbing debut when I press record. Oh man, the pressure, the pressure.
[1 short beep]
[body percussion]
[Jonathan sings]
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really want a Zoom 1 Essential.
[2 short beeps]
Whoa! That was bad, wasn’t it? Now, the thing is, we can keep building on this malarkey.
So if I go back into the menu, we can do it all over and add a second overdub.
Guide sound: Menu. Overdub.
Jonathan: Okay, ready for the next one. Here we go.
[1 short beep]
[body percussion]
[Jonathan sings]
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.
Well, tell me what you want, what you really really want.
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.
Yeah, tell me what you want, what you really really want.
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really want a Zoom 1 Essential.
[2 short beeps]
Okay. So now, we can play this back.
And the thing is, every time you do this, it generates a new file. So you can actually go back. If you did a dub that you didn’t like and you want to do it again, you can just delete the most recent file and have another crack.
But I think we’ve done enough damage to demonstrate how this works, so I’ll just play it back.
[body percussion]
[Jonathan sings]
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.
Well, tell me what you want, what you really really want.
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.
Yeah, tell me what you want, what you really really want.
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really want a Zoom 1 Essential.
well, forgive me for mangling the product name as well. But it had to fit, you see.
So that is the Overdub feature, a very interesting wee fun toy that you can play with.
More Menu Options
Now, if you’re still with me, [laughs] let’s go back into the menus.
Guide sound: Menu. Overdub.
Output.
Jonathan: Now, let’s have a look at the output options.
Guide sound: Volume control.
Jonathan: If we go in here, …
Guide sound: Fixed.
Jonathan: You can fix the volume control at a certain level. And actually, that’s what I’ve done for this demonstration. But normally, …
Guide sound: Knob.
Jonathan: You would want to set it to knob because when you do that, you’ll be able to control the headphone and the speaker volume with the knob.
Sometimes though, if you’re doing what I’m doing and connecting this (using it as a line output), then you might want to fix the volume just to get some consistency.
Guide sound: Fixed level.
Jonathan: So we’ll go back.
Guide sound: Volume control, fixed level.
Jonathan: If we go into thfixed level, …
Guide sound: +0 Decibel.
Jonathan: You can adjust what that fixed level is. It goes all the way up to 40, and it goes down some considerable way as well. So this is how you can determine what level you are fixing it at.
Guide sound: Fixed level.
Output.
System.
Jonathan: Next, we’re on to system options.
Guide sound: Language.
Jonathan: You can choose from a range of languages, and we saw what those languages were when we set up the Zoom H1 Essential.
Guide sound: Accessibility.
Jonathan: I don’t know why the H1 Essential mispronounces accessibility because the other ones do not.
Guide sound: Date time.
Jonathan: We can set the date and time.
Guide sound: Display.
Jonathan: And i’m going to go in here because we might be able to just get a wee bit of extra battery life from the Zoom H1 Essential by turning the display down, since it’s actually no good to me.
Guide sound: Brightness. Bright.
Dark.
Jonathan: And we’ll set it to dark.
Guide sound: Dark, set.
Jonathan: And we’ll go back.
Guide sound: Power saving.
Jonathan: There are several power saving options available too, so we’ll explore those.
Guide sound: Power save time: 1 minute.
3 minutes.
5 minutes.
Off.
13 seconds.
Off.
Jonathan: The power saving time will determine when it goes into a kind of a standby mode. I’m going to switch mine to …
Guide sound: 1 minute.
Jonathan: I believe 1 minute was what it was set to, so we’ll leave it there.
Guide sound: 1 minute, set.
Turn off rec screen.
Jonathan: You have on and off if you go in here.
Guide sound: Power save time.
Jonathan: And that’s what we have in the power saving options for the H1 Essential.
Guide sound: Display.
Power.
Jonathan: Now, we’re on to power, a different setting from display.
Guide sound: Battery type.
Jonathan: And we saw this when we set the recorder up. You may well use different batteries from time to time. For example, at the moment, i’m not using triple a rechargeables, so i’ve got a set of alkaline batteries in here. I may well want to change that sometime in the future.
Guide sound: Auto power off.
Jonathan: And when we go in here, …
Guide sound: 10 hour.
Jonathan: If you haven’t done anything with your Zoom H1 Essential for 10 hours, it’ll switch itself off. There are various increments that you can set for this. It’s important to note though that no matter what you do, if you are recording, if you’re doing anything with the sd card, if activity is clearly happening, Zoom says the power off setting won’t have any effect. So they are obviously guarding very carefully against losing data because it’s powered off.
Guide sound: Auto power off.
Battery type.
Jonathan: And then, we’ll go back out of this screen.
Guide sound: Firmware.
Jonathan: And we can update the firmware. I’m going to have a crack at updating the firmware a little bit later because there is actually a firmware update for the H1 Essential, and this is the first of the Essential series that i’m aware of that has a firmware update, so we’ll come back and revisit this a little bit later.
Guide sound: Factory reset.
Jonathan: And we’ve done that.
Guide sound: Language.
Jonathan: And we’re back around to language.
Guide sound: System.
Help.
Jonathan: When you choose the help option, a qr code appears on the screen of the Zoom H1 Essential. And if you want to take a pick of that qr code with your smartphone, for example, it’ll take you to the appropriate page.
Guide sound: Rec settings.
Jonathan: And now, we’re back around to rec settings. So those are all the choices that you have on the Zoom H1 Essential’s menu system.
Installing Firmware Updates
Next, we’re going to do something that hasn’t been possible to demonstrate with other members of the Essential family as I record these in early March of 2024, and that is updating the firmware. That’s because there hasn’t been a firmware release for the other models at this time. There has, however, been a firmware update for the H1 Essential, so we’ll be able to put this process through its paces.
If you go to the Zoom website and search for the product that you’re interested in, you should see a link to the support and downloads page. On there, there are a range of files including the additional accessibility languages, the user guide, drivers in some cases, and where a firmware update is available. You’ll find it there.
I am not aware of a way to be notified of firmware updates. It doesn’t get pushed to the recorder or anything, of course, because the recorder’s not connected to the internet so that’s perfectly reasonable. And to the best of my knowledge, Zoom itself doesn’t push any notification about firmware updates through its social media accounts. So I’m sure that many of us will be looking for firmware updates regularly.
You may want to subscribe to the Blind Podmaker email group, and you can do that by sending a blank email to creators-subscribe@TheBlindPodmaker.com. That’s creators-subscribe@TheBlindPodmaker.com. And since these are great tools for podcasters, we’re certainly talking about these recorders a lot there, and it’s perfectly on topic.
When you find a firmware update, you will download a zip file. And in the zip file, there’s a folder that you should extract. All I did was copy the folder into File Explorer. It’s waiting for me there. It has a few files.
In that folder, you’ll find a .bin file, at least you’ll see the .bin extension if you have extensions shown in Windows. And I always do, because it’s quite informative to see those extensions. You want to copy that .bin file to the root of your SD card. We’re going to start the process by doing this.
So in order to do it, we’re going to have to turn the H1 Essential into a storage device. I’ll press the Menu key.
Guide sound: Menu.
Rec Settings.
Repeat setting.
USB.
Jonathan: Enter.
Guide sound: USB mic.
USB file transfer.
Jonathan: Enter.
Guide sound: PC/Mac.
Jonathan: That’s the one we want.
Guide sound: File transfer.
Jonathan: Now that we’ve put the H1 Essential into file transfer mode, the microphone is muted so I’m talking through the studio mic.
I have a USB-C cable plugged into my computer at all times, so I can just plug in a USB peripheral into it that I need. So I’m going to connect that to the USB-C port of the H1 Essential. And all being well, it has come up as a drive. Let’s just verify that.
JAWS: Run dialog.
Jonathan: I’m going to go to Drive E.
JAWS: E. Items view multi select list box.
Jonathan: There we go. We’re in Drive E, and I know that’s the recorder. If I go down, …
JAWS: Zoom.sys.
240304162331.wav. 16 of 17.
Jonathan: There are the files on the H1 Essential, and I’m just browsing the recorder as if it were a Drive in File Explorer at the moment. I guess it is a Drive in File Explorer.
I’m going to go to another window in File Explorer now, …
JAWS: Home. Navigation.
Jonathan: and go to the Downloads folder.
JAWS: Today, expanded. H1EssentialV1.10 E. 5/003.
Jonathan: I’ve downloaded the H1 Essential zip file. I’ve unzipped it. The folder is there.
I need to push enter on this folder.
JAWS: Items view list box. Today, expanded. H1E system software version history 110EN.pdf.
Jonathan: If you open that PDF file, you will get a list of the things that are new in this version of the software that’s quite informative. It does say with respect to accessibility that they’ve fixed some pronunciation issues so perhaps when all this is over, we will not have excessibility anymore.
JAWS: H1Essential.bin.
Jonathan: Here’s the file we want – H1Essential.bin, and we want to copy that to the root of the drive so we will press ctrl C.
JAWS: Copied.
Jonathan: I can close this window now.
And I’m back in the H1 Essential. Now, I’m going to paste this bin file which is a zoom update file into this drive.
JAWS: Pasted. 1 interrupted action. Copying 1 item from H1Essential V1.10 E interrupted. 0% complete. Yes button. Alt+Y. Are you sure that you want to copy this file without its properties? The file H1Essential.bin has properties that can’t be copied to the new location. H1Essential.bin. Size, 1.64MB.
Jonathan: I’ve got a prompt here. I get that sometimes. But yes, I want to copy it.
JAWS: Copying 1 item from H1Essential V10.
Jonathan: It’s actually quite a small file for a firmware update. But we’ve got what we’ve got, and it’s now on the drive.
JAWS: H1Essential.bin.
Jonathan: That’s what we need to do, so I’m going to Alt F4 out of this, and I’m going to take the H1 Essential out of storage mode.
I’m back talking through the H1 Essential.
In the guide which is provided for installing these firmware updates, Zoom advises that you connect your recorder to an external power source when you’re performing the firmware update.
There’s actually no requirement to do that. They’re advising out of an abundance of caution because if you have a set of batteries that is on the way out and you start the firmware update and it uses too much battery and it runs out of power during the firmware update, you may have an Essential brick. My battery is still showing full at the moment, so I’m confident that there will be enough juice for me to get this firmware update done. I gotta take that chance.
Anyway, let me press the menu key and see where we are.
Guide sound: Menu. USB.
Jonathan: I need now to go to system.
Guide sound: SD card.
Overdub.
Output.
System. Language.
Accessibility.
Date time.
Display.
Power.
Firmware.
Jonathan: That’s the one, so we’ll go there.
Guide sound: System: 1.04. Boot: 1.00.
Jonathan: Take a note of that number because we hope that it will change once the update is applied.
What you want to do here is press nothing else other than enter. Otherwise, the recorder is going to lock up. So I’ll just press enter.
Guide sound: Firmware update. Cancel.
Jonathan: And as is the custom with these recorders, cancel is the default because updating the firmware is a big deal.
Guide sound: Execute.
Jonathan: But we do want to execute. So I navigate it down to execute, and now I’m going to press enter.
At this point, we don’t have any speech, and you need to power down the recorder according to the instructions.
It makes me a little nervous because I can’t see what’s going on. But to be fair, this is not much different from, say, an iOS update where you don’t see what’s going on either.
So I’m going to power down the recorder.
I’ve obviously enabled the microphone in the studio because we have no power to the recorder.
Now, I’m going to power the recorder back on. At this point, we don’t get any sound. But what I’m going to do is use the magic trick that I have at my disposal as a hearing aid wearer, and I’m going to switch into telecoil mode, and I’m going to put the Zoom H1 Essential to my ear. I can hear that it is updating.
Now, I know this isn’t a trick that’s available to everybody, but I can hear an increasing series of clicks through my hearing aid. See, there’s got to be some benefits in being a hearing aid wearer.
Now, it is rebooting. I can hear that really clearly. I’ve got quite used to doing this with my hearing aids, so I can hear that it is now loading the firmware. Zoom says it should take around about a minute for this process to take place.
It still sounds like it is doing something, and i imagine that when it’s over, it will go to a kind of a completed state.
It actually sounds like it may be in that completed state now. It’s not doing anything major. it’s just sitting there idling, as far as I can tell from the electronics. I’m just going to give it a bit longer, to be safe. It really does sound very static now. So I’m going to take the risk of powering the recorder down.
And I can now hear that the recorder is powered completely off. Now I suspect that when we power the recorder back on, we should be up and running with the new firmware, so let’s give it a go. Gotta live dangerously in life, you know. I mean, assuming it comes back at all. [laughs]
Guide sound: Rec standby. Remaining time: 99 hour, 59 minute. Battery level, full. Mono. Low cut, off.
Jonathan: And I have the microphone back, so I’m talking through the H1 Essential microphone.
Now, the big question is, what do we have in terms of the firmware?
Guide sound: Menu. Rec settings.
repeat setting.
USB.
SD card.
Overdub.
Output.
System.
Language.
Accessibility.
Date time.
Display.
Power.
Firmware.
Jonathan: No change in the pronunciation of accessibility yet, i note.
Guide sound: System, 1.10. Boot, 1.00.
Jonathan: Fantastic, dude. We managed to get it updated to the new version of the firmware.
So what we did was we went into system, we then went into firmware and pressed enter, we then scrolled down and we pressed execute. Once we did that, we had to power off the recorder, then power it on, and leave it for about a minute. It wouldn’t hurt to leave it a bit longer, given that if you don’t have access to the trick that I do, you may not know when the update is finished, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
When the update is over, you will want to power the unit off again, and then power it back on. So power it off and give it a little while to power down, and then power it back on, and it should be up and running as normal with the usual firmware.
A little bit of a scary process, but as I say, a lot of devices don’t talk during their firmware update processes, so there’s nothing particularly unusual or second rate about this process.
Installing or Updating Accessibility Files
Now, I already have version 1.01 of the accessibility installed on this recorder. It was shipped to me that way from Zoom. But I’m going to go through the process because I don’t see that there’s going to be any harm caused by me simply reinstalling, so I can show you what this process is like, because this applies to all of the Essential series and it’s not something that I’ve covered in my previous reviews.
It is recommended by Zoom that you make sure that your firmware is up-to-date before you install the accessibility file. I imagine the reason for this is that there may be changes to the prompts, which only work if the new firmware is installed.
We hope, for example, that the file list will become accessible at some point. I have no indication from Zoom that that might happen. It’s just a hope of mine. So obviously, you would need to have the new firmware installed before you installed any prompts in future that rendered that file list accessible.
So first, the process is to make sure that your firmware is up-to-date, then you can install the latest accessibility update if there is one.
The process is quite similar. So I’ve connected my Zoom H1 Essential to my PC as a drive once again, while I paused recording.
I deleted the firmware file because I don’t need that anymore. It’s been applied.
And instead, I copied the English accessibility update that was released on the 29th of February. It’s a .bin file, and it comes in the same way. You download a zip file, you open that zip file, you’ll find some information in there, and you’ll be able to copy that bin file to the drive that is your Zoom H1 Essential. So we’ve done that, and we’re good to go.
It is unfortunate that this is clearly a product aimed squarely at blind people (the accessibility feature). And yet, even in the accessibility guide, unfortunately, all the buttons that you have to press are graphics and therefore, inaccessible to screen readers, if you take a look at the PDF that comes with the file. There’s also no update file, unlike the firmware, so we can’t see what is new in the accessibility file, which would be quite interesting.
But we have it on the recorder, and I’ll go to the menu now.
Guide sound: Menu. USB.
Jonathan: We want to get back to system.
Guide sound: SD card.
Overdub.
Output.
System.
Language.
Accessibility.
Jonathan: Let’s press enter to choose that.
Guide sound: Guide sound. Volume.
Version.
Jonathan: And that’s the one we want.
Guide sound: Language: English. Version: 1.01.
Jonathan: Once again, I just press enter at this point.
Guide sound: Cancel.
Execute.
Jonathan: I did have, after pressing enter, to press the down arrow key or navigation down key to get speech feedback.
Guide sound: Cancel.
Execute.
Jonathan: And it obviously sees a firmware update. I will press enter on execute.
Testing, testing. Okay, the microphone is still on, and the update should now be applying. I believe this is the case.
From what I gathered from the installation guide, it isn’t necessary to power the unit down when you’re installing the accessibility update. In fact, it might be a good idea not to do that.
So let’s just pause the recording, and I will come back if anything happens.
Guide sound: Done.
Jonathan: That’s encouraging. It did actually say done, and it looks like the update has in fact, been applied.
Using the H1 Essential as a USB Microphone
This next part of the review and demonstration is recorded on my iPhone 15 Pro Max using Just Press Record, which is a much-loved app in the blind community. It’s accessible, and it’s also available for the Apple Watch as well as the iPhone.
When I connected the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the H1 Essential together using the USB-C cable that came with my iPhone, it asked me if I was connecting headphones or some other device, and I chose another device. At that point, I was able to hear VoiceOver coming through the headphone socket of the H1 Essential.
I then opened Just Press Record. And by default, it was using the iPhone’s microphone. But when I double tapped, I was able to choose the H1 Essential, and I’m talking through it recording on the iPhone. It’s now acting as a USB mic.
When it’s in this mode, you’re able to go into the menu of the H1 Essential and choose USB mic settings. I suspect one thing you’ll want to enable is the monitoring setting. When you enable monitoring, it means that you’ll be able to hear yourself coming back through the headphone jack of the H1 Essential while it’s acting as a USB mic, and you’ll still be able to hear VoiceOver coming from the H1 Essential.
Another feature is that if I press the play button, it mutes the audio. And if I press the play button again, it unmutes the audio.
That’s actually quite a handy feature, particularly, I can imagine, for people using this through something like Station Playlist Studio on their computer because this will also work as a USB microphone on your computer, too.
In those USB settings, once the H1 Essential is a USB microphone, you can go in and adjust the send and receive options. In other words, how much level it’s sending your recording device and how loud your computer is, such as VoiceOver and other computer sounds. So it’s a pretty cool implementation of a USB mic.
It is quite limited, though. It’s not a full audio interface.
And unlike other members of the Essential family, there is no loopback function here. That means that you won’t be able to record VoiceOver or your screen reader on Windows and Mac, in the same way that you can using loopback on the H4 Essential and H6 Essential.
You can record on the device while you’re using it as a USB mic. So if you are streaming somewhere with your iPhone and you want a recording of the audio that you’re streaming, you’re absolutely able to do that by pressing record on the Zoom H1 Essential.
However, you can’t play the recordings back while it’s being used as a USB mic. That is because obviously, the play button has been used for the mute toggle, so it can’t perform both functions. You have to disconnect from USB microphone mode in order to play the recordings that you’ve made.
I’m just going to go into stereo now.
We are now in stereo. There we go. I can move around here. I’ll just position myself where I believe I am center. You might be able to hear a little bit more room ambience now. The microphone is acting in stereo mode, and Just Press Record is recording that successfully on the iPhone.
So what I’ve done is recorded this on the iPhone, and pasted this recording into Reaper for you to hear.
Conclusion
And that concludes our look at the H1 Essential. And with it, our look at the Essential series.
Once again, my thanks to Zoom for facilitating these 3 episodes. But most important, my thanks and gratitude to Zoom for taking the time to create these recorders.
It’s been said that about 25% of the development time on the Essential series was consumed with the development of the accessibility feature. That is a significant commitment of resources, for which Zoom should be warmly congratulated. Hopefully, it’ll mean that a wider range of recorders will have accessibility going forward.
Obviously, as consumers, it’s absolutely appropriate that we should point out where there are areas where accessibility might be improved, and I hope that we can do that in an encouraging way. Because I know that Zoom is proud of what they’ve done, and they’re excited by the enthusiasm that’s been generated already in the blind community, and justifiably so. I like to hope that this is the start of a partnership that will see even more innovative accessibility features over time.
No other professional recording company has done this. Olympus has done it, but I don’t think they’re quite in the same class as Zoom recorders. They serve a different purpose. That’s not in any way to decry or demean what Olympus does, but they’ve got a slightly different target market from Zoom, which is more the professional recording market. So to have a pro-grade series of recorders offering this set of functionality is a real breakthrough, and Zoom has set the bar.
In terms of the H1 Essential, I do hope that the file list can be made accessible, like all the Essential recorders. That would make a significant difference.
But it’s already cool to hear so many early adopters in the blind community using the H1 Essential for all sorts of innovative things. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be serious stuff like podcasts. It can be capturing the moment. And this H1 Essential is so small, you wouldn’t think twice about taking it with you and capturing whatever moments occur. That is quite liberating, and I’m sure there’ll be some interesting stuff coming through social media as a result.
The Zoom H1 Essential sells for $99 US, a great price point for a recorder of this quality.
Thanks for listening to this series on the Essential family. I hope you found these episodes helpful.