- Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Double Tap on YouTube. Now, Sean and I have been chatting with Samuel Green from Zoom, the company, of course, that is well-known for creating a number of wonderful audio products over the years for musicians and now podcasters. But did you know that their latest line of essential recorders, the H1E, the H1 Essential, the H4E Essential, or the H6E, also Essential, have accessibility built into them in the form of voice guidance? Now, regular listeners to Double Tap will know us talk a lot about Olympus audio recorders over the years that have had voice guidance built in. Well, imagine that being translated into new Zoom recorders, giving you access to that high-quality recording and accessibility tools for blind and low vision people as well. Well, Sean and I caught up with Samuel Green to learn more about the new products and the challenge that went into building them.

- I am Samuel Green from Zoom North America based in New York.

- First off, great to have you on Double Tap with us.

- Absolutely, very happy to be here.

- Very excited about this because, you know, blind people love recording audio, right? That's one of the things we love doing. Some of us, for some of us, it's like taking pictures and recording is great, but, you know, obviously a lot of us, like Sean and I, are allegedly professionals in this field. And, yeah, I know, I know, news to me as well when someone told me. But, you know, for that reason, we like to record good high-quality audio and Zoom has been around for a long time doing this. For people who don't know the history, give us, can you give us the kind of potted history of Zoom and how long you've been making audio recording gear?

- Oh, sure, so Zoom as a brand was founded and is still based in Tokyo. That's where all the main engineering and worldwide sales happen. And started in the '80s into the '90s as guitar multi-effect pedals. That was the only business that Zoom did. And so obviously for musicians, that was all focused. And as we've gone to the 2000s, we started making some recorders, made our first hand-held recorder, which was the H4 in about 2007, and a year later with the H2. And those products were built for musicians, only musicians. The H4N came out, it had multi-tracking and guitar effects and all this stuff. And we realized there are a lot of people using these for not music. And it was the same time DSLRs were going, were selling like crazy, people were buying them for audio for video. And we hadn't put one feature in there that an audio for video person might need. In fact, we were scrambling for workarounds for all these things that they were concerned about. In 2013, we released the H6. And that was when we really embraced the audio for video. We had individual gain knobs so you can make quick changes when recording dialogue. We had two outputs so you can go out to a camera, those types of features. And then we expanded the line with the H5 and all that. And then we turned around podcasters are using the H6 to do podcasts. There isn't a single podcast feature. They're trying to figure out how do I record phone calls on here? And all this difficult stuff, it was not easy. So now we've got the P4 and the P8 which have the phone inputs on the sound pad. So it's been a journey of watching different users start to use our products and then adapting to really kind of perfect what a recorders could be for those users. And that's been a blast so far, which has led us to today where now we have replaced our H1, H4 and H6, which were some of our most popular recorders we've ever made. We still do the guitar effects. We have some audio interfaces, some cameras with really nice mics, but obviously today we'll focus on the audio recorders.

- Yeah, and it's interesting to me because I, for a long time used my, and still do actually to this day, use my iPhone for a lot of recording primarily because of the accessibility of voice memos or just press record or whatever app it is I'm using. I've got full accessibility capability in this. And I used the H4n for years, I really enjoyed it but I'm not having issues with it because of a lack of vision means I can't tell if it's recording, I can't see the levels on it, that kind of thing. So, really interested in the announcements that we're gonna talk about today. But how do you find that market? Because people have got a really decent recorder in their pocket, but yet they are still going out and buying recorders like the Zoom recorder. Is it because of the name? Is it because of the brand? Is it because people want something that's just better or is it all of the other features that you're talking about? The fact that you can record multiple people and get that good quality audio.

- And I think there's those two aspects. The one is the phone will work great until you need anything beyond just the single mic that I'm holding in my hand or placing down. So as soon as you got a multi-person setup, a multi-instrument setup, that immediately gets you going I need to start looking at other recorders that can actually take these multiple inputs so that I can do full mixes and everything that I wanna do. The other part is audio quality. And as much as the iPhone audio quality has improved and people use it, I find that it's pretty easy to convince them, your story of discovering that the H4n sounds absolutely incredible. That's a very easy thing to do. I love going in front of groups with an acoustic guitar and just putting down a Zoom H4n and hitting record and then plugging it into speakers without worrying about mic placement and obviously no mixing involved. And I'm never nervous about it 'cause every time it sounds incredible. So that moment of belief can happen for a lot of people where they say, okay, I'm no longer going to accept the worst quality because the better quality is so easy to capture. It's not a difficult thing to do. I just need this piece of equipment and we'll get into all the ways that this new Essential series makes that even easier.

- It's very interesting listening to you there. How you started off concentrating or focusing on guitarists maybe or instruments and then people say, hey, well, I wanna use it for this. So then you, oh, okay. So then you do something else and then it's, oh, I wanna use it for podcasting. And then when you throw in, then you get blind and visually impaired people saying, hey, this is great, I wanna use it. Now you gotta start thinking about, oh, okay, now we need some sort of accessibility. Were you sort of scared off by that or did you just see it as another challenge?

- It's another challenge and something, obviously we've been contacted by blind users of our product for a long time, hoping for them to work better for them. And there's been a very harsh limit to how much we have done so far. And this kind of leads into the backstory of how we got here because some lobbying in the past 10 years for these kind of features. A few years ago, we attempted to do something with our R20 recorder, which was a desktop recorder that had eight inputs and this touchscreen on it with almost like a GarageBand like interface where you got these clips that you can move around and everything. And we had a wireless control app and we said, hey, iPhones have accessibility built in. Can we just tap into that? And we already knew people were using our F6 app and things with those features, even though we hadn't actually programmed it. So they didn't work perfectly, but they were getting by with it. So what if we went in and actually programmed the app to work perfectly with the gestures and the voiceover available on the iPhone? And we ended up being limited technically on what we were able to accomplish in that. And we ended up needing to limit the feature set quite heavily to what was actually available on that app. So although the features that are there were great, there weren't as many features as we were hoping. And that was kind of the moment where we realized if we're gonna do this, we've got to build it into the hardware. And what better time than when we're replacing our three of our most popular recorders to take the plunge and do that.

- So talk us through what is new and in particular, in terms of accessibility features. Tell us about the new features inside this new Essential range.

- Sure, so all three of these, the H1 Essential, H4 Essential and H6 Essential have a voice guidance system. So, and it starts the moment you take it out of the box when you buy it, the first time you turn it on, the first thing it says and it reads it out is, would you like to turn on the guide voice? And with an option for beep only, English plus beep or off. And you select English plus beep. And from that point on to setting date and time all the way through the recording screen, it's on. So that's kind of the first experience when you buy the product, that's what you get. Now, once you're in it, theoretically, every menu, every adjustment has either a voice readout or beep tones. For example, the headphone output, when you turn it up, there's a higher pitch beep and it gets louder. When you turn it down, there's a lower pitch beep and it gets softer. And all in the mixer, when you're adjusting the faders, it will read out the numbers to you there if you need to adjust your low cut or you want to turn the two mics on top into a mono mix, all of that is part of that voice readout system for you to be able to navigate through. Built into the units when you buy them is English for that accessibility system. We do have seven other languages that are available for download from our website and installation to the unit. So that's kind of the status of what this system really does. The other thing I'll mention that for accessibility, and it's not a feature specifically for that, but 32-bit flow recording, which is built into all three of these recorders. And to keep the explanation super simple, 32-bit flow gives us a bigger dynamic range and it allows us to make a recorder that doesn't clip on the high end. And no matter how low you record, you can raise the volume without introducing a bunch of noise, which anybody that's recording 24-bit and tried to work with very low level signals, knows that's what happens when you turn it up. So because of that, we've actually been able to eliminate the gain control completely from them, meaning that you can turn on the product, arm the track you wanna record, make sure your mic or whatever is plugged in, and hit record, and you're guaranteed to have audio that you will be able to mix into your final product. And you didn't have to do the gain adjustment to make sure, you don't have to monitor your levels to make sure things aren't getting too hot and all that. So it simplifies the whole recording process for every user, but I think that that is a huge secondary element into why these recorders become incredibly accessible for blind and visually impaired creators.

- Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's the thing I hear about most, because there's nothing worse than trying to set your gain and being unable to see the flashing LEDs to see when they go into the red and when they're in the green, or that's where you spend most of your time trying to get that gain right. And if you take that away, it makes things so much easier, less stress, definitely.

- Absolutely. And I have very little experience using accessible products in the past. And I don't know what one of these recorders would have looked like if the system was in it, but I'm imagining clip tones going off all the time and it being not so fun of an experience as you're trying to set levels, especially in crazy environments.

- Can I also ask you about the audio interface part of this, because this always intrigues me. So this has an audio interface. Now, for people who don't know, that is where you can connect it to your computer and it can become the audio output and input. So essentially that means you can connect your microphones to this if you wanted to external microphones or use the internal microphones with this device and then use the output from, say the headphone jack on that to listen to and produce audio, record audio, right?

- Correct. And there's a few really nice features kind of that revolve around that. One is that you can record to the SD card while you're using an as an audio interface. So especially for streaming applications, 32 bit float is limited in the benefits it can give you for streaming because where you're streaming isn't in that. So clipping is still possible, but you can always record a 32 bit float backup on your SD card that you know is gonna be okay. So that's a really nice feature. The other thing is that there are obviously the H1 Essential with only the two mics, that's just a stereo going into your computer. But for the other ones, you have two options in audio interface, a stereo mix or the full multi-channel. And the full multi-channel is great if you wanna plug in multiple things to record into a DAW or something like that. You got three musicians, plug them all in, record them individual so that you could do your mixing. For a streaming, you would wanna use the stereo mix because you're just looking for all the inputs to get together into one stream that goes to whatever software you're using for that. But there are some other ways that you could use that stereo feature, especially with Android and iPhone. You can connect as the audio interface to your phone and record video with the audio being the audio from your Zoom recorder, but using the video from your phone. So that is, to me, a very cool application because we're talking about using your phones for audio. Certainly people are using their phones to capture video all the time. And the second you've got three musicians and you're trying to do that, well, you could use the internal mic, but we've got really no control over the volumes or anything like that. If you have an H6 Essential and you're using that as the audio input for your video, you do have full control. And so yeah, the audio interface mode unlocks a lot of possibilities.

- Yeah, we were saying when we were talking before we started recording here and we were saying how we use the Zoom to record out on the road, if you like, at Site Village one time. And exactly that, the ability to connect four mics and have such clear audio. Plus, in this case, at least, you could connect it to your computer and record and keep a backup on SD card. You're covering all your bases. Back in the day, it would be, you'd have to have a cable going from some output on a mixer to a dictaphone somewhere for a backup. But it just makes things so much easier. And having that reassurance of there's always that fallback in case anything goes wrong is really cool. Can I just ask, you mentioned that the voice guidance there for controlling it, but you also mentioned in the previous versions, was it the R4? There was a companion app. Is that still the same with this one?

- So for the H4 Essential and H6 Essential, there are apps available. So there's a little slot on the recorder for a BTA1 Bluetooth adapter, which is a separate accessory you have to buy. And then we've got the H6 Essential control app and the H4 Essential control app for iOS. They are not programmed to work fully compatible with gestures and voiceover. To be honest, at this point, I have not gone through and done a full test to see what exactly is and is not working in there. But those apps are there for anybody that wanna try it out.

- And every aspect of the system, the menu is accessible, right? I mean, I saw a couple of people talking about file listings not reading out at this point. Is that something that's new, that's updated or changed?

- So not yet. And as you can imagine, and I'll kind of go into a little story development here because we had a lot to learn about putting this kind of system into a recorder. There's extra hardware that was needed. There is this completely separate audio circuit that we needed to have built in for it. How do you balance the volumes of the audio you're recording to the voice guide? And those are a lot of things we had to learn. It ended up being about 25% of our total software development time for these products was dedicated to the accessibility system. And we're really proud of how it came out and thus far the response has been really positive, but we knew we were gonna get some feedback. We knew we could get on the base, but maybe not hit a absolute grand slam on it. And so we're gathering some feedback. So the theory is yes, every menu, every adjustment, you should have a voice readout. It's not perfect right now. And the one you just mentioned there, the file list is not reading out every file there. So that's one thing. Another thing is you do get a beep when you arm or disarm the recording tracks, but it's kind of hard to tell exactly what you did. And obviously there's workarounds. You can listen for the signal coming in and all that, but optimally we'll update that so that there's a way that you would actually know what you just did when you hit that button. Another big one, and it might be the first thing that we end up updating is a quick way to turn the voice on and off, which right now it's great that you could turn it on as soon as the first time you turn on the product out of the box. But if you decided you wanted to turn it off and then turn it back on, it's about 14 button clicks to turn it back on. So we will develop a shortcut for you to be able to turn that on and off. And I've heard several use cases for that, but basically if I've got all my settings and all that, and I'm just hitting record and hitting stop, every time you get to the main record screen, it does give you a status readout. And maybe I don't need that every time. If I'm just trying to figure out a part and I'm recording 20 different versions of it, I don't wanna have to hear that readout every time. So we'll have a shortcut to allow you to turn it on and off. That's just a couple of several points that we've put together that we are going to see if we could do some updating for.

- But I think it's great that you're being so open about that and you're saying, look, we want the feedback, we want this to improve. And like you say, you put 25% of your development time into this, you want it to work. You want it to succeed. We certainly do. So it's up to us as a community to help you with that. And I'm sure you're getting plenty of feedback and more people that buy this will no doubt give you that feedback because ultimately you've unlocked the door that blind people can buy this thing, right? So we couldn't buy it before, but we would end up in a situation where we'd have to deal with an inaccessible device. Now it is accessible. You're gonna get a lot of people interested. And I just wanna expand this a little bit because of course there are other companies out there, I'm sure you've heard of them, that are doing similar products and creating recorders and doing all this kind of thing. And not maybe as much on this kind of device specifically, but I think about some of the mixer type devices you've got. And then I think about a company like Rode that are making these kind of equivalent mixer devices for podcasters in particular. And they're not building in much accessibility at all. And this kind of puts you ahead of the game a little bit. And I just wonder, what's your kind of plan for development longer term with your other devices? Is this kind of set a stall for you that says, we should actually just make all our devices going forward accessible or are you just focusing on these particular devices so far?

- So right now it's a focus on these particular devices. And I've mentioned it on some other interviews I've done that we cannot add this accessibility system into previous products. And so for some reason, I mentioned the extra hardware needed and all that kind of stuff. So what will happen in our future products, it's impossible for me to say right now. I will say the feedback so far from the community on these products has been really amazing. And we're really happy about that. And we're happy to have done this on these recorders. So the focus is here. I hope to see some more in the future but impossible to say right now. And let me add, we'd love to see it from every company. There's a lot of companies making a lot of great products out there and we've done this with these recorders and we believe that other companies can do it too with some of their products. So we hope to see more of it from everybody all around.

- And actually it's really important you say that because from my point of view, I'm with you on this. I wanna see it from other companies. I don't wanna call companies out like road and say, oh, hey, you're not making your products accessible and that's the end of the story. I don't want companies to get defensive about that. I want them to listen to that feedback and say, well, hang on a minute. Here's a market that is interested in buying these devices. Sean, I mean, you had hands-on with my Rodecaster Pro and you're like, I'd love to use this but it's not accessible to you. So you're not gonna buy one.

- No, absolutely.

- It's got a big touchscreen. It's hopeless.

- It's funny to me that this is a particular sector when we're talking about audio devices that seems to be lagging behind when it comes to accessibility. I'm guessing actually, I'm gonna ask this, the danger, the risk of being jumped by people in my own community. When it comes to accessibility, you mentioned 25% of your software development time was taken up just by accessibility. Was there any time during that where you thought, you know what, it's not worth it? I know.

- Definitely not.

- Well, you're gonna say that, aren't you?

- I wanna say, yeah. No, just honestly, because look, other companies, we keep mentioning Rode, but there's a reason for that because I really would like to use their hardware but I am excluded from it. I cannot use it. And it is purely because the accessibility hasn't been thought. As you mentioned earlier, it's really difficult to bolt on after the fact. You need to really come into this with accessibility in mind at stage one. So I just wonder, other companies that may be watching you and seeing how you struggle with accessibility, and as you've been totally honest and open and said, there's still areas where it's lacking, but we're working on that. What sort of advice would you give to other companies?

- So I'll start by saying the 25%, that wasn't a surprise to us. Going into it and learning the things that we were gonna have to do that was something we were aware of going in that this was going to be a hurdle we have to jump. And I think that that's the message. It's a hurdle. You have to jump it. We hope it will be easier for us in the future if we choose to put in additional products now that we've learned everything we've learned. And for every other company out there that thinks about it, they see that hurdle that they have to get over. And it's a scary hurdle. And my encouragement would be jump it, figure it out. Because once you get to the other side, it's gonna be a lot easier to do it again. You gotta take that first step. And we did it, we have no regrets. We're really happy to be where we are right now.

- Just talk me through for people who are kind of interested here, but I'm thinking, 'cause I imagine there's a lot of people who are interested in this product, or at least, I mean, I'm thinking about the H1 Essential, which is the kind of device I would imagine is more for people who are doing maybe personal recordings or perhaps maybe musicians in their own way, maybe recording guitar or whatever, recording music, maybe a bit more kind of like one-to-one recording, that kind of thing, maybe recording lectures and are looking for an accessible recorder. They may look to that. Others might look to the H4 and H6 Essentials. But could you maybe talk us through what the differences are between the three specifically, so people can get a sense of what is different? I mean, obviously we know bigger numbers mean more things. And in this case, it's more inputs, I guess, is what the one in the four and the six represent. But what else would you gain by buying the other ones?

- Sure, so you're right on with the H1 Essential. It's small, it is incredibly easy to use, very easy to have with you at all times. If you're a solo musician who just likes to noodle on the guitar and record it, you are in a band or an orchestra and you like to record concerts or your rehearsals or anything like that, the H1 Essential is the choice. Even people doing interviews out on the road and things like that, there's even a button to switch from stereo to mono on there, throw a windscreen on top for your plosives and you could do an interview with it. Going up to the H4 Essential, you have the two mics on top and now you've got the two XLR TRS inputs. And those, you can be plugging in microphones for recording music, you can be plugging in keyboards, you could take a feed from a mixer. A lot of event videography ends up using the H4 Essential, sometimes multiple of them. One of them ends up by the mixing board of the DJ and gets a stereo feed from there while the others with the cameraman who's going around and doing little interviews and things like that. So it's versatile because you've got the mics on top plus those two inputs that you can use. And for a podcaster looking for a portable two mic input with 32-bit float, the H4 Essential will be where you go. The H6 Essential, you've got four of those XLR TRS inputs. You've got expanded capability there. You've got also the microphones on top. It comes with XY microphones, but that is a removable capsule. And we will have some additional capsules available, a monostereo shotgun mic, a capsule with two extra inputs to actually give you six inputs going into it. And so, expanded musical applications, audio for video, whether you're using shotgun mics or wireless, the H4 Essential with the two inputs might be enough, but if the two is enough for you every time, there's probably some times where you wish you had more. And that's kind of the trouble a lot of people get into. So the H6 Essential, you've got those two extra inputs there whenever you might want them. The H6 Essential also adds a second line output to go to your camera. The H4 Essential and the H6 Essential, as we discussed, have the wireless control from iOS, but also have wireless timecode. Right now, it's only compatible with the Atomos timecode system, but for people that do video, timecode is how you sync up your video and audio files so that when you put them into your computer, it's just a click and sync rather than needing to do it yourself. But all of them can be used as audio interface. All of them are running on batteries, either AA or AAA in the case of the H1 Essential. And they're all recording SD cards up to a terabyte, which for context is a lot of audio.

- It's a lot of audio.

- So, yeah, that's kind of the brief as you go up. All three of them have applications for, we have the three main categories, the music, the audio for video, and the podcasting. Obviously, there's people that go in between those categories or people that are outside of those categories, but still need the recorder. All three of them have application with all three of these recorders. It's a question of how much power do you need and power basically means inputs, but also with the H6 you get the extra output. So there's a couple other little features that can drive you in one direction or the other.

- Now, I feel this might be a bit of an international issue question because this happens quite a lot with products. But can I just clarify the names of these products? Because I see a bit of conversation online from people saying, "Hey, I tried to find it and I couldn't find it." So I, for example, searched for it as because I had an H4N, I searched for the H4E and that came up, but is it actually called that or is it called Essentials?

- They are Essentials. So it's the H1 Essential, H4 Essential, H6 Essential. We anticipate people calling the H20, H4, H60 and that's totally fine. But we really liked having the full word on there because especially with adding the 32-bit float, we really felt like we were getting to the point where these are becoming so easy and so obviously with 32-bit float, kind of perfect audio every time type of situation that it is really essential that you have these kinds of features because the audio you're recording is essential in and of itself. Audio only happens one time. You could play the guitar riff again, but it's not exactly the same as the last time you played it. So your audio is essential and now we've got these recorders that can pretty much guarantee you're gonna get it. And so we have the essential features, you record your essential audio. So we really liked the word for these recorders.

- Wow, our audio is essential, Steven Scott, just.

- No one has ever said that. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

- Yeah, okay, all right. But between the three of us, we know the truth. Listen, Samuel, it's been so good talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your news about these recorders. And welcome to the blind family. You've got all these new people who can shout at you and say, "Hey, make this better now, it's great."

- You know what, I have to say the blind community has an ability to spread word and in a way that I have not seen another community that does it quite the same way. And it's been really, really fun to get to know a little bit more about it. So I'm so happy to be on the show with you guys. So thank you so much for having me.

- Thank you. - Thanks so much for coming on and keep in touch. And you can find these, as you say, search for H1 Essential, H4 Essential or H6 Essential. I did search for H1, H4, H6 and E and it did actually come up in my country. So I don't know if it's different in every place, but you will find it, just make sure that E is in there. And yeah, that is brilliant. Samuel, thank you so much for coming on.

- Thank you.

- And that was Samuel Green from Zoom. You can find those recorders by searching for H1 Essential, H4 Essential or H6 Essential. Tell us your thoughts and tell us why you'd buy this over using your iPhone. I understand if you're doing multi-person podcasts or multi recordings that you will want to have a device like the H4E or the H6E. But when it comes to the H1E, which is essentially a device for individuals, for people like me to go out and interview someone like you just one-to-one, why would I use this over using something like an iPhone, which has got quality cameras built in? Maybe it's a review we should do in the future. Anyway, tell us your thoughts in the comments. Also, you can drop us a note to feedback@doubletaponair.com. You can call 1-877-803-4567 or you can, as always, find us on social media. And we'll catch you again for another Double Tap on YouTube soon.