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Pimp my H2n


Tom Visser

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I get insomnia sometimes... most people take Nyquil or a shot of whiskey or something. I tend to take things apart.

Here is a shot of the front housing. A top mounted mode selector with 5pin (CN701), loudspeaker wired to daughterboard with 4pin (CN703), mic gain potentiometer on 3pin (CN601), and what looks to be a ground reference using the H2n's front grill screen.

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There is a SD card reader, power / hold slide switch, a tactile menu button along with navigation joystick, output volume tactile buttons, the "remote" 2.5" jack, line output 3.5mm jack, and a mini-B type USB jack. The small surface mount DSP chip is has the text "ADC 3101 TI 15J P59C" (quite an eye test). The larger chip says "FIDELIX 250915A? 1A141? SCA1113131? 1123?" (even more of an eye test).

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...and the last picture in the set, the reverse side of the audio daughterboard, which shows CN841 and CN842 which connect to the microphones. I can also tell that the line input goes through these opamps too. Anyone recognize the 20 pin connector? It has 2 rows of 10 pins with both edges coppered.

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More to come at a later date...

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I've always been able to successfully take things apart. It's the putting-it-back-together thing that always screws me up.

How about adding a couple of balanced TA3 inputs? Then you could tape it to an SD302 and have the magic "SD302D" that lots of people want.

I use the H2n as a backup recorder, and other than the odd experimentation, never use the built in mics. My little project addresses this fact, that I never use the mics, and that I only use it in a bag and find the experience lacking because of the form factor designed for handheld operation. I also find the unbalanced stereo input fine, as my source is most always an unbalanced tape output from a quality mixer. Balanced wouldn't really help me since interconnects are short. Of course I'm eyeing those 4 crappy little dual opamps and thinking of what I could do down the road with them, but that is not my immediate concern.

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In the original H2, there was some quite severe EQ going on for the on-board mics, which meant that you couldn't just strip the mics out and put something else in without having a compensating EQ curve somewhere in your processing chain. I think I have a graphic somewhere that gives an idea of what was applied. You might want to do a quick check at some point if that's what's in your plan.

John

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Hey John, thanks for that graph. That graph represents the response of the capsules? I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at, since it doesn't look like a microphone response chart - way too linear... or did someone hook up a signal generator directly to / in place of the capsule leads and measure the electronic tilt?

Some parts arrived from Mouser...

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Although definitely not perfect I followed this guys plan and pimped mine out too. I turned it into a four track recorder the two switches let me choose between using the onboard mics and the the RCA inputs. It didn't turn out perfect but if I was in a CRAZY NUTTY Pinch I would probably pull it out and find someway to get it to work...maybe comparable to the Edirol R-44 lol.

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Sorry, yes. I should have explained: it's a sig-gen into the mic inputs with the capsules removed.

John

Further clarification: I had one of my H2s modified by a colleague to accept the input from one of Len Moskowitz's Core-Sound TetraMics so that I could have a pocketable Ambisonic recording system. The mic capsules are removed and a multi-pin connector fitted to the top of the case. First recordings indicated this LF boost and a test by another colleague confirmed that there's inbuilt EQ correction for the existing capsules.

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My first goal is simply to make this a quality in-the-bag backup recorder, mostly from a form factor perspective. When I say in the bag backup, I mean for ENG rigs that would otherwise be camera only mix, not as a backup for a recorder which already has a 2nd media option. The thought had occurred to me to make electronic mods, to add real quality preamps, but that would make it more expensive and at that point would like just purchase one of the usual suspects pro solutions. As a 1-off prototype, so far the cost, including the original H2n unit, is about $550. The metalwork should be ready to show off sometime next week.

Anyone have a favorite PCB design suite, prefer something that would run on OS X, although windows would work too - something easy, and can tie directly into an online ordering program. I have Pad2Pad and ExpressPCB installed on my windows machine, just haven't ever actually ordered anything from them.

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