Hey there

Long time audio pro nerd with experience all over the place - from studio to location, mostly recording voice. I've never loved handheld recorders, but have always had one mostly because of their price and ease of carrying around.

I've a Zoom H6 that is getting on - it's probably 10 years old at this point - and honestly it's starting to fall apart. It still works (barely) which I guess is a testament to it, but I'd rather not trust it anymore for proper jobs.

The thing is I've kinda loved/hated the thing the entire time I've owned it. I enjoy how easy it is overall to adjust levels (at least compared to its sibling the H4 that I have despised ever since its release), but overall it's always seemed like a strange product to me despite the fact I've used it a lot - it's too big and unwieldy to be a comfortable and useful handheld voice recorder, it doesn't have enough functionality to use as a decent audio interface, and it's annoying to use as a field recorder unless you have ready access to a surface to set the thing down on, especially if you're trying to run more than one or two inputs at the same time. But, it is ultimately decent at all of those things, and seems to have spent the better part of 10 years as the 'best' non-bag-design audio recorder on the market.

I'm thinking of upgrading. But I can't really seem to find a recorder that is relatively affordable, relatively intuitive but still a relative upgrade to the H6. Any suggestions?

I'm heavily considering the Tascam X8, but have heard so many horror stories about the thing since its release that I'm kinda put off by it (although I hear the newest iterations have most of the kinks sorted out...). The H6essential has the semi-usefulness of 32-bit, but takes away the only actually good part of the original H6 in the halfway decent gain knobs and shoves gain into some menu. The F3 only has two inputs. The F6 is about double the price of the X8 (which itself is 30%-ish more expensive than the H6e), and still not as useful when not run in a bag, on a camera, or when a handheld recorder is needed (running a separate microphone plugged into it is certainly an option, but far from an ideal option).

Do I just run my H6 into the ground until it keels over? Thoughts highly appreciated.