I'm trying to edit some recordings made for an organizational podcast with a Zoom H5. The sound quality is quite decent, but one thing that's driving me nuts: there appears to be a gate operating in a pretty obtrusive way. There's a bit of low-level background noise in the room, something HVAC-y. In itself it's not bad at all, and I'd be OK with it except that it makes the gate really obvious when the noise cuts off sharply to dead silence in the gaps between speeches.

What's confusing is that there's nothing in the H5 manual about a gate or automatic noise reduction of any kind, other than a switchable HPF.

Has anybody else with an H5 run into this? If there's a workaround or a way to disable it, I'd like to pass it on to the people doing the interviews, since there will be lots more of them coming.

There isn't a gate feature on H5's, mate.

does the recording stop at these points ?? ala starting and stopping at a set Threshold ?? the 360 systems Instant Replay type function is what i mean .. where you could set the recording to start if the Threshold came above a certain point .. say, -40db

or did they use a mixer in front of the H5 that had a gate ??

just trying to think what could be causing this ..

anything in the software you are using that could be causing this ??

Sorry, I should have posted a correction--it turns out that there was a rational explanation. I thought I was dealing with a raw file, but someone had already taken a crack at editing it, and the moments of silence are editing artifacts.

ahh .. makes sense now .. the hand me downs !!! good investigation !!!

Sounds like it's been processed by someone who's recently downloaded Audacity, watched a YouTube on noise reduction and gone directly to the 'default preset' and clicked "just do it".

I think that might come up as 20 or 25dB of NR Tell them to stop doing that !