Replying here from the other thread…
The body, jacks, most buttons and the sliders are all hard plastic. The four small buttons under the screen and the three to the right are classic rubber or maybe silicone?. Hopefully nothing melts.
Initial thoughts:
Good ergonomic design, logical software. I miss the jog wheel from the H2n, but the nav buttons under the screen do the job.
Audio is easy to manipulate. The R4 records each take of each track in a wav file named by track and take in a project folder. You just put the MicroSD card in your computer and use your regular file and audio tools on the contents. Audacity can open the 32bit files, play back and normalize them.
It really wants to be a very tiny, minimalistic DAW and that will probably be its long term charm. Zoom will sell a ton of these things to garage bands who can use the four channels to record a whole song on takes. Doing the same thing with synths may present interesting minimalism constraints.
Next, I want to play around with dynamic range. 32 bit is appealing in a compact, limited device like this because if it is implemented well then you shouldn’t have to worry about gain. Just get a signal in, hit record, and go. That’s what I did with the Syntrx, not even bothering to notice that the output level was set at about 25%. The normalized recording in Audacity seems fine, but I haven’t listened to them in detail or A/Bd with the original signal.
Possibly in parallel with the dynamic range explorations, I plan to build out some multitrack jams. Four tracks can be bounced down to a stereo pair which can then be reloaded into a track so you effectively have unlimited tracks/layers.