Nice unit, just not portable 
by Paul T from Mount Laurel, NJ, October 2007
Music Background:  Hobbyist

I bought this unit to record rehearsals and our band's performances. It does a fine job with recording quality. It's just not "portable". Two hours of battery life is not that long. It will not charge with the USB cable so you have to use the A/C adapter which is as large as the unit. There is also no internal microphone. So when you add up the two power cables, adapter, external microphone and the unit itself ... it's a large package to work with. If you could use rechargeable batteries and an internal mic, it would be a 5-star unit.

  MR-1 first impressions 
by Dj Hombre from London, UK, August 2007
Music Background:  DJ

I bought this neat little unit with the purpose of recording sounds of varying sensitivity - from Church Bells to my wife's band (Amy Blue) in their practice sessions and live gigs.

Korg have kindly provided a software upgrade for the MR-1 so it can now handle mp3 recording & playback as well as some tidier menu options and the Auto recording level monitoring.

On recording the band this weekend through the tiny mic provided, I was initially disappointed with the result played back...it seemed to be poor on the bass levels but over-doing the high end. On getting the recordings back home and loaded into a run-of-the-mill audio software package, I could apply an EQ to the sound and bring the bass back in nicely. Using AudioGate I've crunched the sound down to mp3 (mainly because that's what the rest of the band understands at the moment) and distributed it to them.

They were pleasantly surprised with the output from such a small unassuming mic. I'm sure with practice the sound recorded will get better and better as I get to grips with where to position the mic and what thresholds to apply (maybe more help/guidance would be good here from Korg with some examples of what thresholds could be used and when).

I'm really impressed with the result though. I'm not sure (probably because I'm new to this sort of thing), but I reckon it would be nice if the people at Korg could include some basic EQ functionality, so the playback (not the file) can be amended after recording.

  A new paradigm in audio recording! 
by Maitland from Santa Cruz, CA, June 2007
Music Background:  Long-time Musician, Student, Hacker,

Once you hear what you have been missing, you will be hooked. The MR-1 has amazing high-frequency detail. It really shines when recording a full band or a mix where there are lots of different sounds occurring at once. You can hear every little nuance of every little sound.

And all of this is in a package that is only slightly larger than an iPod. So, while everyone else at the bus-stop is listening to their crummy MP3's, you can be pumping that latest mix straight into your ear-drums in SACD quality! :)

Some details:

The inputs are 3.5mm TRS left and right. This is kind of unusual, so you may want to be heating your soldering iron to make some cables, b/c you prolly aren't going to find exactly what you need at the local guitar store.

Also, the supplied phantom power is of the 3 volt electret condenser variety, so you will want a little phantom power box so you can plug some nice microphones into it (of course, the included microphones are completely worthless 100-12000hz response...)

  Excellent quality, some flaws 
by Adman from Petaluma, CA, March 2007
Music Background:  former recording engineer, musician

I've played with this for a couple of weeks, and am trading it in for the larger MR1000 (which was the plan from the start). But for a small device, it performed admirably. The sound quality is excellent, producing noise free recordings that made my microphones sound better than ever before due to the broad and flat frequency response. The software seems to work well too, and I imagine will improve with time.

To save space, the mic inputs are mini jacks, but there are separate l and r ones, and they are balanced. I was impressed with that. So you'll need special adapters to bring XLR down to balanced mini jacks. But kudos to Korg for not compromising there.

The drawbacks - THE MAJOR one is the built in battery that cannot be swapped out - you must charge the unit with an AC. I got about 2 and a quarter hours at full quality, with the light on for most of that time (for some reason, it wouldn't go off that night after the 5 second interval I had selected in the preferences. This worked at all other time, except the one when I needed it most! Not sure why). But if I were in a situation where I needed more that that couple of hours of portable record time, I would have been out of luck. That's a deal breaker for me.

Input volume control is through software, so you have to go 2 screens in, select one channel, adjust it and hit enter, select the other channel, adjust it and hit enter, and then come back out again. This is not elegant, making it difficult in critical applications that also require speed in adjusting levels.

I was very impressed with the built in limiter. While I didn't really use it in the short time I had the unit, the flexibility in settings for it are quite impressive. You can set it, essentially, to be a compressor or limiter, with threshold settings and amount of limiting. However, that would take some "play time" to hear what you get and get what you want before needing to use it in the field. A couple of basic presets with an on/off selector would be helpful here.

Finally, there is no digital output - only analog and headphones. So you must transfer files to your computer via USB, but you can't daisy chain any other digital recorders off of its input and keep it digital.

Overall, given the size and weight of the unit, it's pretty cool. The 20G hard drive gives plenty of record time with full 1 bit quality. 1G files are created and can later be seamlessly joined. Each 1G file gives 25 minutes of stereo 1 bit record time. Turning them into CD quality cuts the size to a quarter of that.

But the battery thing is a bummer. If you know that you will never need more than 2 and a little hours at a time without AC, then you're golden. But otherwise, you're toast. This was the main reason I put off ever buying the mAudio machine, and while this got me through what I needed it for while waiting for the MR1000, I'm now looking forward to all of the above disadvantages disappearing with the new machine (with the exception of the digital outputs). Without the battery issue, I would have given 4 to 4 and half stars.

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