Unbeatable At The Price 
by Robert J. Spear from Ithaca, NY, July 2007
Music Background:  Musician, music educator, long-time field recordist

KORG has created a true field recorder without wasting a dime on superficial effects that no one will use anyway. The money went into high quality converters, clock, and preamps. This unit is small, light, and dead quiet. Even the headphone amp is dead quiet. It's a joy to hear your recorded signal emerge from absolute silence.

The MR-1000 does only the basics, but it does them really well: 2 in, 2 out, a limiter, a high/low gain switch, and a switch for phantom power. For location work direct to stereo, that's all you need. Move the data to your desktop via USB 2.0, and you're good to go. The recorder's onboard menu system is wonderfully well thought out, and you never have to dig through layers of sub-menus to get to where you want. You'll probably be able to use the machine without opening the well-written user manual. And unlike some other machines, KORG's won't let you turn off the unit before the TOC data gets written.

To my ear, the preamps on the Korg are analytical and cool almost to the point of pain. If you have a weak link anywhere in your chain, you're going to hear it on this machine. Solid-state condenser mics tend to sound thin, but you guys with class A preamps or tube mics ahead of the MR-1000 are going to love what you hear. My ribbon mics through a clean, JFET class-A biased pre into the Korg amazed everyone.

This unit offers sampling rates up to 1 bit at 5.6 mHz, which boggles my mind. The supplied AudioGate software works as advertised, although I experienced hiss problems trying to convert to 192 kHz. But all this is clearly superfluous because you won't be using 192. Once you go over 24/96, 1-bit is a more efficient way to store your files. You can downsample to your DC Redbook or dvd-a format later. Even if you don't need high-res tracks, this unit is clean and quiet even at 16/44, and at this rate you could record for almost two days without stopping!

I have only a few little quibbles with the MR-1000. A warmer preamp with higher gain would be appreciated, as would M/S decoding at the headphone jack, but any faults of this unit are ones of omission. Korg has raised the bar for recording excellence at this price point. I'll be first in line when their 4-tracker comes out!

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