I don't write many reviews but here goes nothing...
At last the moment I have been waiting for for some time, arrived last night. I had the MR-1000 in my hands and was ready to rock n roll. Took a little doing but I made a 4-pin XLR power cable from a bad adapter that KORG sent free of charge and ordered my XLRF > TRS cables for running line in to the deck. I admittedly didn't read the entire manual, only hitting the high points. The form and feel of the deck is very sufficient, I wouldn't say it's a tank and there are still some parts of the case that are plastic. I was also expecting something bigger and was suprised at how small it was. I was hoping that the ol' dynamite in small packages rule would apply here. I got everything set up in my bag just so and went to the bar for the moment of truth. Setup was a breeze compared to unpacking and setting up the V2 > MMe > HHb combo and plus my bag was lighter by about 20 lbs (at least that's how it felt). The TRS connections for the deck are super tight. Insertion pressure wasn't bad, but pulling 'em out was a little scary. I hate having to tug that hard on a cable or connection. They're new so maybe they will loosen up slightly, plus I have no real experience with TRS connections or connectors (other than headphone jacks), so this maybe normal. The menu is very intuitive, it took no time to have everything setup to roll (pretty much a one-stop-shop, rec > play > and your going), plus the default settings (1bit, 5.6MHz) keep you from recording in multibit unless you tell the deck specifically. I ran TLM170s (card, din, <20' from stage, 7' stand) > V2. I had the V2's gain set at 25dB with both trim pots at 0 and adjusted the gain accordingly on the MR-1000. The left channel ended up at about 5.5 and the right around 6.5 on the dial. So there was plenty of headroom on the V2 or the MR-1000 for line-in. The gain adjustment for the MR-1000 met my liking. There wasn't much play in the knobs and there was enough resistance that it didn't 'spin away'. The nested configuration of the knobs was at first a little irritating but the taper (not me, the shape of the knob) made it easier to turn both at once or individually. The gain knobs are a little small (fat fingers beware!) and with a gain adjustment like this I don't see how a hold button would be able to work to make the MR-1000 completely tamper-proof The gain knobs will still take some getting used to. The meters on the MR-1000 are great, at least compared to what I'm used to. The graduations are very fine and they very quick and responsive. The peak bar hold time can be set at 0s 4s(default) or 8s, I left this at the default and found that it was good enough to make sure I wasn't blowing the top off of it. The one qualm I have with the display is it is a backlight on or off situation (sure you can set it to go off after a set time) and the back light on setting is bright as hell. I might have to get some window tinting for the display and see if I can still see the meters through it, doubtful. The clip lights are nice but not as attention grabbing as the bright ass screen. Plus they clip at +3 dB, which is alright for DSD but is too hot for PCM, but the gain can be cut in Audiogate (kinda Mickey Mouse, IMO). On a side note, there is a DSD filter setting in the menu (on or off) which applies a -3dB cut a and above 50kHz, could someone tell me how I'm gonna be able to tell the difference in -3dBs at 50kHz and above??? I had it on for the show, but I think I will disable this in the future (and see if I have ears as good as a dog, I wish). Listening to the show afterwards (AKG271s) was awesome, but not really the time for critical listening, but from my first impressions the detail and clarity was supurb. I might like to use a headphone preamp and run analog from the rear panel instead of the monitor and see what difference this would make. But for monitoring it is sufficient. I will listen more, and not at 3 in the morning after beer, loud music and a smokey bar, but when my ears are freshly rested. Transfering the recording to the computer via. Mickey Mouse-Gate was fairly easy once I discovered some of the pitfalls. First, the transfer via high speed USB was a breeze, however, my computer/hdd won't save a file that is larger than 4GB in size, so I had to keep the file size limited by this constraint. Had to save the raw data for each set of music as two files instead of one, but not a big deal for just the raw data. The entire show was about 12GB in size (for about 2hr and 23 min of 1bit 5.6MHz audio). The conversion to 16/44.1 was at about 2X real time. I won't go into the "how did the wave look after conversion?" right now though. So that's that. All in all, I'm very impressed with the form and function of this recorder at present. Sure it's dosen't have the feature set of some of the other recorders in it's class, but it is DSD bitches!
