Korg MR-1 DSD recorder

[MikeRivers]

 

PLease, tell us about file size per minute!!!

I used to remember 11 megabytes per minute, but that was for 16-bit 48 kHz stereo recording. Today I think about 24-bit 44.1 kHz stereo as being 1 gigabyte per hour. I don't even think about DSD because it can't be used directly (I don't master SACDs) and for what I record on a unit like this, there's really no improvement over 44/16. I just use 24-bit because the space is there and all my friends would think I was behind the times if I didn't.

 

According to the manual, the DSD modes (there are three!) eat disk space at the rate of 1 gigabyte every 22 minutes, so about three times the rate of my "standard" speed. The MR-1 needs contiguous disk space for recording and so if you do a lot of recording and deleting, now and then you have to defragment or reformat the internal disk drive in order to assure that there's enough contiguous space for the recording you want to make. Although I haven't encountered them yet, it does have some error messages having to do with disk availability. If it can't find 10 minutes worth of contiguous space for the recording mode you've selected, it won't let you start recording. Apparently it gets somewhat impolite if it starts running out of space, so it's best to start a lengthly field project with an empty disk.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

Gus, you may not have heard of a publication called EQ but in the March 2007 issue, some guy named Greg Anderson reviewed the MR-1 and wrote the following:   "As the MR-1 is hard disk-based with 20GB of storage, there are the usual fragility, noise (although very minor, on the order of an iPod), and reliability issues compared to solid-state memory

[Gus Lozada]

There's a writer named Guy Rosada who writes some technology column for this EQ publication. Maybe he can get 'im a job.

 

Ough... that Guy Rosada dude ... as long as he keeps writing his column I won't but that magazine again!!

 

 

( note: that is actually true, given I got a free subscription to the magazine as soon as I started writing for them )

[MikeRivers]

I got a reply from Korg Tech Support today. They confirmed what I discovered about the time stamp and said they would be looking into it with their engineers and consider it for a future firmware update.

 

Korg supplies a utility program called AudioGate along with the recorder which, among other things, converts one format to another. I figured that its primary purpose would be to convert a DSD file to a WAV file so you could burn a CD and that's all the playing around I did with that program. The support guy said that AudioGate will combine split files automagically and that was their current solution. But this is an extra program that at least some users wouldn't need to use if format conversion wasn't required.