The Korg D1600 MKII

1. Korg Digital Recording Studio
2. Korg D1600 Specs Hp
3. Korg D1600 Specs
4. Korg D1600 Specs Driver

When the drive in my loyal Korg D1600 multitrack recorder decided to throw in the towel, I needed a new media device in my console and that got me thinking about alternatives.
The Korg D1600 is a neat piece of kit, around which my home studio and media projects are centered, which can record 6 to 8 track simultaneously depending on bitrate which a total of 12 to 16 track respectively.

1981 – The Korg Polysix is a 61-key, six-voice programmable synthesizer. It was released to compete with Roland's Juno-6 synth, and both keyboards shared similar features, such as a built-in chorus unit. Open “KORG D1600” that appeared in step 3, and you will see the contents of the USB drive within the Use a USB cable to connect the D1600mkII to your D1600mkII’s hard disk. Copy the desired data into. The D1600 features Korg's famous REMSmodeling effects - accurate amp, cabinet and microphone simulations. You can edit any of the preset effect programs, then store your edits to 128 usereffect. Pre-owned Korg D1600 DAW. In very good condition, very light scratches around the unit from normal use. Comes with power cable. Uncompressed Recording and Playback for Top-Quality SoundUncompressed recording/playback is the reason why Korg's digital recording studios are acclaimed for their superior audio quality.

I made project backups on cd's for projects that where important and often did not keep the track on the machine itself. That also made the death of the hard-disk itself a less traumatic event.
The interface for the Korg is an old-school IDE interface mounted on a bracket that slots in and connects through a big Centronic like connection. It is accessible right at the front of the machine when you take off the plastic cover.
I immediately replaced the drive with another 40GB drive, but found it to be to noisy. This could become somewhat of a nuisance, finding a proper IDE drive that runs silently enough. I really need a silent drive because the recorder resides in the room where the recording is going on, and several mic's are perfectly able to pick up subtle noises like that.
Luckily I found an old 80GB drive that ran pretty silent and I put that one it.
But It still bothered me a little. I do not like the concept of the spinning platter media carrier very much, never had really. And here I was in the age of solid state fitting my coveted machine with an old junky disk with objectionable operational methods.
I know about SSD and that these disks are available with an IDE interface in a 2.5' and 3.5' housing format and the idea to put one of these babies in is still quite tempting. Now the expense of a nice 32 or 64GB is not really the issue. I do not lose or gain that much compared to the 40GB drive and it is solid state.
Still these devices to break. Not a lot and not as enthusiastically as those supersonic spinning pieces of 80's memorabilia do, but still.
So I'd still be forced to do my CD backup overtimes I finished a project.
But really, how reliable are polycarbonate media for backup ? The figures are not that good. I keep them in proper conditions, no light, no humidity and still they are not to be trusted. On top on that, those mirror discs are just another spinning moving old fashioned type of storage. WHY CAN'T WE GET RID OF THOSE !?!?!?.
I find it rather vulgar to upgrade a nice machine with a state of the art drive, only to still be left a 100% reliant on spinning media backups.
But lets ignore backup procedure for a moment.


Finding alternatives

Maxtor Fireball III

Now I own the MKII version of this particular type of recorder unit and this model shipped with a whopping 40GB silent Maxtor fireball 3 disk. Now I did quite a lot of maintenance on that machine regarding deleting songs and even tracks that where obsoleted and during the 4 or 5 years of using the machine, I never really reached a point where the drive was used to the extent that it could be considered full.
So the question becomes : Do I really need a classic-moving-parts disk with months and months of storage space ?

Korg Digital Recording Studio

The answer was 'NO'. It would be ideal if could use a solid state medium that I could use as a per project basis and not a one big clunky device with all the disadvantages of a fixed drive, be it solid or traditional.
In keeping up with what the industry is up to, I knew of several digital audio recorders that had flash card based solutions. Some of them take CF memory or memory sticks. So why can't I have that ? Why can't I have a nice D1600 - 16 channel multitrack that accepts a little solid state card per project, session or theme ?
So I set out to do some research on what I would need to hack my D1600 a little for it to accept some type of portable flash media.
I started out with finding out what adapters were available and more specifically available to me from my location to connect any type of memory card directly to an IDE bus.
It was pretty clear immediately that a myriad of boards are made to suite such purposes. It ranged from 3'5 card readers with multiple media slots to very simple single media interface boards used as internal components.
In the end I decided that compact flash was the best choice for this project since these cards are practically close family to the IDE standard. Some CF cards also support DMA and the high end cards have pretty nifty read/write speeds.
But my bet was that Ultra II cards would be decently fast enough to cope with 8 track simultaneous recoding or 16 track playback.
I decided against other form-factors because most of them had some logic on the board to make the IDE connection. This means that the speed is depended on these onboard components and seeing how these boards are not all that expensive, I figured that this could be a risk. I also wondered how much more IDE protocol compatible a third party adapter chip would be compared to Compact flash itself. If even small stuff like master/slave settings or other protocol features where badly implemented in such cheap components, the board could fail entirely in the D1600.
I also had several CF cards in various pieces of gear around the house!.
Now this might be the time at which you would protest and say the difference between a common hard-dirive and compact flash is more then just the bus interface and you'd be right. Both SSD's and ordinary disks have a certain amount of insanely fast cache memory to speed up operation and I'm not sure on how a CF flash card gets around such problems.
The dead disk I pulled out of the console, however, wasn't some high speed monster drive. It was a 5400RPM single platter disk with only 2MB of cache obviously build for price and silence, not speed.
The Read/write numbers on that disk where not that impressive and in real world examples quite similar or worst then the solid state CF cards I checked out.
Combined with the fact that multitrack recording is a lot of steady sequential reading and writing and that the disk had only this single purpose, I felt confident.
The adapter

As I would like easily removable storage for my console I chose a single card interface board with a nice ejection button for clean removal of the card.
This board also had a DMA jumper, a Master/Slave Jumper, 2 IDE ribbon cable connectors(40 and 44 pin) and a small molex connector when using the 40 pin ribbon connector.
This was great, because it would fail completely, I'd at least have this little part which I could use in a multitude of scenarios. With shipping it cost me about 22 Euro's so this even did not break the bank.
So I took out my 4GB Sandisk CF flash ultra II card from my Eos 350 and flung it and the adapter into the multitrack caddy, jammed it in and turned it on.
The device correctly recognized it and initialization was a breeze.
So now I had my device with a solid state drive running, what appeared to be, fine! But did it ?

All the parts thrown together in the caddy

Time for some testing. How did my new fangled non moving media device perform ? To be short, I did not notice any difference from the old hard-drive media.
I tried to do the most I/O intensive operations on such a short notice.
Recording 8 track simultaneously, and recording 8 and playing back 8 track and various overdubbing setups using a multitude of channels.
I also did a lot of short copy paste actions and recorded a lot of short bits on top of prerecorded tracks. In short I tried to fragment the drive as much as possible to get it to lag or fail but it did not.
I have a bit more of rigorous testing to do before the jury is in on this one, but I'm pretty sure that a single CF card is sturdy enough to handle the data i/o for a single project and then some.
Also do not forget that I only used Ultra II for this test not the more spiffy Extreme Ultra III type that would run circles round most common hard disks with ease.
As for recording space, the 4GB card had about 400 minutes of recording space, or so the indicator told me. This is, of course, per track would mean 25 minutes using all 16 tracks simultaneously. Now this is plenty for most band or other projects seeing as I never do more then 2 or 3 tracks per session. Even If I needed all the channels for all tracks then 8 Minutes per track would still fit nicely.
Results
Does this mean that a 8GB CF card would double the storage to 800 minutes ? Well, I'm not sure. The D1600 and other Korg hard-disk based recorders allocate about 2 gig's for USB transfer so I imagine when the CF card is initialized this is also done. I do not really like this system and use it rarely, but it's there and I do not know if it is possible to disable it.
This means my 4GB card possibly only yields 2GB of true recording storage but A 8 GB card would triple this number giving a rather decent 75 minutes of 16 track recording. Could I life with that ? I think I can !
The 16 32 and 64 GB flash cards are still a bit on the pricy side, but 30 Euro's for the 8 GB (15mbps) version of my 4GB card is doable. The 4GB version now roughly is 20 Euro's. The 16GB version goes for about 70 euro's and claims 30mbps as transfer speed.
The sweet spot for these types of memory lies around the 8 - 16 gig mark at the moment and I might get a couple of 4 8 and 16GB cards for various uses.
A small number of these media cards would quickly make me have a handsomely larger amount or media storage then my old fixed disk. All this for the cost not ridiculously higher then buying another disk, especially it it would be an SSD.
But what is the gain of this method you might ask ? I could all be down to personal preference, but I really like the possibility of have dedicated flash storage.
I will still back up finished projects to CD, but the CD is now practically a secondary backup. A flash card can lie on the cupboard for ages, and I can have 1 for every project or a small series of recordings.
So even If my primary storage fails, not all of it will do so at the same time.
Odds and ends
Apart from more rigorous testing, I still want to find out if the D1600 allocates 2GB on every drive it initializes. I tried to get some information from the disk with various partition analysis tools, but the proprietary format used by Korg remains illusive.
To be continued
Next time I hope to post the results and findings on hacking the D1600 to neatly accept the card in a front facing slot. I'm playing with the thought or leaving space for an extra internal SSD in the future which could be toggled with a tumbler switch or something.

Korg D1600 Specs Hp

Mock up of the CF card reader implementation

Korg D1600 Specs

Korg D1600 Specs Driver