I had the Korg D16 for about a week, and it was a very cool machine. Small enough to fit a laptop case, yet very powerful. One of the best things about it is that it has a touch screen so you don't have to flap your way through a ton of sub-menus. I didn't keep it though, because 2,500$ was way over what I though I could afford.

A portable studio with the same sound quality can probably be purchased for the same price, if not less, based on a laptop as the multi-tracker and a very decent soundcard as the interface. I myself use a Dell for field recording connected to a M-Audio FireWire 410 card as the audio interface, and it works perfectly. A maybe even better alternative is buying a laptop and a DigiDesign MBox in which case you get a full software bundle, including Pro Tools and Reason Adapted boosted with a few awesome plugins, and that is high quality for a very favorable price.

Hi there
I originally bought a D16 - it' was a very easy "box" to learn, and sounded quite good. I loved it, but wanted to move up to the next step - I then bought a Roland 2480 and sold my D16 - the Roland had lots more features, a much deeper system (but at the time full of O/S problems) - I had several commercial CD projects crash and burn - some very pissed clients to say the least!!! - I then decided that if I was serious about recording I had to move up again to something rock solid - I bought a RADAR Project 24 with great converters - sold the Roland - and then promptly bought another D16 (used on Ebay for less than $600) - I found the D16 was great for live gigs that the RADAR was too much trouble to drag to (as long as you only need to record 8 tracks at a time @ 16 bit - 4 tracks @ 24 bit) - the great thing about the D16 is you can dump your tracks to wav files and move the stuff over to the RADAR (or any other better system) to mix on.
I would not hesitate to recommend the D16 - for the $$ you can't beat them!!!good luck

dan

I have to 2nd what Dan said........

I am set up for 24 track recording in my home studio - but I still own and use a D-1600.

It was my 1st purchase - and works great.... I use it for live gigs and for quick recordings to capture my bands practices....... it has a ton of built in effects so it's really a stand alone unit.

Easy to use - and fairly stable........

And the new ones are expandable to record 16 tracks simultaneously.

One other thing - the tape recorder is linear recording - which means that anything you dub in or change in the recording is final - complete - (it's called destructive editing) - whereas the Korg (and most of the digital hard disk recorders) are non-linear - and editing is not destructive........ you can "undo" most things you do if you like what was there before.

Good luck,

I have been working with some young friends who own a couple of D1600's. I love the ease of use (once the system has been learned) and the sound quality is surprisingly good. With the older D1600's, you are limited to using the onboard mic / line pres unless you go 2 tracks at a time through the s/pdif ins but if you turn them all the way down and pull your gain out of an outboard pre they can sound pretty good.

However they are prone to locking up and or crashing. We have one machine that had to go back to LA for repair because the power to it was accidentally disconnected and when we plugged it back in, the machine would not re boot. It seems to me that they should be able to withstand an accidental loss of power. I can see some one having to return their machine because they were using it when the power failed..

So be sure to do a save every pass and back up your songs. These seem to be a slightly volatile medium. I would be scared to take one out on a remote recording. That would be one pissed client when you tried to explain to them that their once in a lifetime performance was lost due to a machine error..

I think that KORG made a calculated decision to release the product with software bugs.. and to let the consumer be their beta testers. KORG is not the only company that does this but it still burns me when I come across it. I suppose that with the speed technology is released these days, that it is impossible to fully develop a product, beta test it and then release it before the technology is obsolete.