This is a review and detailed measurements of KORG MR-2000S ADC and comparison to the ADC portion of RME ADI-2 ADC. I have previously measured the DAC portion of KORG MR-2000S and RME ADI-2 DAC.
The KORG has been on loan to me from a kind owner. It will be shipped back tomorrow so I won't be testing anything on it after the review. I own the RME ADI-2 Pro and will do more testing on it in the future.
The KORG MR-2000S is a stand-alone (and connected) professional audio recorder whereas the RME ADI-2 Pro is just ADC/DAC. So not in the same class of operation but still, I am sure many are looking for a reference so I picked the ADI-2.
Operationally both devices are a nightmare. We are talking small screen user interfaces with a design that only the original firmware developer loves. We are talking nearly half hour spent on both just to get the bloody devices to input audio over XLR and output over SPDIF at the same sensitivity and sample rate/bit depth. Honestly, why don't these companies do some usability testing of these features?
I have already complained about the ultra-cheap and chintzy dongle on the ADI-2 Pro which I had to use for S/PDIF. But I thought I do it again in the hopes that RME improves the quality here.
The KORG is a rack mount device with all the connectors in the back. The lousy part of it is a monochrome display that has low contrast. The display on the RME ADI-2 Pro runs circles around it.
Anyway, I am sure most of you want to see the measurements so let's get into them. These being the very first ADCs I am testing, I don't have a tutorial to send you to. So I will describe them as we go although they are similar in nature in some cases to DAC tests.
Measurements
For all of these tests, the only input used was the balanced XLR. In almost all cases, the drive level was 19 dBu. The input sensitivity on RME ADI-2 was set to 19 dBu. On the KORG I set it to "16 dB" which matched the RME to 0.1 dB.
The only sampling rate I tested was 48 kHz. I will test other sampling rates on the RME in the future.
Let's start simple with frequency response. Here I set the analog output on my Audio Precision analyzer to 19 dBu for RME and 18 dBu for the KORG to offset them on the graph for better viewing:
Starting with RME, I was a bit disappointed to see the ringing (up and down swings) which I assume it is due to the anti-aliasing filter. While the variations are small, it starts ringing at around 1 kHz! Will have to analyze this further in the future.
The Korg doesn't have ringing but the two channels are offset by about 0.09 dB. Not a lot but in a professional product, I expect better matching.
Let's dig into distortion and noise. Analog signal from my Audio Precision analyzer is ag 19 dBu again.
The RME shines really well here. It has a lower noise floor (by 8 to 10 dB) and much lower harmonic distortion components. We are talking 20 dB differential so not insignificant.
Looking at the noise floor with no signal we see:
We have 10 dB difference in favor of RME ADI-2 Pro as the previous measurement indicated. Converted to bits, the RME delivers 20 bits while the KORG trails it at 18 bits.
Next let's look at linearity. Here, an analog output is varied by my analyzer and resulting digital value compared to it. Any deviation is a product of error in my audio generator and ADC:
As we see, RME ADI-2 Pro delivers again. Using my self-imposed limit of 0.1 dB, the RME delivers equiv. of 16.8 bits here while the KORG stops at 15.5 bits. But the RME maintains its low error almost to the limit of -120 whereas the error on the KORG keeps getting larger and larger.
Let's look at THD+N versus level where my analyzer changes the analog output level and measures what comes back as far as distortion and noise:
Pretty uniform differential in favor of RME ADI-2 ADC across all levels. Neither ADC clips the input either.
Now let's see how they do when we keep the level the same but change the frequency:
We see a rising distortion with frequency in KORG MR-2000S. The sudden drop at the end is actually a measurement error in that we have kept the bandwidth fixed so the harmonics are no longer measured after a point. So in reality, the RME ADI-2 Pro has a commanding lead at higher frequencies to the tune of 30 to 40 dB!!!
A side note: in all of these measurements we are at the mercy of how clean the output of my analyzer is as that is the minimum noise and distortion that can be seen even with an ideal ADC. Fortunately as we see in the measurements of RME ADI-2 ADC, the analyzer distortion seems excellently low as to allow easy differentiation of these DACs.
Conclusions
The RME ADI-2 Pro runs circles around the KORG MR-2000S' performance. It does this in every measurement and consistently so. Until I measure more ADCs, I can't say how "bad" the KORG is. But I can say that the RME ADI-2 ADC like its DAC is producing superb measured performance.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
If you like this review, please consider donating funds for these types of hardware purchases using Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/audiosciencereview), or upgrading your membership here though Paypal (https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054).
The KORG has been on loan to me from a kind owner. It will be shipped back tomorrow so I won't be testing anything on it after the review. I own the RME ADI-2 Pro and will do more testing on it in the future.
The KORG MR-2000S is a stand-alone (and connected) professional audio recorder whereas the RME ADI-2 Pro is just ADC/DAC. So not in the same class of operation but still, I am sure many are looking for a reference so I picked the ADI-2.
Operationally both devices are a nightmare. We are talking small screen user interfaces with a design that only the original firmware developer loves. We are talking nearly half hour spent on both just to get the bloody devices to input audio over XLR and output over SPDIF at the same sensitivity and sample rate/bit depth. Honestly, why don't these companies do some usability testing of these features?
I have already complained about the ultra-cheap and chintzy dongle on the ADI-2 Pro which I had to use for S/PDIF. But I thought I do it again in the hopes that RME improves the quality here.
The KORG is a rack mount device with all the connectors in the back. The lousy part of it is a monochrome display that has low contrast. The display on the RME ADI-2 Pro runs circles around it.
Anyway, I am sure most of you want to see the measurements so let's get into them. These being the very first ADCs I am testing, I don't have a tutorial to send you to. So I will describe them as we go although they are similar in nature in some cases to DAC tests.
Measurements
For all of these tests, the only input used was the balanced XLR. In almost all cases, the drive level was 19 dBu. The input sensitivity on RME ADI-2 was set to 19 dBu. On the KORG I set it to "16 dB" which matched the RME to 0.1 dB.
The only sampling rate I tested was 48 kHz. I will test other sampling rates on the RME in the future.
Let's start simple with frequency response. Here I set the analog output on my Audio Precision analyzer to 19 dBu for RME and 18 dBu for the KORG to offset them on the graph for better viewing:
Starting with RME, I was a bit disappointed to see the ringing (up and down swings) which I assume it is due to the anti-aliasing filter. While the variations are small, it starts ringing at around 1 kHz! Will have to analyze this further in the future.
The Korg doesn't have ringing but the two channels are offset by about 0.09 dB. Not a lot but in a professional product, I expect better matching.
Let's dig into distortion and noise. Analog signal from my Audio Precision analyzer is ag 19 dBu again.
The RME shines really well here. It has a lower noise floor (by 8 to 10 dB) and much lower harmonic distortion components. We are talking 20 dB differential so not insignificant.
Looking at the noise floor with no signal we see:
We have 10 dB difference in favor of RME ADI-2 Pro as the previous measurement indicated. Converted to bits, the RME delivers 20 bits while the KORG trails it at 18 bits.
Next let's look at linearity. Here, an analog output is varied by my analyzer and resulting digital value compared to it. Any deviation is a product of error in my audio generator and ADC:
As we see, RME ADI-2 Pro delivers again. Using my self-imposed limit of 0.1 dB, the RME delivers equiv. of 16.8 bits here while the KORG stops at 15.5 bits. But the RME maintains its low error almost to the limit of -120 whereas the error on the KORG keeps getting larger and larger.
Let's look at THD+N versus level where my analyzer changes the analog output level and measures what comes back as far as distortion and noise:
Pretty uniform differential in favor of RME ADI-2 ADC across all levels. Neither ADC clips the input either.
Now let's see how they do when we keep the level the same but change the frequency:
We see a rising distortion with frequency in KORG MR-2000S. The sudden drop at the end is actually a measurement error in that we have kept the bandwidth fixed so the harmonics are no longer measured after a point. So in reality, the RME ADI-2 Pro has a commanding lead at higher frequencies to the tune of 30 to 40 dB!!!
A side note: in all of these measurements we are at the mercy of how clean the output of my analyzer is as that is the minimum noise and distortion that can be seen even with an ideal ADC. Fortunately as we see in the measurements of RME ADI-2 ADC, the analyzer distortion seems excellently low as to allow easy differentiation of these DACs.
Conclusions
The RME ADI-2 Pro runs circles around the KORG MR-2000S' performance. It does this in every measurement and consistently so. Until I measure more ADCs, I can't say how "bad" the KORG is. But I can say that the RME ADI-2 ADC like its DAC is producing superb measured performance.
-----
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
If you like this review, please consider donating funds for these types of hardware purchases using Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/audiosciencereview), or upgrading your membership here though Paypal (https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054).
