I had been vacillating for weeks on replacing my aging Mackie 1202VLC mixer. The headphone jack died months ago, and several channels need periodic jiggling to make connection. When I ran across the Korg ZERO 8, it seemed to have everything one would want in a mixer, and so much more. Between the time I placed my order at Musicians Friend and the expected ship date, Korg killed the product line.

What a shame. This was an amazing piece of gear; 8 stereo channels, Firewire I/O, effects, a touch screen that doubles as a Kaoss Pad, lots of knobs, slider, and “blinken lights.” The ZERO consistently receive rave reviews. Why would Korg kill this dream machine, less than 2-years after its release? It could be any of many reasons. Here are two.

Price. All this digital power does not come cheap. With a list price of $2,450 it’s difficult to understand to whom this unit was targeted. The street price apparently quickly dropped and was currently hovering around $1,000. A few weeks ago, some retailers started clearing these out for about $850. That’s when I made my purchase.

Sound. While many ZERO 8 owners were quite happy with the sound quality, a small but vocal group of users groused about their units being crazy noisy for a fully digital mixer. Several months of no response from Korg only made this community louder and angrier. When a response finally came down from Korg many of these users took it as a denial of the issue. You can read all about it on the Korg Forum. I don’t have an opinion on this subject, but I was looking forward to forming one upon receiving my ZERO.

Which will now never arrive. So farewell ZERO 8. We hardly knew you. Does anyone have any recommendations for an alternative? My Mackie is ready for retirement.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Gear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.