The Zoom engineers have done it again. The MRS-1608CD is a 16 track digital audio workstation that records to a 40 GB internal hard drive, and features the power of seamless digital editing and Zoom’s famous signal processing, while still being the only digital multi-track recorder on the market with programmable drum and bass sections with a complete bank of touch-sensitive pads

The 1608CD has 16 physical tracks, each with 10 virtual tracks. The new machine also has 8 XLR/phone combination input jacks, with four of them being able to provide phantom power for condenser microphones, with the capability of recording up to eight simultaneous tracks at once, that’s two tracks more then the latest 1266, as well as having the ability to insert compression and EQ on all eight of those input channels

Like all Zoom multi-tracks you get the drum and bass sections with 12 touch sensitive and backlighted playable pads. The 1608CD now includes a sampler function that allows you to assign part of V-takes or WAV/AIFF flies to those drum pads. With over 100 different drum and bass sounds, the 1608CD has 40 real sampled drum kits as well as 20 real sampled bass sounds, giving you real drum and bass recordings that you can program into your project, with 500 user programmable patterns available per song

Pre-recorded drum beats and samples phrases can also be imported using the CD-R/RW drive. Up to 100 samples can be stored per project, and by cutting and pasting, loops can be created and dropped in and out or songs quickly and easily

The 1608CD has adjustable EQ and pan controls for each channel, as well as a complete array of adjustable 24-bit mastering effects such as Reverb, Chorus, Modulation, Delay and Compression. Of course the MRS-1608CD model has an integrated CR-R/RW drive, so you can mix and master your project right down to CD without the use of external hardware