Korg AM8000R (1997)

A gorgeous-sounding ambience box that fights you every step of the way — and the fight is real.

Overview

Forty ambience effects, an internal mixer, and eight parameters tweakable at once over MIDI — on paper the AM8000R reads like the multi-effects processor a project studio in 1997 had been waiting for. And in the right hands, it delivers sound quality that reviewers reached for superlatives to describe. The problem is that getting to those sounds is an ordeal, and the people who reviewed it when it was new said so in the bluntest possible terms.

The AM8000R arrived as the companion to Korg's DL8000R digital multitap delay, sharing that unit's chassis and its operating logic but turning the focus toward ambience rather than delay. Korg announced it alongside the DL8000R in late 1997, billing it as a multi-effects processor offering forty ambience effects — delay, echo, reverb, and pitch shifting among them — with an internal mixer to combine effects and eight parameters controllable simultaneously via MIDI. The front panel differs from its sibling mainly in the color of the top, and the WARP knob is assigned to real-time adjustment of selected algorithm parameters. Connectors are unbalanced jacks, two in and two out, and the unit runs from an external Korg supply. A footswitch jack mimics the front-panel switch, and three controller inputs are available for real-time tweaking assigned within the editing procedure — the same trick can be done over MIDI.

The architecture splits into three processor modules: FX1, FX2, and Delay/Reverb, each with its own active indicator. FX1 and FX2 are identical, and between them they draw on roughly 30 algorithms — chorus, flanging, modulation delays, phasers, pitch shifters, rotor simulators, filters, and full dynamics — with each type averaging around 10 parameters. The Delay/Reverb module pulls from 11 types, mostly delays paired with room, hall, and plate algorithms. All of it can be mixed together intelligently at the end of the chain. On the evidence of the period press, the results were genuinely excellent: Studio Sound (February 1998, p.38) called the AM8000R even more spectacular and impressive than the DL8000R delay line, praising reverbs that range from skinny and sparse to fat and expansive, retro-style phase and flanges that come up from your boots, convincing horn and rotary simulations, and modulation and pitch effects that would have been at home in a late-series Eventide. For a box in this price and class, that is high praise from a reviewer not given to handing it out.

Then there is the editing system, and it is the reason this processor divides people. The AM8000R displays, via a largish LED display, one parameter at a time for adjustment. Studio Sound (February 1998, p.38) objected to this not because single-parameter adjustment is unusual — it is common practice on multi-effects units — but because you can only see one value at once, and the reviewer considered the ability to view multiple values a critical part of the information-gathering process. The same review noted that the flow chart of editable parameters could probably cover the surface of a large split console, and concluded that this is a great-sounding unit marred by a terrible editing system that does not stand up to prolonged use even after familiarity sets in. That is about as direct as a magazine verdict gets. EQ (1998, p.130) ran into the same wall, noting that the curious thinking behind the operating method — already established on the DL8000R — was easy to miss on first contact, and that the three modules' active indicators were part of the puzzle of knowing which processor you were actually in.

What the AM8000R offers, then, is a trade: exceptional processing in exchange for patience. The reverbs alone — with Predelay, Reverb Time, high and low damping, Density, and Diffusion as the working controls — cover a wide expressive range, and the modulation and pitch effects are the sort of thing that earns a permanent place in a rack once you have the presets dialed. The presets themselves may be good enough to entice some users, as Studio Sound (February 1998, p.38) observed, but those who develop the knack to quickly edit a nearly-there preset during a mix or while an artist waits for a particular foldback effect will be few. If the work is done in advance, the box rewards it. If it is done under pressure, the box punishes it.

Collectors and studio users chasing one today should know what they are buying: a 1997-era Korg ambience processor with a well-regarded sound engine and a famously laborious interface, dependent on an external Korg power supply that is easy to lose and annoying to replace, and equipped with unbalanced jack I/O rather than balanced connections. The DL8000R sibling shares the chassis and the operating logic, so anyone who has learned one has learned the other — a small mercy. Prices and current market demand for the AM8000R are not documented here; buyers should judge condition and the presence of the original supply carefully before committing.

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