Korg D-110
A page that exists mostly to correct the record: the D-110 was a Roland, not a Korg, and the archive's catalog has it filed in the wrong drawer.
Overview
The first thing any collector needs to know about the "Korg D-110" is that the name is a filing error, not a product. Every period document in the archive that names a D-110 attributes it to Roland — it appears in studio gear lists and dealer classifieds as a Roland unit, never a Korg one. This page is here because the archive's catalog lists it under Korg, and the honest move is to flag the discrepancy plainly rather than invent a Korg lineage for a box that never had one.
What the period sources do establish is that the D-110 was a working rack module, common enough in professional and semi-pro rigs that it turns up repeatedly in studio inventories. Producer Steve Lindsy, working out of the Village Recorder in West Los Angeles with clients including Luther Vandross, Joni Mitchell and Elton John, listed a Roland D-110 among a deep MIDI array that also included three D550s, a P330, a TR808, a Jupiter 8 and an MKS20 (Recording Engineer, undated excerpt, p.4). DJ Jazzy Jeff's Touch of Jazz Productions studio in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania ran one alongside a JD-800, a U-220, a D550, an M-3R and an M-1R (EQ Magazine, August 1992, p.54). Two very different rooms, same module in the rack.
The D-110's internal architecture is documented in detail in a period tech-answer column, which is the most useful single source in the archive for understanding what the box actually was. The hierarchy ran four levels deep: Tones at the base, holding raw waveform data plus user-programmable filter cutoff, amplitude envelope and similar parameters, spread across four banks of 54 — banks "a" and "b" as factory presets, bank "i" for user-programmed Tones, and bank "r" for rhythm Tones. Above that sat Timbres, which took Tones and added performance parameters like pitch-bend range and transposition, in two banks of 64 locations each. Timbres were then assigned to Parts, where MIDI receive channel, pan position and output level lived, and the whole eight-Part-plus-rhythm-section assignment was saved at the top as a Patch. That column's author was blunt about the tradeoff, noting that the D-110's flexibility came at the cost of a software architecture complex enough to obscure it — a fair summary of why these modules intimidated as many players as they rewarded.
MIDI implementation followed that hierarchy literally. Patches were selected by program change on the control channel defined in the System menu; Timbres were selected by sending program changes on the channel matching the target Part, with changes 1–64 hitting bank A and 65–128 hitting bank B. Tones could not be addressed by MIDI at all — to use a user-programmed Tone in a Patch, you first assigned it to a Timbre, then the Timbre to a Part. Clunky by later standards, but coherent once you understood the tree.
The module's installed base was large enough to justify dedicated third-party support. Opcode's Unisyn editor/librarian treated the D-110 as an eleven-Module device — the overall multitimbral patch, eight parts, the drum set and the timbre table — a level of granularity the software reserved for complex machines (Electronic Musician, undated excerpt, p.5). Opcode's Galaxy Plus Editors were marketed in the same period as "better than a universal editor/librarian," with the D-110 among the supported devices (Audio Collection, April 1991, p.155). When a $350-ish used module earns its own multi-module software profile, it was doing real work in real studios.
Secondhand pricing tells its own story. Rogue Music's classified in Electronic Musician listed a used D-110 at $350, sitting between an ESQ1 at $479 and an MKS-20 at $625 — mid-pack money for a mid-pack module. A later blowout ad in BAM dropped one to $120 in a clearance list alongside a Korg P-3 and an Alesis MMT-8, which is roughly where these things landed once the market moved on. None of that is collector-grade money, and collectors should treat the D-110 accordingly: a useful, cheap, slightly fiddly module, not an investment.
For archive purposes, the practical upshot is simple. If you're hunting one, search for a Roland D-110 — that's what the badge says and what the dealers sold. If you find a listing calling it a Korg, you've found a mislabel, not a rarity.
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