Recording Modes

The VS-1680 features two additional recording modes that are not present on the VS-880: Multi-Track Pro (MTP) and Live 2. These two modes still use Roland's RDAC compression scheme. The only recording mode on the VS-1680 that does not use RDAC is MAS mode. When Mastering mode is used, the VS-1680's track count is reduced to only eight tracks on playback. To get the best overall performance from your VS-1680, it is recommended that you use the new 24-bit MTP mode. I owned a VS-880 for five years before I upgraded to a VS-1880, and I must say that MTP mode does sound richer and fuller than the VS-880 to my ears, though admittedly, this sort of thing is subjective to each user . The following is a table that shows the approximate recording times in minutes for the available sample rates and recording modes. This information is based on one track using a hard drive partition of 2GB.

Table 1.1. Recording Modes Versus Available Time Guide

Recording Mode	48.0kHz	44.1kHz	32.0kHz
MTP	742	808	1114
Mastering	370	404	556
MT1	742	808	1114
MT2	990	1078	1484
Live 1	1188	1292	1782
Live 2	1484	1616	2228

MTP and MT1 Times Are the Same

You may notice the calculated times for MTP and MT1 are the same on the table. Roland insists that even though the times are the same, their engineers have been able to extract greater performance at exactly the same cost.

It's important to note that Roland's recorders do not place any restrictions on the way you divide up the available recording time. In other words, there is no fixed length. The VS-1680 does not care if you want to record for three or four hours on just two tracks or divide the time amongst 16 tracks using all 256 virtual tracks.