I bought one of these the year it came out for guitar. It listed at $2000. It was the best multi-effects processor on the market at the time. Absolutely loved the unit! To my great disappointment though, it was Korg's last attempt at making rack mounted multi-fx processors. After that they went exclusively to more simplistic floor mulit-fx crap that I never liked and never bought. Zoom and Yamaha went in the same stupid direction after a few years. Roland resisted this direction for a long time to their credit coming out with the GP-16 and then GP-100 before finally following suit. When the Korg A1 came out as great as it was, it had competition because that same year Zoom came out with the Zoom 9010 which was a single rack space (but extremely deep) very high quality quad configured multi-FX processor which also listed for $2000 but as good as that was it still wasn't quite as unique, useful, and inspirational as the Korg A1 for a progressive guitarist in my opinion, though I will say the Zoom had equal sound quality. I'm sure much of that was because Zoom made the chips for Korg back then. The only thing I didn't like about the Korg A1 was if you were going to use it for on-the-fly playing, you had to use it with it's own foot controller because trying to use a MIDI foot controller was useless since the MIDI channel changes were very slow. That was a big flow for this unit. Also the expanded FX card didn't come out until like two years after the unit was out, only the memory card was available.
I bought one of these the year it came out for guitar. It listed at $2000. It was the best multi-effects processor on the market at the time. Absolutely loved the unit! To my great disappointment though, it was Korg's last attempt at making rack mounted multi-fx processors. After that they went exclusively to more simplistic floor mulit-fx crap that I never liked and never bought. Zoom and Yamaha went in the same stupid direction after a few years. Roland resisted this direction for a long time to their credit coming out with the GP-16 and then GP-100 before finally following suit.
When the Korg A1 came out as great as it was, it had competition because that same year Zoom came out with the Zoom 9010 which was a single rack space (but extremely deep) very high quality quad configured multi-FX processor which also listed for $2000 but as good as that was it still wasn't quite as unique, useful, and inspirational as the Korg A1 for a progressive guitarist in my opinion, though I will say the Zoom had equal sound quality. I'm sure much of that was because Zoom made the chips for Korg back then. The only thing I didn't like about the Korg A1 was if you were going to use it for on-the-fly playing, you had to use it with it's own foot controller because trying to use a MIDI foot controller was useless since the MIDI channel changes were very slow. That was a big flow for this unit. Also the expanded FX card didn't come out until like two years after the unit was out, only the memory card was available.