I have an MRS-1044 as a backup to my computer setup (SONAR XL2.0, Roland StudioPak, etc.) It is a very nice unit indeed...

My 1044 has the USB interface, making it very easy to achive stuff to an external hardrive (firewire) on the pc. I like the new one, though - 6 inputs instead of 2.

But I also really like the Yamaha aw16g, because of its sampling capbability; but I may wait until the next iteration for that - the samplers I've seen so far all seem to missing one show-stopper feature (differnt for each sampler. But someday someone wil get it right (hopefully, VSampler/ DR-008)