The box is very small but very solid. The phones jack and volume knob on mine were a bit loose, but that should be easily fixed.

There are 79 drumkits and 24 bass patches, so it has quite a nice selection of tones given its size and price. (Especially compared to my previous purchase, the TR505). The play modes were easily worked out upon getting it, and the recording was easily worked out after downloading the manual off the net. The manual should be readily available in .pdf form if your looking for it. The preset patterns are pretty good, and really sum up where Zoom were going with this thing. It has 4 banks of 99 patterns (the 4th is user) and has a good selection of both rock and dance patterns. This thing is perfect for guitar backing tracks or whatever (and therefore a guaranteed earner) but has some drum and bass, trip-hop, ambient, house...NICE There are some limitations with this bit of kit: 1. No midi out 2. No battery power apart from this, it was well worth the (cheap) price i paid for it.

I decided I wanted a low-cost drum module which would act as a drum sound source driven from Cakewalk. I did not expect to be doing a whole lot of programming of patterns and songs using the drum machine's internal sequencer. Having checked out reviews on the web, I originally bought a Boss DR-670. Generally pretty nice drum and bass sounds. You set the bass up on one Midi channel, and the drums on another. First problem: the bass instrument is tied to the drum kit (program) you select. If you want a different bass sound, you have to select a different (factory or user) drum kit. Then I discover that the bass does not respond to Midi controller events such as pitch bend and volume, and the bass will play only a single note at a time: you can't play bass "chords". And the drum kits have something like 30 instruments total.

Back to the shop for a loaner Zoom RT-123. For Midi, much better. You can have two drum kits (about 50 instruments on each, although there's significant overlap) on different Midi channels (10 and 16, say), and you have the bass part on another channel. Probably use this with a "normal" kit on one channel and a "special" kit, like FX, say, on the other channel. You select the drum kits and bass instruments via patch change events in real time on the appropriate Midi channel - the drum kits and bass instruments are independant. The drum sounds seem pretty good, although you cannot customise the kits. The bass part responds to pitch bend Midi events (very important), as well as volume (useful) and pan. Plus the bass part is polyphonic. The only Midi downside is the lack of Midi Out...

Took the Boss back, got the Zoom, and scored a refund out of it 'cos the Zoom is cheaper. Yeah.