Overview
The Boss BR-532 is a 4-track digital recorder with a built in rhythm guide, Roland's COSM effects processor, a phrase trainer and much more in a portable tabletop box built with the guitar players needs in mind. At first glance this is a good-looking recorder reminiscent of the old 4-track analog cassette recorders with a few extra buttons and knobs and a nice orange backlit LCD display. There are six 45mm faders; one dedicated to each of the four tracks one for the rhythm guide and one for the master volume. There are easily readable LED lit buttons indicating each track's status, located under it's fader. There are clearly marked gain and trim knobs, a data entry wheel and easily accessible transport control buttons. The back has a 1/4" and XLR mic input, a 1/4" guitar/bass input and stereo line inputs on RCA jacks. Additionally there is a midi out jack, a 1/4" foot switch jack, stereo line out on RCA jacks and a toslink digital optical out. The very front of the BR-532 has a built in microphone and a headphone out jack. The BR-532 looks well designed and will run off of optional AC adapter or 6 AA batteries.

In use
The Boss BR-532 has many options built-in. This thing will do just about everything you need it to do to produce a recording or solidify an idea, so I will focus on the usability of certain features, the ease of use and the quality of sound.

Although there are a lot of controls crammed onto this unit they are very easy to decipher and well laid out. If you have ever used a 4-track tape machine this thing should be no problem for you. When you power up the BR-532 all you need to do is set up a new song in the utility menu and you are ready to go. The track indicator under track 1starts to blink red indicating that the track is armed and ready to record. You just plug in a pair of headphones, plug in your guitar and adjust the "Guitar/Bass sensitivity" and the "Input Level" and you are ready to go. The level meters on the LCD screen are not very easy to use, but they do the job. The onboard effects are based off of Roland's amp simulator COSM technology. I found the effects to be a little on the noisy side and the presets needed to be tweaked a little bit before they were usable, but all in all I was impressed by this add on feature that didn't even need to be included to make the BR-532 worth the asking price.

After finding the right sound and adjusting the levels all you need to do is press the play and record buttons and start playing. When you like the take move over to the next track and the next track and the next... Each track has 8 virtual tracks so you can re-record a marginal track without loosing the previous one. This machine is packed full of useful features like the undo/redo, guitar tuner and phrase sampler. I had a lot of fun during this demo recording session.

The one thing that I had no luck with is the drum machine. This thing was difficult to figure out and wasn't very user friendly. It is not something that I would take the time to figure out, although the sounds were definitely useable if you can figure out how to make it play exactly what you want.

The Sound
The over sound quality was very good. It wasn't professional recording studio quality, but it sounded much better than most of the cassette based 4 tracks that I have used. I could hear a little bit of the compression, I especially noticed it with the dynamic guitar style that I have. The effects added a little bit of noise to the recording (this is expected as most effects processors add noise to the signal.) Everything came through fairly clean and clear and there was a decent amount of dynamic range to the recordings. The built in microphone on the front did not sound very good. It is something that might be useful to catch scratch ideas, but it is not something that I would use to record a track that I would want to use in one of my recordings.

Bottom Line
I found that the Boss BR-532 is a great value, but it has its limitations. If you are looking for a professional sounding polished recording you might want to hold off on the BR-532, but if you are looking for an all in one unit that you can record great sounding demos with everything that a guitar player needs built in then the BR-532 should be seriously considered.