On PR-IV magnetic recording systems, the maximum likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) method is optimum. But it has the problem of the complexity of the structure. The three level detection (TLD) method can be used, which has simpler structure than MLSD, but requires almost twice of power to achieve the same probbility of error as MLSD does. Therefore a new detection method (error controlled detection: ECD) is proposed which has much simpler structure than MLSD and gives much better performance than TLD. The simulation resutls show that the performance of ECD is better than that of TLD by approximaterly 0.5~1.3dB both in linear and nonlinear channels.