A. & G. Reiswig wrote:

But...if you were looking for a basic mono or stereo recorder that had
pretty decent sound, and was hopefully smaller than the typical DAT or
cassette recorder, what would you look at?

Have a look at Sony's Hi-MD. The full scoop can be found at

http://www.minidisc.org

It has pre amps (which have not been characterized yet by
anyone so far as I know) does 44.1 kHz, can handle optical
digital in and record to either their latest ATRAC
compression (which hasn't fared too well at all against the
competing codecs in listening tests) or, more interestingly,
to 16 bit PCM. The recordings can be uploaded at high speed
but they are encapsulated in a proprietary format and
currently the only thing you can do is play an encapsulated
PCM file with their app. There is a hack at the above site
that claims to be able to reencapsulate them to .wav format
and Sony has quietly announced their intention to ship a
utility this fall that does the same. The medium holds
about a gigabyte.

There are other solutions coming down the pike from Tascam
and I think from Yamaha that use CF media but they aren't
here yet. If you don't need pre-amps there is also the
iRiver line of HD recorders. Hard drives packaged so close
to analog recording circuitry are problematic due to the
high di/dt noise they generate. You won't find a HD unit
with real pre-amps for this reason and even the line in
devices have noise well above -96 dBFS.


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
simpler."

A. Einstein