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The 333ES is so good, that its LP2 sounds good even without Type S. I got one when they were more reasonably priced, but it's now deceased and departed. The JE780 is well-spoken-of and while not exactly common, does turn up here and there for much less than the 333ES. I'm not sure the S500 was ever common, even in Japan. Don't know where you're looking, but besides eBay, you can always check out Buyee (http://buyee.jp/?lang=en). Lots of folks record optically from their PCs! (I sometimes do so from an iMac...my PC has coax out...that works, too.) I have a JA22ES, which seems to have a GUI that enables one to do titling and such from a PC, although I do not use that functionality. Anyway, good luck, be nice to know what you wind up with.

Well if I wanted average quality I could just stick wtih the old player. The Sony deck sounds amazing, even compared to a similarly spec'd and priced Pioneer from the same era. And I've got some good speakers, and despite my old age I can still hear and appreciate the high end. I'm really very aware of quantization in the high end, which is why I'm using MDs instead of, say, 320kbps MP3s. The difference between LP2 and SP might not be noticeable, but the difference between music recorded via optical input and music encoded by SonicStage and transferred over is -massive-. Whatever SS is doing doesn't work nearly as well as the NH900. Now whether that's because of the DSP, or flaws in my testing (which was done a while ago and I may have done something silly and forgotten) I don't know. But I find it relaxing to create a disc the old fashioned way. Creating a good playlist and recording one track at a time is a soothing thing. tl;dr - it works and I like it. =) Holy crap, you're not kidding about the JA333ES. O_o The S50 requires the weird PC-Link thing, is that a hassle compared to the relatively easy NetMD with Sonic Stage?