So many good points-kudos all! I just want to share my small 2 cents, as I am also a recent convert to Minidisc (late 2007 to jump in is, well, a little late!). My dad is a working jazz musician in Kansas, so i grew up around all sorts of live music, and an enormous jazz collection of records from the 50's and 60's of great music. I was never allowed to play with the Reel-To-Reel, but I still clearly remember the day he bought a Technics cassette deck. I would spend gleeful hours cueing up the records after cleaning them, running the loud sections to make sure the record level wasn't too high (especially if I wasn't using cro2 or metal tape) and making mixes of my favorite sections or albums to play in my walkman. It was an experience I truly enjoyed. After leaving the nest, I went on into computers and for years downloaded or burned music onto hard drive upon hard drive. At different parts of my life I've had all the music I've ever wanted or cared for in digits. It gave me a blase' attitude about something I used to have a cherished memory of. It truly bcame a disposable thing to me--McMusic, if you will. Cue 2007, and my dad sent me his old panasonic solid-state receiver (back when EVERYTHING was made of steel and wood ) and a decent turntable. I began to remember what it was about albums and recorded music that I loved so much. I tried looking for a good cassette deck, but if you think good Minidisc players are rare... That's when I came across some small mention of minidisc on an album forum I was reading at the time. It was exactly what I was looking for-an elegant sloution to creating portable copies of the record collection I have been amassing. That also sounds great. Oh, and is durn cool looking. And waay more portable. Y'all know what Im talkin aboot. I found an MDS-JE780 on my local cragslist with 120+ minidiscs to go with, and I've been happily recording ever since. No need for fancy sound cards, or optical outs (although I'm sure I'll be heading that way soon too), or music mastering software. that and I am no longer a pirate on the high bittorrent seas. I'm supporting bands I like by buying vinyl, hunting down rares and spending an afternoon mastering them to minidisc to play in my portables. Eh, it's a hobby! Someone mentioned in a post earlier about curmudgeoniness, and I suppose there's a bit of that going on, but I'm regulating my computer where I think it belongs-mostly away from my music collection (I have to admit I am a bit of a Magnatune junkie, but thats what the NetMD interface is for).