devo_ji

Both of these units sound fine. The real difference will show up about 2 years from now. Just like the first gen Ipod's have problems with holding a battery charge, what will everyone be saying as the HD units start failing. There is a reason we are all supposed to back up our HD's regularily, and those units just sit in big boxes that don't move. I can't wait for the crying to start when user's entire music collections are gone with one bump, knudge or grind.

I think for concert recording it's a better idea to use the line-in. So a pre-amp is required. Does anyone have any suggestions or just order the Sound Professional one.

I believe, from what I have read, that the louder the music you want to record the better off you are using the line-in. This bypasses the mic-pre in the unit which I guess suffers from having to be so small to fit in the tiny MD case. Also the mic-input is more prone to distortion. Given that many classical performances can get pretty loud I would pay a little extra for a pre-amp. Now the question becomes which is the best low cost pre-amp for the money?

I don't yet have a ton of experience recording on MD but from what I have heard you probably will be more than happy with the compressed ATRAC recording. Then if you really want the best possible use the PCM and change disks. From what I have read experienced listeners sometimes like the sound of the more compressed 128 bit MP3's over the CD original. I havn't tried this myself yet but it indicates to me that the 256 bit ATRAC should be just fine.