Also, let's not forget that Iriver was giving us optical in and optical out with surround sound support. Mine was great until it died on me. Anyway, I also wanted to say that I disagree with the opinions that Sony should be marketing the MD units as recorders first. There isn't as big a demand for a recorder as there is a demand for a player with recording capabilities. What sells Ipods? Not recording, that's for certain. I believe that marketing and forcing the marriage between MD and ATRAC really hurt their progress. MD is media, first and foremost. It is more cost effective and covenient than any other removable media that I'm aware of. They needed to stop forcing people to use proprietary codecs with MD. In my opinion, they should have supported drag and drop and most of the popular music formats like Iriver. MD media should have been able to replace big, cumbersome, and fragile CDs. It should be treated like the media it is. I guess time will tell how well MD will do in the near future. This should be interesting. One thing that concerns me is that you are bombarded with Ipod commercials but never see anything about an MD player/recorder.