Advice on using either PCM or Hi-SP

[Crystally]

I just bought a MZ-RH1 recently,

The software took a while to get used to.

I'm using an ECM-719 microphone.

I'm going to a concert tommorow night.

Should I record in PCM, or in Hi-SP?

It's in an open air auditorium, so there's going to be some "loss", I understand.

Is it worth it to record in PCM which is CD quality?

And with SonicStage, what transfer settings should I use? should it be as ATRAC3? or just transfer as is?

[greenmachine]

Although Hi-SP is of decent quality, I tend to use the highest quality I can afford, which means if I expect the concert to be less than 95 min in length (when using 1GB blanks) or expect to have a minute pause to be able to change discs, I use PCM.

PCM should be transferred "as is", can be converted to wav and finally compressed using a lossless compression scheme like flac.

Hi-SP should also be transferred "as is". If you want to archive Hi-SP files (.oma extension), you need to remove their copy protection, which prevents them to be used on other SonicStage installations (details here). Or you decompress to wav and use lossles compression in the same way as with PCM recordings, which will take more space than using the files in their native Hi-SP format, but you will have a universally usable file.