Best deck with optical out to play back mds recorded on early Sharp MS-701

[midiwife]

Hi folks,

Apologies but I seem to have posted 2 previous and unfinished versions of this post too - merely trying to add tags...

Anyway,

I have a bunch of MDs I recorded on my lovely Sharp MS-701 many years ago.

I want to transfer the contents to my mac via my M-Audio interface which features optical in. I previously bought a Sony Deck - the MDS-JE520 which worked fine when I used it but has since bitten the dust (suspect it's the logic board from reading similar threads).

My question, as my minidiscs were all recorded using the MS-701 with its own particular version of ATRAC - is it important to find a deck that allows for the same protocol for decompression or, is this unimportant in playback?

I read this piece below on the very informative page:

http://members.tripo...s701.html#atrac

The ATRAC version of the units is unfortunately not entirely comparable -- that is, both Sony and Sharp each use a proprietary ATRAC, (the current version for Sony is 4.5, and the current version for Sharp is 5.0). The Sony R50 uses Sony ATRAC v4.0, and the Sharp MS701 uses Sharp ATRAC v5.0 but both seem to be nearly identical in sound reproduction. The difference between the ATRACs has less to do with performance issues than the independent development of Sharp and Sony's ATRAC. The result is that the Sharp and Sony units make recordings with slightly different sound characteristics, but which one people prefer is more a matter of personal taste than one necessarily being "better".

Any help on this would be gratefully received. I'm happy to spend a bit to get a decent deck as many of these discs are quite important to me.

Many thanks.