How I've been using this player ? - To record CD's and LP's for listening while away from home. I've always recorded using the Liion battery, recharging after 5h or so of recording.

There are already technical descriptions about this recorder on the site, so I'll skip to what I consider are it's strengths:

1) Light weight and small size. It fits very nicely into the smaller division of the CaseLogic combined Md player and MD disc wallet.

2) Sound Quality. I'm very impressed with the sound from optical digital input. This comes via a fostex converter (COP-1) from a MicroMega CD player.

3) Sound Quality bis. This unit drives some Sennheiser HD 495 headphones very nicely, giving an open and atmospheric sound.

4) Track editing facilities, it has divide, combine, erase and move facilities. These are easy to use, but it takes a few days of close contact with the user guide. The naming facilities are perfectly adequate, if a little tedious to execute.

Now the weakness.

1) Analogue recording via the 'line' input stage. This is nowhere in the same league as the digital performance. Coming from LP I can't get the gain high enough on the MD unit, without the penalty of excessive hiss generated in the line stage of the MD player itself. This is perhaps an impedance mismatch, the LP sources I'm using are beyond reproach. to get acceptably hiss free recordings the line input mustn't go past 03 on a scale of 0 to 20, if higher gain levels are set say 08 or 09 the meter doesn't show overload but the resulting recording is too hissy.

2) The line output is also the headphone output, it's not really up to driving input stage of my integrated amp, and so playback on the main rig while not unpleasant is definitely not on a par with the original source (even CD, and especially LP).