Sony Portable Mini-Disc Player/Recorder (MZR500PC)
Durability could use some work.
I bought this recorder for my record company. For that it works great. I can take an optical cord, and plub into this recorder directly from my mixing board. NOTE: This recorder has ONLY a LINE-IN jack, so if you want one with a phantom powered mic jack, don't buy this. Meaning, you cannot just plug a microphone directly into this. You need the sound to come from a machine with some form of amplication, unless it is incredibly loud.<br />The main reason for 3 stars is the durability. I dropped my recorder once, and the machine opened, and the Minidisc flew out. The latch to close it also bent, in addition to the door coming partway off, and I had to repair that in order to get the unit to close and functino properly again. This is odd, as I had heard from others that this was a durable unit, and usually Sony products can withstand a beating.<br />Currently, I am residing in Japan, where I just purchased the SONY-MZR909. It has yet to make it to the American market, but keep your eyes out. It's got many new features that the 500 lacked. Mainly, it  has a powered mic jack. It also supports MDLP, and has a group mode, so you can split up the tracks if you only want to listen to a few. It has a new system called personal disc memory, where it stores your sound settings on each disc, and retreives them each time you change discs.<br />This is a good first recorder, but if you can afford it, go with a higher line product.