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My pal John Vallier wrote me an email a couple months ago with a link to the MicroTrack and asked me what I thought about it. It was a serendipitous moment in that my old, reliable, pocket-sized Aiwa cassette recorder finally bit the dust and I was told it couldn't be repaired (can't get parts). Then I found that it's nearly impossible to find this kind of unit anymore. I struggled with an old minidisc recorder for a while but it just couldn't take the SPL level of a live band. So I was really in the market for a small, concealable, reliable, quality recorder.
Mr. Eugene helped me get my hands on the M-Audio unit for review and also sent me this Sony recorder for a shootout. I, however, admit to bias as I'm extremely leery about both machines and their relationship to the place where the rest of us live: the REAL world. But the M-Audio uses compact flash and the Sony uses either regular mini-discs or the new HI-MD mini discs that hold a gig of information. (I'm a bit more confident of the compact flash mainly because it's used in a lot of digital cameras so it would seem that there's a little bit of staying power right there.)
Both units are light and tiny. The Sony is a 3" square where the M-Audio is 4" x 2". So they're close in size and of similar...