I bought an H2 a month or so ago and really love it. I use it for band rehearsals and to record gigs for later analysis. I put a 4 GB HCSD card in mine and have loads of capacity.

Arkie, the H2 can record from other devices and systems too. You can plug in a stereo mic or any stereo (or mono for that matter) input you like. The input circuit has range settings to help you adapt to the signal strength of your input. By the way, I have reservations for Merle Travis Thumbpicking event in May. I hope I'll see you around there. I'll be there Thursday night and leave Sunday morning.

The H2 can be used as a DI for your computer as well. You can plug a mic in and just pass the digitized signal through to Audacity or what ever recording program you use. This should work with turntables too. If you have a good turntable and don't want to spring for a new USB turntable, just go through your H2 to digitize those irreplaceable LPs.

The nice thing about the H2, over MD recorders, is that the digitally recorded tracks are moved directly onto your computer with no extra DA-AD conversion step. Much better quality in your computer music files.

The H2 is best used when you don't want to build up a performance by layering tracks using just the recorder. The H4 has only two mics and, I believe, doesn't time stamp recordings but it will let you do multi track recordings using only the H4. I prefer do do multi-track on a computer so I don't need that function in a recorder.

      - Mark