It's a pity that none of the small portable MD recorders don't have a Digital Out facility - although most seem to have Digital In.

I gather that this is because when the MD system was first designed they were intended for personal copies of CD tracks and for pre-recorded MDs only. It was feared that it would lead to piracy if digital copies out were permitted. Since then, pre-recorded MDs have beeen discontinued, and CD burners mean that there's a much easier way to copy CDs. One of the main uses of pocket MD recorders is for live music recording, and it's apity that this can't be directly transferred as a digital signal, rather than as an analogue one with it's loss of quality.

Mind you, four tracks that I recorded with my first stereo cassette deck (about 25 years ago) have been successfully used on the "Remembering Fred" archive CD set of the late Fred Jordan and they haven't come out so badly.