After a short play with the Edirol recorder, courtesy of the Yorkshire Garland Song Project who had just purchased one, I was glad I'd decided to look a bit wider, mainly due to the build quality (thinking about the abuse that I put my recorders through - my Sony MD is bent and useless now, which is why I was looking for a new recorder).

The Marantz is excellent but a bit big for recording in sessions which is one of the things I do regularly. I've used them on film shoots too but they don't easily hide from the camera if I want to use them close to the action.

Eventually, I plumped for the M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 which has turned out to be an excellent all-round machine with just a couple of disadvantages.

It has an internal battery which can last up to 8 hours before needing recharging but if you do run out of power there's no alternative but to recharge, during which time it's offline.

Also, using it on a film shoot in Spain, I discovered that it stops working when the temperature gets into the 90s - not a problem that I'm going to worry about very often.

There is a mini-jack mic input and a tiny t-bar mike to go in it and the quality is phenomenal for the size. There's also a couple of phantom powered balanced mic inputs which I use for posh work, but using the power drains the battery quite quickly.

The recordings can range from mp3 128bit/sec giving 17+ hours mono recording on a 1Gb flash card to WAVs at 96K/24bit - super quality for 58 minutes mono.

At little bigger than a pack of cigarettes and not much heavier, it's very easy to place it to record in a session, or hide it in an actor's pocket if I'm filming.

All in all not a bad little machine but I shall check out some the others mentioned above.

J