If you're looking for studio quality sound, these small, hand-held digital recorders do fall a bit short. They are very good. They're great for evaluating practice or recording song fests and such, in the same way that a lot of people (including me) used a small, battery-operated cassette recorder. And their sound quality is far superior to the little cassette recorders. They are used a lot for field recording, including by broadcast news reporters for on-the-spot interviews and such.

But the weakest link in these recorders is (are?) the in-built microphones. Since they are built in, refinements of mic placement and such are difficult or impossible to achieve. Most of them do have a 1/8" input for an external mic, but that's still not going to give you studio quality. Samson made the attempt by equipping their Zoom H4 recorder with two XLR mic connectors, and I gave that some serious consideration before I read in a number of reviews that this recorder—and another small digital recorder I considered, the Marantz PMD660, that also has XLR inputs—has noisy preamps. The gizmos are just too small to have all of the electronics necessary to produce studio quality sound. But—for what they are intended, they are excellent.

I went ahead and got the Zoom H2, which is considerably less expensive than others on the market. I use this as a replacement for my little Panasonic cassette recorder, which it blows off the table in terms of sound quality, size, and versatility.

If you want studio quality, you need to go with something a little less portable. I'd suggest that you beg, borrow, or steal a copy of the "Roger McGuinn's Guide to Home Recording on a Computer" DVD (about $20). His lash-up is about as simple as it can get—a couple of good mics, an analog-to-digital converter that connects with his laptop computer, and a good, big external hard-drive. You can produce studio quality recordings with this gear, because McGuinn and a lot of other people are doing it.

In fact, I just bought two home brewed CDs yesterday, produced by people I know, on computer-based equipment similar to McGuinn's, and the sound quality is as good as any CD you can buy from Tower Records or from Amazon, with a well-known record company label on it.

In addition to getting the Zoom H2, I've recently equipped myself with some gadgets similar to what McGuinn uses on the DVD, and I'm learning to use it.

I use the Zoom H2 as a sort of "practice / rehearsal aid," and to record song fests. Neat, tidy, easy to use. And I can burn what I record on it to CDs if I want. The quality may not be quite up to commercial CD, but it's not bad, and unless a person is a recording engineer or has a very sophisicated ear, they probably couldn't tell the difference.

Don Firth