Oddly enough the actual sound quality of the audio is no better than that of a decent cassette recorder - I used a Sony Pro Walkman with TDK AR tape. What is different with a digital recorder is the lack of hiss, provided of course the recording level is not set too low.

If auto record level is used, it always sounds hideous. Many Minidisc recorders suffer from this, or perhaps users just haven't found the hidden manual record level function which has to be preset before the recording is started. I have a Sony RH1 and you can change the record level whilst recording, upload to a PC via Sonicstage and save as a wav file.