Digital Equipment (Reply to Celso Alvarez Caccamo)

[Alexandre Enkerli]

> My only experience with a portable to record sound directly was awful.
What was the setup? Some computers (especially those with Intel
processors at high clock rates) do generate a lot of noise. Fanless
computers are rather quiet.
Also, there's a large range of quality in soundcards. One would guess that
Hammerhead-equiped portables should produce quality recordings.

> the best medium should be memory cards/chips, with no movable parts
True. This could in fact be achieved on a portable using flashcards. The
biggest problem there is that those cards are usually rather expensive for
the amount of data they hold and uncompressed high-quality sound
(think 24 bit/96 kHz) requires a lot of space.

> like Archos' announced MP3 / Audio CD direct recorder.
Do you have more info on this device since your earlier posts about it?
And we'd probably be more interested in the audio CD part than the MP3s as
the latter technology is a lot lossier than even MD...
Direct-to-burn is certainly a very interesting concept but it's in fact
the opposite of the flashcard idea, involving several movable parts.
Burners seem to be rather sensitive to movement. Surprisingly enough, this
doesn't seem to be a problem with MDs and other magneto-optical devices.

Another option, related to both FireWire digital camcorders and MD is
Sony's MData2 camcorder. Using a new version of MD's magneto-optical
technology but on CD-size disks, it can allegedly hold 5 hours of audio on
one disk.