Yamaha CDR-HD1300
Been waiting for the price of these to drop for about a year (they started at £600). Noticed in Hi-fi World that Sevenoaks are now selling them for £470 so I bought one yesterday morning.
It's an 80GB HD recorder (standard IDE, any disk up to 140GB can be swapped in), with built-in CD writer. Digital and analogue inputs and outputs. You can use the inbuilt CD player to digitally rip directly to the HD, but it does implement SCMS, so any content ripped to the HD digitally can only be subsequently digitally transferred to a CD-R/CD-RW a single time (not the most onerous restriction, but it does mean it can't be used to make bulk copies, not something I bought it for anyway). Best of all, it doesn't compress the digital stream at all. (Sony have something similar, but it looks like it only makes ATRAC copies, and Richer Sounds sell an even cheaper device that will only store MP3).
Basically, it's a PC designed to work as an audio separate. I couldn't be arsed to sort out a laptop for this kind of stuff, and for £470 would be hard-pressed to put together something as good. The immediate reason for buying it was because, thanks to penance, I now have a tape deck to use to digitise a pile of tapes I've had for years, something I've wanted to do for ages. The prospect of making analogue CD-R copies of all this stuff was a bit daunting, but this thing is great - I've just left it going all weekend, feeding the tape deck tapes as required, and, once everything's on the disk, I'll be able to chop the files up into individual tracks, edit out the gaps where I forgot to turn the tape over in time, and make digital copies to CD from the HD of the stuff I want to keep, at my leisure.
It's an excellent thing, and playback from the HD is really very good. (Currently listening to Rise Above by Epic Soundtracks, recorded by me circa 1991 onto tape from a NAD TT and it sounds great, apart from a bit of wow at the end because the tape was a bit suspect). It's also dead quiet in operation, no intrusive disk or fan noise. The control software is, by necessity, pretty complex (it's an extremely flexible device, with lots of record and edit options) but very easy to pick up.
I'm dead chuffed with it. Has a timer as well, for kicking off those all-important digital recordings from Freeview of Jazz on 3 and Mixing It on Friday nights. Brilliant. Best recorder I've ever used. Given that I have a multi-room setup and now have the capability to store up to 120 hours of music, I suspect this may get more use than the CD player...
-- Ian