That said tho, if you were to burn for a true CD sound by using WAV as the file type (I pressume at 192k then?) then surely if you made an "audio" disc rather than "data" disc (so you don't have to stick to MB limitations only to time limitations) then you get the best possible CD burn yes?
I've been doing som research on these NET MD recorders and again, seems they don't turn out as good as Sony would have you belive. One review I just read says you can't make use of the USB to MD transfer set up if your recording in normal stereo mode (which on an 74min MD gives you 74mins - LP2 gives you 148min and LP4 gives you 296mins on one disc - more so if you use an 80min disc) so that defeats the purpous a bit. Also, the sound quality diminishes the higher the ammount of mins you use, so the LP2 and LP4 functions aren't so good as you get worse sound quality (tho I can't use em anyway as my car MD won't read MDLP, only normal stereo recordings)
Also it seems the software you need to use this set up isn't great as it encodes everything (from MP3, WMA and WAV to it's own OpenMG format, which is designed for ATRAC3 which is what MD players use) Apparently this takes just as long to encode as it does to copy, so actually makes your copy time twice as long. It also doubles up all the tracks you copy onto the HDD so uses a lot of space aswell.
So thinking about it the only advantage would be that I could lift tracks right from PC directly to MD rather than burn to CDRW, then copy from CDRW to MD using optical cable from my DVD player, but if you can't copy directly via USB in normal stereo mode then thats no good to me.
So I might as well stay set up the same way I am - using MD in the van recorded normally, but maybe get a compatible CD changer that can read MP3 discs? Or upgrade the soundcard on this to one that has a much better sound on it, and also an optical in/out so I can copy straight from the PC, out the soundcard and into my hifi via optical cable....? Although this would all be in real time (like a cassette) thats no different than it is now TBH....