Awesome quality, no diference between CD and MD in sound quality.

The Kenwood 1050MD is my first foray into the world of digiital Mini Discs. I must say that I am impressed with the format: none of the calibration hassles, tape wear, alignment problems, tape hiss dolby mistracking, tape rewinding, song-hunting, tape chewing, etc., etc., associated with cassettes.
This unit has been solid and sounds great. I like a lot of the extras, including coax and toslink for both digital inputs AND outputs. Analog RCAs are of course included as well. The remote is compact and packed with buttons, including an eject. It operates silently, and track access is fast and accurate.

The sound is indistinguishable from a CD to my ears. With enough CD recording, this unit will eventually pay for itself in CDs that I now won't have to buy.

I just recently purchaced the Kenwood 1050MD to copy MP-3s from my computer to MD. I have two other Sony MD recorders and can here NO difference in any of the three decks, the Sony's are much easier to title the songs with, or maybe I have not spent enough time with the 1050 to get use to it. Sonically it is a great deck for the novice or professional, I would reccomend it although it don't have some of the features of my Sony MD-501,like time stamp and clock. I will give it a rating of 4 as it has not yet proven itself as to how long it will last.

I bought this deck mainly to convert my CDs into high quality digital recordings. I had heard that ATRAC4.5 did a really good job at this, and I was curious just how good it was, so I bought this deck, somewhat sceptically, to see if this was true. Boy, was I surprised! I recorded Mariah Carey's "Butterfly" album on the Kenwood 1050MD both via digital and analog means, and the results were amazing (this is a good CD to test your system by the way, the recording is of exceptional quality and really brings out the best in your system). I put on the original CD and then the digital copy and then the analog copy. I could hardly discern any difference between the analog copy and the CD, much less with the digital copy. Clarity was amazing, maybe it lacked a little depth, but unless one did a side-by-side comparison with all ears glued to the system, this wasn't at all obvious even to the most discerning ear. I even liked how the bass in MDs sound more "punchy" than the original; it goes well with the kind of music I listen to.
The 20 bit DAC and ADC converters are definitely awesome! I expected some crappy converters in this component but i was wrong. I am even thinking of buying a 200 disc changer and linking the digital output to the Kenwood 1050MD to make use of its 20bit DAC for listening (the DACs you get on these changers are most often horrendous). I can't really say much about the features on the Kenwood 1050MD - but i can say they suffice for the kind of no-frills recording I aim to do, with the single purpose of high-quality recordings. One thing I really liked about the features of this deck was the "monitor" function - it allowed me to route my CD player directly to the deck instead of thru my preamp.

At the price of USD369, it is definitely a more than worthwhile investment than say a NAK cassette deck! I can't wait to see how ATRAC 5.0 performs when it hits the mass market!

I am thinking about getting a digital audio recorder (haven't decided on format yet) but I want to use it as an A/D converter to feed my digital pre/pro as well as making digital dubs. Can this be done, or is it like a cassette deck where it will only output an incoming signal in record or record/pause mode?