I'm looking for a high-quality sound recorder, mostly for use on location (For use with video work.) This means that in needs to be small and portable. I intend to use a shotgun mike (Condenser) with it, so a XLR input would be useful (Though unlikely, so an adapter will have to do.) In school we used Minidisk players, which worked very nicely. Unfortunately, the new generations of minidisk get their input digitally, which means most models won't record any more, and those that do, no longer have manual gain levels. Does anybody have sugestions for alternatives?

Edirol R4.

Those things are not cheap by any means though. You could try finding a secondhand portable DAT recorder.

g3(?) iPod + pre-amp.

Before messing about with prosumer formats and consumer gear, go to a film production equipment rental company and rent a Nagra IV for a weekend. If you explain that you're trying to learn the ins and outs of the thing, they'll likely give you a break on the rental price.

Either get one of the staff to show you the basic opperation, or find some kind of tutorial online. These things have been the Cadilac of field recorders since the early seventies, so there's no shortage of "How to" guides out there.

Record as much tape as you can over the course of the weekend, at various different speeds. Use the "direct from tape" monitoring option, and try recording with the limiter and without. Become familiar with the noise floor of the tape itself as well as the preamps and circuitry.

Then, once you've become intimately familiar with the Nagra IV, return it and wipe the tear from your eye. Now try out as many other field recorders as possible, comparing them to the Nagra IV in terms of preamp quality, ruggedness, features, and recording quality.

My point is: anything will sound better than a consumer MP3 player forced to serve as a field recorder. The Nagra IV is still the standard against which serious field recorders are judged, so it makes sense to get to know it before blindly choosing a recorder.

Personally, I found the Fostex FR-2 to be the ideal compromise between quality and price for my purposes. It's priced like an entry level DAT (ie. Tascam DA-P1), but outperforms the top-tier timecode DATs (eg. Fostex PD-4). Although it lacks many of the input/output features that I like to see, the 24-bit/192kHz recording and optional timecode card edges it ahead of the slightly more expensive Sound Devices stereo hard-disk recorder.

As for miniDisk recorders suitable for production sound recording, the only one that even comes close to being suitable is the HHB portadisk. Functionally, it's essentially a Tascam DA-P1 that records onto minidisk. Bear in mind that I still consider minidisk to be a poor alternative to DAT (of which I was never very fond in the first place).

Good luck, and remember: if a field recorder doesn't have XLR inputs, it's probably not worth using.