best recording equipment?

Question

hand held for around 200$ or less
to record music

Answer 1

The Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 looks pretty good as a portable hard-drive recorder, and can be found on eBay for under $200. It has an S/PDIF input as well as the line input, so you can use an external ADC or record directly from digital sources.

There's the Gemini iKEY which records to USB memory devices, in either Wav or MP3 format.

Other Creative players like the Zen V, and Zen V Plus, Nano Plus, Neeon 2, have line-in recording.

And there's the oldschool MiniDisc and DAT, but both have limited recording time.