For remotes, life is good when your gear is light, and the less of it you have, the better. Now, eliminate as many of the moving parts from each piece as you can, and soon you'll spend more time thinking about the quality of your material, instead of worrying about finicky equipment.

HHB showed the Portadisc MDP500 minidisc recorder. It has a professional-grade minidisc transport, and the unit boasts many of the features found in a rack-mount equivalent, such as analog and digital I/O and a parallel remote control.

Marantz offered the PMD-690. It uses ATA-type PC cards or flash memory PC cards with an adaptor. Recordings are saved as .mp2, .bwf or .wav files.

Denon is marketing a portable recorder that uses flash memory. The DN F20R has XLR balanced inputs and RCA unbalanced inputs and outputs.

Sonifex has added features to the Courier. Editing is possible with a jog wheel and LCD screen built in.

The handheld Nagra ARES-P, displayed last year, places all the transport functions at the user's fingertips. Digigram also had its version of the recorder, the RCX220.

The Orban Opticodec line includes one model with an audio recorder, in addition to its audio encoding and streaming capabilities.

As is so often the case, broadcasters continue to benefit from new technology brought about by rapid advances in computing and data storage.

Doug Irwin is director of engineering, Clear Channel, San Francisco.