I am kind of late getting into the game, but I am considering a MD deck to archive my cassette collection. I have over 300 Hong Kong pop albums on cassettes, and while I have obtained CD replacements (and sometime SACD replacements) for about 50% of the cassettes, I am sure most will never be released on CD. Therefore, I am considering the purchase of a MD recording deck for this purpose, with a MD portable player in the plan for playing compilations made. Any recommendations? Or do you think I should go with a CD recording deck instead.

BTW, the cassettes are currently stored in huge Case Logic carrying cases (120 tapes each) and will be played back on a tuned-up Sony TC-K670, which was Sony's top-of-the-line 3 head 3 motor single deck.

From worst quality to better..

Tape -> MD
Tape -> CD via standalone recoder
Tape -> computer -> CD. Advantage of doing this is you can record in 24bit 96khz (if you have the right soundcard) and do some editing like hiss removal if you want.
Tape -> computer -> DVD. Same as above but you can store as 24bit 96khz this way.

Going to MD is easiest and having a portable is attractive. If you're after archiving maybe CD is better since MD is lossy. Then again it is tapes we're talking about here. Some may say even recording them as 24/96 is overkill.

Thanks Ian,

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That's why I was considering MD.

Since you're talking archiving, I'm not saying MD is going away anytime soon, but likely CD's will be around longer, or the very least be more capable for transferring to whatever is next.

That's one thing I am considering....the longevity of the format to archive to.

Record them on CD-Rs using a deck CD-R recorder.

I use the TASCAM CC-222 to archive casettes on CD -- it has built-in noise reduction and auto-pause detection, and defeatable/set-able music/no-copy-bits (so you can use cheap computer CD-Rs rather than expensive music CD-Rs) to record music. It also has a variety of speed controls. However, I must admit, the cassette unit in this recorder is only fair -- while it is comprable to the type of deck you might find in a $100-$200 cassette unit, it is not comprable to a really outstanding unit. It also features a full set of digital ins and outs, and analogue ins and outs, including a RIAA phono input.

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Or just use 1 or 2 Music CD-RWs on which you record from tape, than copy them onto normal CD-Rs on the computer, then delete and re-use them (the Music CD-RWs).

I would recommend the Alesis Masterlink 9600. It has a format called "CD24", which you can use to archive 24/96 or 24/88.2, but then you can downsample to 16/44.1 regular redbook format. The proprietary format is pretty long-lived: it's just a combination of the standard CD-ROM format (ISO 9600) and .aiff audio files.

I would record them as wav files, and record them onto a DVD-RAM disc, which are excellent for archiving.