There's a store finder here, Andy.

http://www.wilkinsonplus.com/

The discs I buy aren't Hi-MD btw, just the standard ones. 

You're quite right; I should have mentioned that once you locate a store it's probably wise to phone ahead to see if they have stock.  The picture you draw is very familiar to me.  I have got used to a certain brand of laundry tablet of which Wilkinson's is the only local stockist and I used to have great fun looking for where they'd hidden it from month to month; then the manager unilaterally decided to stop stocking it so I was looking in vain until I cracked and asked a member of staff (it's back now, I'm glad to say).  They also have the infuriating habit of not always putting like with like.  It was a long time before I discovered they had bog-standard DVD+Rs (25 on a spindle for about £7) because the pricey DVD+Rs (5, each in an individual case, for about £5), which I saw first, are stored at the other end of the aisle!

On the plus side, the staff are usually helpful.

I'm not quite sure where you might have learned that here, but it is true that the error correction regime for Red Book CDs is less thorough than that for, say AIFF, (as used in the Alesis CD-24 standard). However, the points I was making related not to copying CDs, but to recordings made using microphones of other analogue sources. For instance, although this may be seen as overkill, I have recently taken to recording from FM using a sample rate of 88.2ksps and 24 bit quantization,  then making level adjustments, etc. and then down-sampling to 44.1ksps and using noise shaping when reducing the bit depth to 16 and burning to CD-R. The audio quality improvement will be minimal, some would say negligible, but my thinking is that I might as well get the best I can out of a compromised audio source.

When ripping audio from Red Book CDs for personal use, I find the open source "Exact Audio Copy" program the best solution. It is highly configurable, and can rescue/reconstruct data lost to some other ripping programs, once you learn its intricacies.

You'll find that in extreme Hi-fi circles there's a theory that CDs copied under the right circumstances might actually sound better than the original, the reason being that although the physical information being copied should be identical, it should be possible to decrease the digital jitter and provide a disc which for which the player needs to provide less error correction. The way that the information is stored on a CD is complex, in a belt-and-braces fashion, and if the disc is dirty or poorly made, the player itself has a good deal of extra work to do behind the scenes to recreate the music accurately: depending how well (or otherwise) the player has been designed, this can make an audible difference to those trained to spot such things. Just slapping a CD into your PC and ripping it to a CD-R is unlikely to manage this quite as well, however....

I've now had a chance to try loading MD material to DVD by using the little Zoom H2 digital recorder as an intermediary; there was a major problem at first, since the input sensitivity of the Zoom is rather lower than standard line level, causing clipping distortion; a high quality variable attenuator in the circuit has sorted that wonderfully, however. This means that I can transfer material from MD (and I'm afraid, true to Dough form, I have rather a lot of these, well over 1,000) to the Zoom without using the computer, then upload the files to the PC or the Mac in a fraction of the time, ready to edit and record to DVD, which will simplify storage (and sharing with others ).

Bryn, I'm using DVD as the storage medium, but I'm intending to use CD as the carrier, so I'm sticking to 16/44.1. Software is the Mac-based DSP-Quattro for editing, and Roxio's Toast for burning, or if I'm on a PC, Wavelab and Nero: if there's any really tough stuff to deal with, I can use ProTools on both platforms, too, but DSP-Q's an absolutely wonderful editing programme, and my favourite by miles.

     #  20               Ted,        I've taken to the garden where 'shivering pines do clime the day' and gibber away like Lear on the blasted heath!   

I have a Sony MX R 90, and it has done me such good service. I used it to listen to my cds a while ago on train journeys... before my ipod habit kicked in. Now I use it for recording live with a Sony microphone. I find the quality surprisingly good. I used to record my orchestra and it sounded as brilliant as we were  , (strings usually sound terrible on 'ordinary' recording equipment. )

I am not sure what I will do when my little tough md player ( I agree pw) finally gives up the ghost!

A

At last got hold of an MD recorder yesterday and reviewed something I did last year-3 stromenti and 9 singers in a small theatre space-much more breadth to the spectrum than I expected, so much so that I think I can write around bits of it as is. Blimey-technology works first time in my mitts, que pasa?