I was wondering the same thing a couple of weeks ago, Glenn. I kept getting contradictory advice from people, so I finally went for "economics" over purist opinions. I picked up the Sony MZR-900 for a reasonable price and then tested it out.(posted 8249 days ago)It works great! I'm using a high quality microphone...so the overall sound is really high quality. When I uploaded the sounds into my Mac and edited with Final Cut Pro, there was no lossy compression that I could hear.
Hope that helps.
John