I think you'll get a wide range of opinion on this one, Marc. Probably including a lot of opinions from people who have never run one.
Same as it ever was... For everyone one person who says the mt is 'solid', you'll have others who say it is flakey. There is a reason for that.. it is flakey! I think you really need to learn about a lot of quirks in order to use the mt reliably..
Contrast that to the r09. Most owners seem to think it is solid and I'm not aware of a single person saying otherwise. There are no major 'need to know!' quirks. People hardly even talk about the r09 because they just work. The mt is dead meat if edirol releases a bit bucket version of the r09.
I still have my mt for doing comps, mostly out of the v3. But I'm not doing so many of those these days so mine will probably be going up soon.
You can make the mt work but it isn't reliable enough for me. Record 100 shows with it and let us know how much you lost, etc.
Yep, definitely same as it ever was -- there always has been and probably always will be a lot of bandwagoning on ts.com. Not aware of anyone saying there are problems with the r09? Last I saw there were 3 pages of people complaining about the 1/8" inputs going bad on the 09, yet everyone glosses over that. If there were these input problems with the MT, people would be jumping all over M-Audio about their bad quality and unreliability. I'm not slamming it over this, yet this just confirms one of my fears about the 09 -- I don't much trust 1/8" input connectors. 1/4" TRS aren't ideal, but they are much better in my book.
Personally, I'm not that invested in the battle. If Edirol comes out with a R09 v2 with a digital input, I will most probably be buying one to check it out. But without a digital input, I'm just not interested. The MT and H140 work quite well for me for the times (mainly stealth) that I want to skip the V3 and just run analog in.
On the MT reliability, I've run it for over 100 sets in the field plus a lot of transfers. Had exactly three problems that I can recall: (1) when I first got it and was running 16 bits, I was talked into trying it at 24bits at setbreak knowing nothing about how it handled 24bits at the time. It shut down early do to glitches in the early firmware making it think that not enough file space was still available. (I had a 16bit back up via an M1, so nothing was lost. Probably wouldn't have tried the experiment if I didn't have that M1 back up. And this problem has been fixed with the newer firmwares.) (2) Once with earlier firmware had an issue with channel swapping when running digi-in at 24-bits. I had known about the potential and had been marking my channels to start with finger-snapping. No problem at all switching them back with CoolEdit, so nothing lost. (3) At a free show at a ski mountain I hadn't planning on taping, we used my MT to go analog in from an AT822 someone else had (pooling gear to see what we might be able to accomplish). Only had cables for using the 1/8" input, not the 1/4" TRS, and I knew up front there probably wasn't a chance in hell of it working without brickwalling -- and it didn't. All of these problems have been fixed with the latest firmware, or can be avoided by knowing the MT's limitations and using the right cables.
So overall, I'd say with my own pretty extensive use, compared to my own experience with other recorders, this makes the MT the most reliable field recorder I've ever used -- compared to the Sony D3/D8/D100/M1 (never ran a D7), the Aiwa HDX3000 and Aiwa HDS1, and the Nomad Jukebox 3. Never owned or ran extensively the DA-P1 or PortaDAT, which may have proven more reliable than the MT, and the H140 might prove to be a very reliable recorder (haven't used it enough yet), but fragile optical digi cables make me worried.
Anyway, that being my experience with the MT. Perhaps it is quirky, but for me anyway, easy enough to work with it's quirks. No worse than needing to insure proper tape loading with Sony DAT portables or keeping from having the dreaded heat shutdown of the JB3.