Boy, this hardware selection is a lot trickier than expected. I figured this would have been debated and evaluated to death here, with charts and graphs etc...
Doug told me "To date I have not had one R44 problem" and "keep in mind I burn in the decks I upgrade first to insure they are in good working order. As they have no moving parts( no transport to handle tape), they rarely fail'.
But....
That Marantz story makes me take pause. You make a very good point there--never thought of that angle. I'm a newbie here, but have had enough gadgets over the years to have done more than a couple firmware updates, and know that can be risky at times. Brick is the term, I believe.
I REALLY want to be a respected member of this forum, and feel obligated to buy one from Doug after bugging him several times around the holidays--not like he probably didn't have plenty of other things to do! Not sure if I got 50 bucks worth of help over the online deep-discount option, but whatever--I'm still planning on getting SOMETHING from him at this point.
Your post is making me lean back toward the stock option. I need to DECIDE and put this to bed. Still need to finalize my mic deal, scope out mic cables, a sturdy mic stand, mic mount bracket, and who knows what else to get started (the point of all this--RECORD!). This has been a very interesting process, but the equipment spec part is a lot of work for a newbie starting from ground zero--6 days ago I could even find the right end of the my mic boom to put the mic bracket on! Heck, 6 days ago I was trying to run a $40 Shure mic into my laptop aux in to "practice" before my musician friend came over to record! Good thing he brought over what was needed to get the signal into my laptop....talk about feeling STUPID.....
And now I'm in the middle of a debate on equipment mods...this gets interesting quick!!!!
Thanks to you and everyone who has weighed in on this R-44 stock vs. mod---this is a wonderful group here.
I have until 2PM ET to order a Concert mod R-44 from Doug for shipment Monday---he didn't say if a stock one could still go out today.