It is helpful for us to know how you'd use a recorder. "Patching in" to someone else's mics, mainly for stealth taping, mainly for open taping, etc. The one thing the MD has going over the JB3 is size, so if you're only mainly stealthing and feel the JB3 might be too large, then the JB3 might not be for you. Otherwise there's a good chance it may be the best option for a recorder. Also, with the standard 20gb drive, the JB3 can hold about 30 hours of uncompressed wav audio files, so upgrading to a higher capacity drive might not be necessary.