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OT: Rethinking the whole A/D thing

I had started down the path of worrying about limiting and A/D conversion
thinking that I should get something to help me keep leveraging my SP-808
and somewhat aging DAT deck as recording mechanisms.

The responses from this list seemed to basically be: Just record in 24-bit
and leave plenty of headroom.

That makes sense, but left me then thinking about the whole process since 
it
doesn't leverage my existing hardware.

My goals are to have something simple in my studio setup that I can
basically hit record on and grab a jam. I then want to be able to take it
over to my computer to clean it up. I'm less interested in recording
straight to the computer because it's more hassle in the midst of playing
and it's less portable.

The SP-808 let me do that via ZIP disks (though the SP-808 importer 
software
is not exactly completely friendly with MacOS X). But I was running into
problems overloading the inputs on the SP-808 and when I turn down the
volume, I'm not getting as much of the 16-bit range. (I've assumed that the
problems I've heard are signal overload and not compression artifacts.)

So, what to do. Per various discussions here, I started looking at minidisc
records. I'm sort of eyeing the Sony MDSE10 since it seems to have fairly
serious audio specs and reasonably connectivity. On the other hand, that
would require running an SPDIF cable from the minidisc recorder back to an
interface (which I'd also have to get) on my computer. If someone feels 
this
is the way to go and/or has specific recommendations regarding this
approach, I'm interested in hearing them.

Then this morning, I started thinking: This is silly, what you really want
to do is record to CompactFlash. SmartMedia seems to cap out at about 128
meg as far as I can tell, but CompactFlash can accommodate much higher
capacities and is easy to transfer to the computer. Does anyone know of a
recorder with good 24-bit converters that records to CompactFlash? 2 tracks
would be sufficient. 4 tracks would be a bonus.

Thanks.
Mark