iAudio X5L Recording Quality

[hailtothethieves]

Hello all,

I've recorded shows here and there with my old MD recorder and I've recently bought a Cowon iAudio X5L 30GB to use as my personal MP3 player (Rockbox and ogg/flac/wavpack/etc did affect the choice). Though, I did not expect it to actually be able to record audio from Line In in lossless form.
I'd like to know how the recording gear inside the X5L compares to other ones, such as the so-much-used iRiver H120/H140... Does anyone know about this? And also, I've heard some people complaining that the hard disk interferes electro-magnetically with recordings, wheter they're from line-in or built-in mic (noise is supposed to be heard at -57dB or so. When I max out the volume on the X5L and go to the recording screen w/ no mic plugged, I do hear some weird noise - I can post samples if needed). Does anyone have a word on this? I'd also like to notice that I do not know if this happens with the original firmware (my guess is that it does), since I only saw it for like 5 seconds (turn unit on, turn unit off, plug usb in, rockbox =D).
I just want to clear these 2 things before I throw away my old (and lossy) MD =)

Thank you so much for your atention

[saratoga]

This is easy enough to check with RMAA.  Just play the test tone through a decent sound card and record it via Line In.  Finally copy to your PC, load it up in RMAA and hit "analyze".  Shouldn't take more then 15 minutes, and it'll give you the exact SNR, noise floor, THD, etc.

[wombat]

I've used the iaudio X5L to record from vinyl (jazz and classical) using line-in. It works very well, whether as mp3 files (the original  firmware, but at at least 256 kb/s) or wavs (Rockbox). Sounds much better than my "multimedia" laptop (a Dell XPS). Go for it!