[Five]

the other thing that comes to mind is that you're using SBLive analog in... some noise etc is added this way so the transfer is not as good as it could possibly be. I understand that it is the best you can do at this time, I also have a MD recorder and no way to do a direct digital dump from it. If you can swing some way to get a direct digital rip off the masters (and of course listen to the results carefully) then at that point the masters have been cloned and the original MiniDiscs would be redundant. Until then, you should consider hanging on to the masters ...