There are two digital components which I would have to recommend:
Cowon iAudio M5L / X5 - Portable Music Player
This has a battery life of 35 hours, and a capacity of 20Gb. It's considered by many to have the best D/A of any portable, and it handles a good range of formats including OGG, FLAC, MP3, WAV etc. I have the open firmware Rockbox running on it and that turns a good player into a fantastic player. Rockbox supports virtually all non-DRM formats including Shorten, FLAC, AAC, OGG, WAV, MP3 and does this with a highly skinnable and customisable interface, and true-gapless playback. I know that the iPod does that now, but with SHN and FLAC? You can actually run Rockbox on an iPod, and it works really well, but the battery life of the Cowon and the fidelity make it the best hardware for their firmware in my opinion.
I have the monochrome display M5L, there's also the X5 which does video and colour display, but for me pure music playback is what I'm after, and I'm happy with the basic model. Can be picked up for around £100, but seems available only on eBay in the UK.
I got this as an upgrade from my DA-20MkII DAT recorder, because I wanted 24 bit recording and the convenience of solid state CF recording when moving stuff to my computer for editing. I collect a lot of live audio recordings, and transfer a lot of stuff from tape and reel to digital, for archiving. I decided it was safer to record to a dedicated machine than get a high-end soundcard and then have to worry about other stuff running and competing for CPU cycles on my Mac. The HD-P2 is portable, though it's a lot bigger than things like the Zoom H4 and Edirol that do a similar job, but it's aimed at the professional field recorder and this portability was attractive to me because I don't have much space and I often travel to friends places to record their tapes when it's not possible to borrow them for any period of time... being larger it also has a fantastic clear display that's easily readable from feet away. The HD-P2 does 16 bit and 24 bit recording, with sample rates from 44.1 up to 192khz, supports timecode yada yada yada.
Compared with DAT CF recording is a breeze. Re-take as often as you like, without wearing the tape out. Zero risk of digi-noise which was the bane of DAT even when using new tape and with clean heads. And fast to transfer to the desktop for onward editing.
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