by CHRISTOPHER SCAPELLITI

While humanity speeds en masse down the digital music trail, millions of struggling musicians are still recording rehearsals, gigs and ideas for their breakthrough hit song with the humble cassette tape. Talk about suffering for your art.

Although compact and cheap, cassettes suck. The audio quality is miserable, the cartridges are fiddly to insert and remove from the player, and the damn things are analog! You actually have to wind through them to get to the part of the recording you need to hear.

And as anyone who has searched for cassettes these days will tell you, fresh blanks are becoming very scarce as the medium rolls at 1 7/8 inches per second to the end of its 40-year run.

All of which makes the new Olympus LS-10 especially lustworthy. It’s a handheld stereo digital recorder with a pair of mics built in and positioned at right angles for

phase-correct recording.

Like most other handhelds, the LS-10 can record in MP3, WAV and WMA formats. Unlike most other handhelds, it can also make studio-grade PCM recordings at up to 96kHz/24-bit quality. (That means “really good” for those of you a few bits short in the digital music department.)

The LS-10 runs for up to 12 hours on two AA batteries, and it has a 2-gig flash memory, enough to record, say, two gigs at the CD-standard 44.1/16-bit recording mode. Should you need more memory, the LS-10 accepts those postage-stamp-sized SD memory cards.

While the unit sports a tiny speaker and earphone jack, most users will undoubtedly want to transfer their recordings to a computer. For that, the LS-10 has a USB 2.0 connection and even comes with Cubase4 LE sound-editing software (though the files can be edited in any digital-recording or wave-editing application).

All in all, it’s a serious package with a serious price tag: $449.95. Obviously, some of us will have to continue hating cassettes a little longer.