I am a double bass player, looking for equipment to record myself for professional symphony audition tapes and for general practicing purposes. I am looking for a high quality sound that I can send digitally online for critique-ing.

I recently recorded on a friends setup which was a Sennheiser e914 condensor mic and going into an edirol R-09 portable recorder. The sound was very good so I went and bought the same mic, but am debating against 2 recorders.

The first recorder is the same R-09 that I used, and the sound was good. It is a 24.bit recorder, however it doesn't have a a built in phatom power, which isn't a problem, but it the input for the mic has to be adapted to an 1/8 inch input. Does this affect the sound quality?

The second recorder is Marantz PMD660. It has two XLR inputs, with a built in phantom power supply. i could use a stereo pair of mics, but would this make a significant difference in quality and detail? The PMD660 records in 16-bit, so does that make a big enough difference?

The prices between them are only about 100 dollars in difference, so it's not a big deal. I just want to know if anyone knows anything about these two or if anyone knows which is better.