Digital recording and field recording

I have always been into field recording.  My 21st birthday present (1982 ish) was a Marantz three-head portable cassette recorder that I lugged around and recorded with.  I remember taking it into The Scala in London to record Videodrome (when The Scala was a cinema club and before recording films was prisonable).  Some of the tapes I recently photographed where recorded on the Marantz.

A memorable recording was on a Euston to Manchester train with a friend in the early 80s.  Even at that time we regarded train travel as a pain the arse.  I have a copy The Catcher in the Rye that I was reading at the time in which my friend wrote "Next year we'll fly".  This was as much about public transport as it was about affluence.  At that age and at that time, we imagined that in only a years time we would we older and wiser and richer.  And flying would be affordable and realistic.  It wasn't.  

Anyway, that was when I did field recordings.  And recordings from the telly.  And radio.  And also had a valve reel to  reel recorder from which I spliced and built cut-ups.  I even, incredibly, had a cassette (boy was it narrow) splicing kiet and did indeed splice cassette tape.  The reel to reel cut ups were very easy and successful (very time consuming though).  I still have many of these field tapes including cassette loops (TDK used to do loops of 30s, 60s and 90s lengths).  

Field recording was in my blood.

Right now, I want that back.  My music making needs external input.  And the world and its sounds are it.  

Technology has moved on.  Cassette, Minidisc and DAT has (pretty much) come and go.  Compact Flash (CF) is now where we are.  Prices have stayed the same / risen.  Quality, being digital has risen (obviously).  But with it, complexity has been introduced:  Bit rates, sample rates, WAV, AIFF, BWF...

16-bit, 24-bit (20-bit?)...

44.1KHz?  44.4, 96, 192... kHz etc?

1-bit?

WAV, BWF, AIFF?

What is all this stuff?  How does it affect sound quality?  Why does it matter?

[An interpretation in next post]

All this is slightly ironic really - these are (sort of) the audio equivalent elements of the image (recording) world.  The image world being the one that I work in.  

Anyway, I feel the need to buy a doodad.  A digital sound recording device.  Having talked to Rob the Bass Man, it is likely to be the Tascam HD-P2.  And maybe a pair of AKG C1000 mics.