Well Im new so to speak with all this but I'm going to say Hard. I fooked around with the soft mods for a day or so. Live 2.0 tends to screw alot of em up. I have a perfectly working copy of MA-EVOX. But that is only good for home brew and uploading crap.
Im going to now do a hard mod, you can get chips for $30 which is ceaper then AR and they add all sorts of cool crap. Like getting rid of macrovision and the ability to easily turn off the chip.
Hard mods are much harder if not impossible for MS to effect with updates.