Review on 🎵 Sony RCD-W500C CD Player and Recorder: High-Quality Audio Playback & Recording Capability by Christopher Gonzalez

Update: January 2007: I just have to comment on the Table of Contents and the hard drive error messages that many reviewers have mentioned. THEY WILL TEST THEM MANY TIMES. I've tried every brand of music CD-R over the years and no brand, not even Sony, is immune. Sometimes this happens with 2 or 3 discs in a row (after about an hour of recording and especially when creating mixed discs). This is VERY disappointing and I have to say that with today's PC recording capabilities it makes this unit a lesser choice in the home CD burner category. If you are looking for a CD burner I have to recommend you a computer as after 4 years I can no longer use it. It just takes too long and there are many read/TOC/end errors on the discs, wasting time that could have been spent writing. В качестве проигрывателя компакт-дисков он работает нормально, но если вам не нравится тратить часы на запись компонента только для того, чтобы он сказал вам "Невозможно завершить" или "Ошибка TOC" в конце, что сводит на нет всю вашу тяжелую работу, используйте Computer. .------------------------------------------------ ------------ ---------- ---------- ------------------ -- --- I used to have a Philips single disc CD recorder that I had to hook up to a stereo and do analog recording between the two components. It was a nightmare; Skipped discs, extra track numbers, missing track numbers, can't recognize disc when I stop mid-mix, can't finalize. I was so discouraged that I thought I would never buy a stereo CD recorder again, but then I took a chance and bought a Sony RCDW500C. First of all, I have to admit that the instructions leave a lot to be desired. You'll find yourself scrolling back and forth between pages trying to figure it out and half of it doesn't seem to make sense (downsampling, BBS, analog recording, upsampling, optical input, manual audio alignment, adjusting screen settings ladda, ladda , ladda), so I'd suggest you sit in front of a Dictaphone and actually follow the steps as you read them. If you're looking for a recorder that you can hook up a cassette player or turntable to and record older formats, this unit will do the trick, but you'll find that there are a lot of settings that can be changed that can make the recorder work differently than you need to so play around with them to determine which one works best for your needs. All CD-to-CD recording is done internally and digitally from deck A to deck B, allowing for excellent data transfer between discs as long as the unit doesn't suffer from "disc error" issues that are common. I made my first mixed CDR and then burned it onto another CDR with just two button presses and the second CDR dubbed flawlessly. I also burned a full CD to CDR using the high speed Create Disc button and was done in less than 10 minutes. (The disc creation function copies the songs, full CD-Text, and finalizes the CDR in one step.) On the other hand, this unit struggles when it comes to reading and writing actual discs. I strictly followed another reviewer's suggestion to stop the recording at least 5-6 minutes before the end of the CDR to make room for the trailing data track and this got the number of "unable to complete" messages, that I receive reduced. receive. If you just assume that an 80 minute CDR is really only supposed to hold about 72-74 minutes of music, you're spot on. Attempting to fit that last song into the last few seconds of the recording time shown on the recorder can cause finalization problems. As for "TOC errors" and unreadable disk errors, well, you're on your own. I couldn't find a way to reduce the number or frequency of them, and overall I'd say that about HALF the drives I've tried ended up with some kind of read/write error halfway through. ;8^(Another problem I had with the instructions is that they state that when writing a CD track to a CDR, you first press the record button on deck B (puts deck B into standby) and then the play button on track A. I've found that if there's more than a few seconds of silence between pressing the play button on deck A and the song actually starting, this causes deck B to skip to the next track number when the song (for example, press the record button on deck B, press the play button on deck A, if more than 3 seconds elapsed while deck A is loading, when the song starts, deck B will automatically detect the signal and then go to track 2, track 1 than leave a few seconds of silence on your new CDR) Presumably this "setting" can be turned off in the settings menu, but after turning it off it still happened, so to solve the problem I found it was better to switch Record first, press play on deck A, wait a second or two for the player to find the correct track (you can hear the CD spinning slightly as the laser finds the track), then Deck A's "rotating noise" stops, right Before the track starts playing, manually start recording Deck B. (It's pretty easy, and after a little practice, it will become second nature.) If you Taking the time to sit down and learn how it works, and decide what settings you want to set up from the start, you shouldn't have many problems with this player, aside from the read/write issues mentioned above. and when it works, you'll find that it can be a lot of fun.