Hi Audrey,
don't get carried away with the hype. A friend of mine had a previous generation Yamaha writer, which was the fastest available at that time, and reverted back to his Phillips drive because it was much more reliable, even if slower.

24 speed means just that, 24 times the normal cd speed. So if an audio cd is 48 minutes of music at normal speed, it will be written in 2 minutes at 24 speed.

However speeds like this make the writer highly critical of the quality of blank cds. If you buy the cheapest blanks, you may run into trouble with reliability of the finished cds (which is what happened to my friend). Everyone has the occasional failed cd, if this becomes commonplace every few cds it is very annoying. If you have to slow down to prevent failures, you've wasted your money getting such a fast machine.

You are paying a high premium for the speed of this writer. If you do not use the high speed you have wasted your money. To use the highest speeds you may have to buy more expensive branded blank cds.

I use cheap cds because I'm constantly updating the archives, so just throw the old ones away. It's your choice.

Hi Audrey, Welcome to THE forum. I agree with Alec. I have a 24 speed Yamaha CD writer in my desktop PC and it will only write at 24 Speed, blank CDs, which are specifically manufactured for 24 speed use and marked as such. The ones I use most are 16 speed, which are generally available for around a Fiver or less, in packs of ten, including a Jewel case. The software which will probably be supplied with the recorder, should allow you to write at several speeds - usually 2, 4, 8, 12, 16 and 24 times. More important than very high speed is that the recorder has 'BURN proof' technology incorporated. This is a facility which prevents Buffer UnderRuN during the recording. If Buffer under run occurs, the recording process stops and the blank CD becomes unuseable. Most of the modern CD RW drives include this technology but it is worth checking.


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Willum

[This message has been edited by Bill Norrie (edited 04-09-2002).]

[This message has been edited by Bill Norrie (edited 04-09-2002).]

Thanks everyone for your replies. I might have known there would be 'snags' - there usually is.

Alright then, here's another question for you. In a well known catalogue the Philips CDR 775 and Pioneer PDR-W839 CD-R and CD-RWs are shown. Do you know anything about either or both of these?

I recently read somewhere that Sony are also working on a stand-alone CD-RW deck with people like us in mind, so I went to our local Sony shop but was told that they are constantly working on new ideas but at the moment there is something they are having problems with and therefore the young man didn't think it would be in the shops for quite some time.

Personally, I use Sony a great deal and if it means waiting for 'quality' then I'm willing to wait.

Be interested to know what you guys have to say though.

Aud

there are several Phillips, Marantz, and Pioneer stand alone audio cd recorders available from hi-fi shops which all give excellent results.
They are much better quality than your computer if you only have a basic soundcard, but not as flexible for editing after the recording, since you have to record to re-writable cd, rip to the pc, edit and then re-record on the pc writer, which all takes extra time. But they are all you need if just wanting to store your sequencer creations.

The Philips 775 is a double deck with record and playback decks built in. I have used a Pioneer 509 in the past, and this had a very good recording quality and was highly regarded for the price.

You should buy a copy of What Hi Fi and scour the advertisements for the best prices if you want to go down this route. The discounts vary a lot, particularly if a model has just been replaced.

But for the £250-350 you could get a pc writer and audio quality sound card, only trouble is this would be more fiddly to set up and use maybe? Also you would need an audio recording program on the pc.

Audrey, I checked with my dealer and he uses a Harmon-Kardon CDR-2 burner. While he swears by the ease of use of this unit, it only copies at a 2x-4x speed which is pretty slow. But, if speed isn't a problem, this unit plugs right into the keyboard, and will make a copy of the cd it burns. It can be found at Circuit City stores, or on the internet and will run between $400-$500. You might want to wait and see if the new kn7k comes out with a built-in cd-rw. That would solve a lot of problems.