BURNING down the house: HOME recorders are HERE - CD recording equipment

Emedia Professional, May, 1999 by Robert A. Starrett

a home burner is not an arsonist, of course, although it might light a fire under the RIAA and other music industry associations. A home burner, or home recorder, is a general term used to describe a newly popular, but not new, CD recording device. These devices, available from Pioneer, Marantz, and Philips are now showing a surge in popularity, mainly due to aggressive pricing by Philips. Home recorders, which are the size of stereo components and integrate neatly into your stereo system, have been around for several years, although, like early CD recorders, they were out of reach for most of us because of their high cost. Few retail stores had them on the shelf; they were only available from specialty audio shops and through special order.

Today, you will likely see the Philips models, the CDR560S, CDR760, CDR765 dual-tray recorder and CDR880, gracing the shelves of your local electronics superstore, with prices as low as $499--not too far off the price of a computer recorder a year and a half ago. Pioneer makes the PDR04 and PDR05, Marantz the DR-700 at a suggested retail price of $849.99. These recorders, like consumer DAT decks, include SCMS--or Serial Copy Management System--as required by the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992.

SCMS is a copy protection system which allows you to make a copy of a digital original, such as a disc or a DAT, but does not allow the copy to be digitally copied, although it can be copied in analog form. This system is meant to prevent someone from making a copy, passing it on to another, and having that copy copied, and so on, ultimately resulting in multiple copies of a work, each digitally identical. The result of this of course is, presumably, lost sales of the retail version of the work.

To allow for payment of a single-copy tariff and prevent further copying, special media is required in these recorders. This media is sometimes referred to as music-only media or as CD-R-DA (Compact Disc-Recordable-Digital Audio) or CD-RW-DA (Compact Disc-ReWritable-Digital Audio) media. Not only can the copies not be copied, but the AHRA provides that the media used in these devices and the devices themselves are subject to a royalty upon manufacture or importation. These royalties are, through a rather convoluted process, split up between various agencies and companies to compensate them for the lost sales due to home recording.

Nobody has kicked too much about this arrangement in the past, possibly because the royalties are rather small (depending on your viewpoint, of course), because DAT never took off in the consumer market, because Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) from Philips was stillborn, and because most people could not afford, or were not aware of, the existence of CD home recorders.

This new lower pricing is a boon to consumers, but raises some issues that have remained dormant until now. Low-priced home recorders with SCMS, royalties paid on each recorder and piece of music-only media make everybody happy, right? Well, not quite. The RIAA has in the past expressed its dissatisfaction with the amount of royalties called for under the AHRA; they only agreed to it because it was the best they could get. And, of course, not everyone is paying the six to ten dollar price for music-only media. Some enterprising fellow figured out that on certain home recorder models, you could insert a music-only disc, let the machine register it and then manually open the tray, drop in a buck's worth of standard media, close the tray, and there goes the royalty.

Another issue that may soon come front and center is increased affordability of "professional" recorders. The AHRA specifically exempts professional equipment from its regulation--that is, professional equipment need not have the SCMS protection and thus need not use music-only discs. This is fine, because professionals need to be able to control SCMS when they are producing discs. But now, several professional or "semiprofessional" recorders are available and affordable. TEAC's professional division, Tascam, offers the CD-RW5000, a "professional" model which uses standard CD-R and RW media and can be had for a mere $929. It would not take many discs to make up the difference between the cost of the 5000 and the cost of a Philips 880 at $599. At a $5 price differential, 66 discs would do it.

England's HHB now offers the CDR850, also able to use regular, that is, non-consumer media in both the CD-R and CD-RW formats. Designated an entry-level studio CD recorder, the 850 is more expensive at $1,299, but once again, how many discs would it take to make up the difference? You can do the math.

The real bargain is here, however. Marantz offers the CDR630, which can be had for $850. Dubbed a "semiprofessional" machine, it will write to standard media as well as the more expensive music-only media. This time I'll do the math. If you could buy a Philips SCMS home recorder for $600, or the Marantz at $850, how many discs would it take you to burn the $250 price difference? Fifty discs.