In examining any piece of equipment, it's important not to just look over the features and specs, but to also consider what the value is to the user. In a recent DPS feature, "Mixdown Tools: What are we using and why," the changing realm or at least reevaluation of mixdown formats is dealt with in depth. As the quality and durability of CD recorders reaches professional status, it's reasonable to consider one as your primary mixdown deck.

I've never used a standalone CD recorder, but I do own a DAT and have an internal CD burner on my PC. Most of my mixes have been done on 1/2" analog tape and DAT. When I pulled the CDR1000 out of the box, however, I knew I wanted to keep it and started immediately justifying. It's a handsome piece of equipment, and, well, I do need a new cassette deck anyway. Cassettes are still useful for examining a mix in the Jeep (unless you have a CD player in your car), but I thought how nice it would be to instead run off a mix onto CD at the end of a session. This evaluation, however, just scratches the surface of the CDR1000's usability.

Yamaha CDR1000 (click for larger image)

CDR1000 Nuts & Bolts
The CDR1000 is a rackmountable, standalone CD recorder, able to record on a wide variety of either CD-R or CD-RW disks. Recording onto CD-R allows you to start, stop, pause and essentially continue recording on a disk until you decide to "finalize" the recording. CD-RWs do the same, along with last track erase, disk erase and initialize erase capabilities. Finalizing writes the TOC to the disk, which allows for playback on a standard CD player. Until then, CDs that you're recording on can only be played on a CD recorder.

The I/O options are AES/EBU and coaxial S/PDIF for digital input and output, with a wordclock input that is associated only to AES/EBU operation. Balanced analog ins and outs on XLR connectors are switchable between +4 and -10dB line levels. Analog operation utilizes 20-bit, 64x oversampling A/D converters and 20 bit 128x oversampling D/A. I know that some of you will scream, "20 bit!! Why not 24??" (even a recent reviewer did). Hey, we're going to 16 bit here, folks. We're not going to get 24 bits out of the machine. We're trying to resolve the higher bit rate.

And speaking of resolving the higher bit rate, the CDR1000 waves the sonic performance banner with Apogee's UV22. With the UV22 technology, bit widths up to 24 bits can be resolved to the 16-bit CD standard. Apogee's UV22 has been heralded as surpassing any dithering or noise shaping that currently exists. Together with real time sample-rate conversions from 30 kHz to 50 kHz rates, you can go right to CD from a variety of recording formats.

Why 30 to 50, and not just 44.1 and 48? Sampling rates can change with variable speed or pitch functions on digital multitracks and some computer software-based multitracks. This means that you can stay digital even with odd sampling rates and wind up with the CD standard 44.1 kHz. But I digress. Back to the recorder.

All controls are accessible from the front panel, except for the analog in -10/+4 switch, which is on the back. Standard transport controls, erase and finalize buttons and analog record level controls (left and right in a dual concentric rotary fashion) are all intuitive, as are the track and index number increment/decrement and high-speed cue (search) forward/backward buttons. Headphone jack and level control, power switch and a foot switch jack (start/stop record) are all on the front panel. Twelve function buttons handle the rest of the duties, such as input select (Coaxial, AES/EBU, or analog), time display choices, UV22 on/off, auto ID or manual (manual includes index# increment) and meter display toggle between peak and peak hold. The display area gives a nice, clear readout of time, mode status, track and index numbers and meter levels. You can also set the unit to loop playback between an A and a B point via the function buttons.

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