Pioneer PDRW839 CD Recorder

Rating:
Summary: A PRETTY WISE PURCHASE
Review: AFTER CAREFULLY SHOPPING THE MARKET FOR THE RIGHT RECORDER, THIS PURCHASE WAS A GREAT ONE. THE UNIT SOUNDS EXTREMELY WELL AND HAS ENOUGH FEATURES TO SATISFY ME. THE ONLY REAL FLAW THAT I COULD FIND IN THIS UNIT IS THAT I WAS UNABLE TO USE THE REMOTE TO CONTROL THE POWER, BESIDES THAT , I FLAT OUT LOVE IT.

Rating:
Summary: PDR-W839 RIP-OFF
Review: I PURCHASED A SUPPOSEDLY REFURBISHED UNIT THROUGH AMAZON.COM. IF YOU SEE ANY REFURBISHED ITEM COMING FROM YAN SHEN STAY AWAY FROM IT. IT WILL BE A PIECE OF CRAP AND WHEN YOU TRY TO RETURN IT YOU WILL GET SOME EXCUSE ABOUT REMOVING A LABEL OR A LABEL IS BROKEN AND THEN REFUSAL TO RETURN YOUR MONEY. A WORD TO THE WISE DON'T PURCHASE ANYTHING COMING FROM YAN SHEN IN SKILLMAN NEW JERSEY!

Rating:
Summary: A trooper
Review: I started with a couple Philips burner decks and they were horrible, but that's another story. I demanded my money back from the Philips purchase and opted for the 839. I record all the time and this thing just keeps ticking. It even fixed some burns that the Philips screwed up! I got the extended warranty, which I would recommend on any device like this. So far the things that have gone wrong have been relatively minor: 1) sometimes when I'm finalizing a disc and it gets to 00:00, the disc just keeps spinning. I need to shut the unit off and turn it back on, but the burn is fine. 2) sometimes the remote will just stop responding, which is necessary for functions such as programming! Both these problems are intermittent and I've sent the unit out for repair, but of course they couldn't find anything wrong with it. She may be slow, ugly, and clunky, but she gets the job done!!

Rating:
Summary: A trooper
Review: I started with a couple Philips burner decks and they were horrible, but that's another story. I demanded my money back from the Philips purchase and opted for the 839. I record all the time and this thing just keeps ticking. It even fixed some burns that the Philips screwed up! I got the extended warranty, which I would recommend on any device like this. So far the things that have gone wrong have been relatively minor: 1) sometimes when I'm finalizing a disc and it gets to 00:00, the disc just keeps spinning. I need to shut the unit off and turn it back on, but the burn is fine. 2) sometimes the remote will just stop responding, which is necessary for functions such as programming! Both these problems are intermittent and I've sent the unit out for repair, but of course they couldn't find anything wrong with it. She may be slow, ugly, and clunky, but she gets the job done!!

Rating:
Summary: "Very Good", but not "Excellent" as it could have been
Review: I've owned one of these for a few months and recorded over 100 CD's on it. Things I like most about it are: quality of recorded audio, general ease of use, synchro recording features, CD-Text facility with keyboard input and sample rate conversion for recording from other digital sources like DAT. The user manual is very well written and easy to understand.

There are some minor annoyances which may not matter to you: the keyboard input (on mine and 2 other machines I've tried, with a variety of keyboards) is patchy (misses keystrokes, gets stuck on upper case, etc) and the machine will not copy CD-Text from one disc to another (a really basic omission).

The changer mechanism can be a bit awkward to use (disc 3 sits deeep in the tray and is fiddly to get out), and it's rather slow to change discs - these are not faults, just things to be aware of.

Overall, I'm happy with the Pioneer, especially when compared to other machines I looked at, but it wouldn't have taken much extra effort for Pioneer to produce a machine that was "excellent" and not just "very good".