Rating: 
Summary: Fatal Flaw
Review: I've used one for about 6 months, copying LP's onto CDRW's, which I would then carry over to my PC, edit and split the tracks, then burn a final CDR from there. For that purpose, this was a more than satisfactory deck.But then I encountered an absolutely atrocious design flaw. Eventually, everyone gets a bad or marginal burn. Problem: when you place a CD into this deck or power up the deck with a CD in it, it tries to read the basic CD/track info. During that time, the open/close button is disabled. The problem is that, if this initial read fails, the deck may reset and retry, and fail again, and THERE'S NO WAY TO STOP IT AND GET THE BAD CD OUT! A call to Koss' service confirmed that there is no way to suppress or interrupt this process. They could only suggest that I send it in for service. Now, as I said, sooner or later everyone does a bad burn. Every other CD/DVD deck I've ever used had SOME way to eject a bad CD.
This is an incredibly poor design and will, for many users, eventually be fatal.
Rating:
Summary: Stopped Working in 3 Months
Review: Me and a great buddy of mine went the same day to buy this item and both of our systems no longer worked after about 3 months, (actually my friend's system broke in 2mo) I will never purchase a KOSS product ever again.
Rating:
Summary: marie-vonne
Review: My girlfriend gave us the CDR 200 KOSS recorder for christmas
but we are unable to use it. It didn't have the manual. I need one. Can you help? If i have to pay i do not mind. Please advise.
Please find below my mailing address. Thanking you in anticipation.
Yours truly. MARIE-VONNE DE COMARMOND
4670 BOUCHETTE STREET
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
H3W 1C5
Rating: 
Summary: Troublesome but worth it
Review: My wife and I are professional musicians and own two of these units. We make our own CD's for demos and to sell at shows and have copied 100's of discs. These machines often work around the clock. They wre a great deal at $150.00 each, but I had to send back two that didn't work to end up with two good ones. They each have different quirks. For example, on one I can change the disc in one tray while the other is finalizing; on the other I can't. I also tried two of the RCA versions of this machine. Neither worked. In fact the drawers wouldn't open on one of the RCA's!
I am very grateful to the first reviewer. One of my Koss machines stopped working yesterday. I had to pick it up and shake it to get a tray to open! After reading the advice about Maxell discs, which I was using, I bought some Sony discs and now it is working again.
If you buy one of these machines test EVERY possible function including recording from all inputs as soon as you get it as the quality control is erratic.
As far as not being able to control the recording level is concerned, this is a problem when recording from analog sources such as tape and vinyl. I have to turn off my stereo speakers, crank the stereo amp to get a level, and then monitor with my wireless speakers from the Koss headphone output. These speakers have individual volume controls. You could also use headphones with a volume control or headphone mixer. I get excellent recordings this way.
All in all this machines are a great thing to own at the price, but it takes a few work arounds to use them successfully.
Rating: 
Summary: Great for the home music consumer
Review: Recently pruchased this unit without reading any reviews or actually having heard about it. Just saw it when I went into Best Buy store. For the price, excellent. So I took it. Flawless operation. Ease of use (once you can get through the instructions). Beautiful layout. Results excellent quality. Instructions could be a bit more user friendly e.g. the term "dubbing" and "make cd" needs to be explained more fully as they take on a different meaning when used with this product. Not for commercial use, but hey, for commercial use, buy a proper cd duplicator that can handle the quantity with speed.better still, take the user through start to finish, as examples. The remote control features is also excellent. Saves getting up and down from from the chair for minor corrections. I just hope that they do not discontinue this product. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: [stopped working] in 6 months
Review: This item is not particularly user friendly when it works. However, mine went south (B drive) after only 6 months. Then I realized that there is only a 90 day warranty, which is lousy. So Koss gets a resounding "Boo!!" from me.
Rating: 
Summary: Lost Manuals and Lost CDs
Review: To those of you who have lost your manual (myself included) you can find basic operating functions on the Koss-AV.com web site under FAQ's-Answers/CDR Recorders. (Note: This is not the Koss headphone website.) They have not yet posted the full manual on the website, however the info posted should help. My unit it worked quite well for a while and I was smiling like a number of the other happy reviewers who made their first recordings, until recently (of course the 90 day warranty has expired)when all seems to be failing. I, like an earlier reviewer had a disc in the unit when it was turned off and upon turning it back on it endlessly searched for the CD prohibiting opening the CD drawer (funny I didn't read this in the now lost manual, which by the way appears to have been written by someone whose first language is not English).I returned the unit to Best Buy where I purchased it (that was the second day after I bought it) and they got the CD out and gave me a new recorder (gut feeling at the time was to get my money back- funny about those gut feelings). Later this happened again with the replacement when the unit failed to read a disc. Frustrated, I got out my screwdriver out and got the CDs out myself. Not easy but can be done. Not a good design(note: before going for your tool box, try turning the recorder off and on completely-unplug it. This "might" reset the computer and then it "might" then read the discs. If this doesn't work then you have to go in with surgery or just toss the thing out). For some reason my recorder has over time become more and more unreliable in recording. It has recently failed almost every CD recording either rejecting the CD one time and then recording it the next after numerous attempts or recording and then failing to finalize the disc resulting in an unusable recording unless you want to listen to all your copies off the recorder. All electronics are subject to failure but this one seems to fail on its own accord when ever it pleases. I have not used other CD recorders but this one won't be my choice when I replace it which looks like it may be very soon.
Rating:
Summary: You need a good brand of blank Cd-Rs
Review: When we first got our KOSS CDR200, we were excited about the prospect of being able to record off the air and to transfer our old vinyls to CDs. However, we were initially disappointed with the failure rates of our audio CD-Rs. About half of them didn't work. After some research on the internet, we hypothesized that the brand of blank audio CD-Rs were to blame. At the web site www.cdrfaq.org, we discovered that the brand (Memorex) we were using were called "trashable." So we bought two good brands, TDK and Sony audio CD-Rs and so far, we have not had one single failure. You must realize that the failures we had went as far as to get stuck in the drawer (pull the plug and the plug it back in, you can get it out), failure to finalize, failure to be readable in any drive except the recording drawer, and sometimes not even that! After changing the brand, no problem! We are now glad we have this unit. Yes, a computer system could do better, but no system is better than the ease of use. Once you get used to reading and interpreting the instructions, it works great!
Rating:
Summary: Not worth it
Review: You might think I'm sour because mine just crapped out after 18 months (whereas I have the same amp and EQ I bought in 80 and 81, respectively....), but this just isn't worth the money. I bought the floor model, and every time I burned a CD, I wished I'd bought a more expensive model. First of all, it doesn't have a recording volume pot, so you have to run it through a tape deck or something that does, so you can balance mix CD's to a consistent volume (in other words, different things are ORIGINALLY recorded at different volumes, particularly LP's vs. CD's. When you put a song from each back to back, it's really bad, unless you can balance the incoming volume. Which you can't with this.) Also, even though the manual says you can do this, you can't make an exact copy of a CD. It ALWAYS puts a one second gap between cuts. So, if you're copying a symphony, there will always be a | break between movements. Or, heaven forbid you score a bootleg of a concert... Your only options are one 80 minute track, or lots of applause and cheering | and lots of applause and cheering bertween songs. Recording is cumbersome, as well, but I've already bored you enough. Finally, I almost always got "recovery" errrors... Don't know what they are, but it was disturbing. I made some GREAT CD's with this, and was excited to buy it, but, all in all, I was disappointed that I spent $150 on it, and will definitely pay more for better features, and more convenience.
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