SURVEYING THE SOUNDSCAPE.

Acting Recordingly: I promised myself that I'd lay off the topic of audio CD recorders for a while. But things keep happening that remind me what an excellent addition a CD recorder can be to any person's system, particularly the dual-tray version that can run a dub directly from a CD in one carrier to a recordable blank in the other.

A major CD recording moment came along with a reunion of my Peace Corps training group. A couple of us had brought back lots of LPs and 45s from our sojourn in Peru many years ago and the idea of putting some of that music on CDs came up. People's first thoughts were of computers and CD-ROM burners. But I said, "Just send the records to me. An audio CD recorder is the way to go." I ended up producing enough CDs for each person to get one as a souvenir of the occasion.

Recording nearly 30 CDs directly from the LPs and 45s would have been a terrible chore, so I made a master using a rewritable CD blank. Bad things can happen during vinyl playback: a bump, a skip, a stuck groove, a pop from an easily removable bit of crud, a missed track break. Any of these events will ruin a nonrewritable disc, wasting a bit of cash and a lot of time.

Consequently, I always use the more forgiving erasable blanks for recording from vinyl, dubbing the result onto a regular blank. Then I erase the master so I can reuse it for my next recording project.

It's the dual-tray design of my CD recorder that makes this process of mastering on rewritable discs workable. My regular CD playback deck cannot play CDs made on rewritable blanks. Your CD player probably won't either. We need that second tray in a CD recorder to play back and dub those kinds of masters. That's also the reason for using the rewritable master to make a standard CD dub. Otherwise, the recording simply won't work with the vast majority of home, car, and portable CD players.

And forget about most DVD players in any case. Unless the player has uses separate pickups for audio disc and video disc play, it's unlikely to be able to get music from a home recorded CD, rewritable or not. I trust this bit of foolish incompatibility will be eliminated in the next generation of DVD players.

Another good feature of the dual-tray CD recorders is that CD- to-CD dubbing takes place internally, and at double speed, to boot. So you can listen to a CD on your main player, to an LP, FM broadcast, or any other source while doing the dubs. You can even leave the main system turned off if the recorder is plugged into its own power outlet.