HHB CDR-800
A rack-mount pro CD recorder with a copper chassis and a built-in sample-rate converter, priced low enough to worry the majors.
Overview
There was a time when burning a CD meant booking time on a machine that cost more than a house. Mix (June 1998, p.172) gave the numbers: a decade before the CDR-800, the only CD recorder on the market ran about $70,000, and a blank disc, if you could find one, cost roughly $350. HHB's pitch with this deck was blunt: CD recorders just became affordable. The manufacturer's own advertising billed it as "the world's first affordable pro quality CD recorder," and by the company's account thousands of the units went into daily service in studios, broadcast racks and mastering rooms.
The price is messy, because the CDR-800 shows up in distributor listings at more than one figure. One BSW catalog page lists a manufacturer's list of $2,195.00. Another page in the same distributor's material carries $1,795.00 for the same model. Treat both as documented list figures from the period rather than assuming one is a typo. Dealer pricing moved, and catalogs were reprinted. Either way, it sat well under the professional CD recorders that surrounded it in those same catalogs.
The deck is a rack-mounting unit built around a copper chassis. HHB made a point of the copper as screening against electronic interference, and the distributor copy describes a solid, protective housing rather than a stamped-steel one. The converter spec is the one that mattered to working engineers: total harmonic distortion of less than 0.005%.
The connectivity is what earns the "professional" label. Balanced XLR analog inputs sit alongside unbalanced RCA analog in/out, an AES/EBU digital input, and S/PDIF optical and coaxial digital in/out. That meant the deck could drop into a studio's balanced patchbay without a pile of adapters, then hand off a coaxial or optical feed to whatever came next. Mix (June 1998, p.172) walked through the front-panel display in its field test: elapsed time, time remaining, total time, and the time needed to finalize a disc by writing its table of contents. It also noted that discs could be pulled at any point and added to later, as long as they hadn't been finalized.
The sample-rate converter is the best part of the deck. It accepts any frequency from 32 kHz to 48 kHz and converts to the CD-standard 44.1 kHz, which made direct digital dubbing from DAT masters and other digital formats painless. EQ (February 1998, p.136) noted that the built-in converter is bypassed when the deck is already receiving a 44.1 kHz data stream, so the signal stays digital and untouched. For anyone pulling masters off a DAT machine running at 48 kHz, that converter was the whole reason to buy it.
The record modes show some thought about how people actually work. There are five: 1-Track Digital Synchro, All-Track Digital Synchro, Auto-ID Digital Synchro, Manual Digital and Manual Analog. The synchro modes trigger off incoming audio, so track IDs land where the music does instead of where your finger does. Skip-ID settings can be written to the disc, and DAT, MD and CD IDs can be copied along with the audio. That saves a tedious re-typing session when you're archiving a stack of DATs. A full infrared remote is included.
According to the distributor literature, the deck also records in either pro or consumer (write-protected) CD formats. HHB's own ad copy from the period leans hard on reliability and build quality as the reasons customers kept coming back, and the company was handing out packs of ten CDR74 Gold blank discs with each purchase. The "#1 in CD recording" headline is advertising, but the field-test coverage in the trade press suggests the deck was in wide professional use.
By the late 1990s the CDR-800 turns up in studio gear lists. One published studio profile from the era lists it among the recorders in a working facility's rack. The caveats are the usual ones for first-generation affordable CD-R hardware: it's a write-once machine tied to CD-R media, and its usefulness depends on a working transport and a supply of discs. Original list prices varied by catalog, so provenance matters more than a single number when valuing one.
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