HHB CDR800
A professional CD recorder that promised "CD recorders just became affordable" - and, for a while, meant it.
Overview
The pitch was blunt, and it ran in the trade press for months. Sound on Sound (1997, p.153) carried HHB's own advertisement declaring that "CD recorders just became affordable," with the CDR800 listed at £1299 in the UK. The same campaign turned up in Mix (September 1997, p.73) and again in Mix (December 1997, p.128). Each ad made the same promise: professional CD recording without the corner-cutting HHB insisted its rivals were guilty of. The ads are the loudest surviving trace of the machine. This was a working tool sold to studios and broadcasters, not a hi-fi ornament, and HHB bought space in the magazines its buyers actually read.
What the money bought was a rack-mounting CD recorder built around a copper chassis. HHB's literature made a point of that copper. The company described it as the basis of a solid, protective housing that screens the electronics against interference. Whether or not you credit copper with audible benefits, the CDR800 was specified like lab equipment. It had balanced XLR analog inputs alongside unbalanced RCA ins and outs, an AES/EBU digital input, and both coaxial and optical S/PDIF digital I/O. A studio could drop it into a rack and wire it to whatever was already there, balanced or not.
The heart of the thing, for anyone transferring masters, was the sample rate converter. It accepts any incoming frequency from 32 kHz to 48 kHz and converts it to the CD-standard 44.1 kHz on the fly. HHB's AES/NAB product notice described the SRC as instantly recognizing rates across that 32–48 kHz window, which made direct digital copying from DAT masters and other digital formats a simple matter of connecting a cable rather than chasing clock settings. For a post house or a mastering room in the late 1990s, that single feature was often the difference between a recorder that fit the workflow and one that fought it.
There are five recording modes: one-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 rather than where an engineer remembers to press a button. Skip-ID settings can be written to the disc, and DAT, MD, and CD IDs can be copied along with the audio. That saves re-typing every index when you're archiving a shelf of DATs. A full infrared remote was included.
The performance claim was a total harmonic distortion figure of less than 0.005%, which HHB attributed to high-quality components throughout. It's a distortion spec, not a noise or dynamic-range figure. It tells you the converter and analog stages were clean, not that the machine was exotic.
Pricing is where the record gets murky. The UK advertising put the CDR800 at £1299 in late 1997. In the US, dealer listings quoted a manufacturer's list that moved around: one distributor sheet shows $2,195.00, another shows $1,795.00 for the same model. The gap is large enough that it likely reflects different dates or different bundles rather than a typo, but the sources don't say which, so treat any "original price" claim with suspicion. The machine was sold through pro-audio dealers such as BSW and Bradley rather than consumer hi-fi shops. It shared shelf space in those catalogs with the Fostex CR-200, which was listed at $2,195.00 while the CDR800 appeared at $1,795.00 in the same catalog.
The target buyer, per HHB's own dealer copy, was someone with demos or masters sitting on tape who would rather press them to CD than dub them to cassette. The copy cheerfully noted that blank CDs were by then cheaper than cassettes. The recorder also offered a choice of pro or consumer (write-protected) CD formats, which mattered for anyone sending a reference disc to an A&R contact or selling discs at a gig.
The CDR800 also appears in HHB's AES/NAB show coverage alongside the company's PDR1000 DAT recorder. HHB is noted there as carrying a full line of recordable media across DAT, CD-R, MiniDisc, MO, DTRS, and ADAT formats.
A CD recorder from 1997 depends on blank media, and the supply of CD-R discs that these machines will actually accept is not what it was. The fact sheet offers nothing on disc compatibility, so no claims are made here about which blanks work. The copper chassis and professional I/O are genuine, the sample rate conversion is useful for anyone with a drawer of DAT masters, and the distortion figure is respectable.
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