HHB CDR850
A broadcast-grade CD recorder with balanced XLR, AES/EBU, and a price that undercut the pro market.
Overview
HHB sold the CDR850 as a professional machine, not a consumer toy, and the spec sheet backs that up. HHB's own advertising made the pitch bluntly: one look at the back panel, the copy went, and it's easy to see why the CDR850 leaves other CD recorders "where they belong: in the bedroom." That line ran across the trade press in 1999. Mix (September 1999, p.137) and EQ (October 1999, p.159) both carried the same spread. This was a deck for the studio rack and the broadcast booth, and the connectivity is where that ambition lives.
The rear panel carried balanced XLR analog inputs and outputs, unbalanced RCA phono connections, an AES/EBU digital input, and coaxial and optical S/PDIF digital I/O. There was also a parallel remote control port. For a facility wiring a CD recorder into a console and a digital chain, that's the full complement in one box - no outboard converters, no adapter cables. HHB's marketing leaned hard on the point: the CDR850's "comprehensive connectivity," as the ad copy put it, "perfectly complements its class leading sound quality and ease of use."
On the media side, the CDR850 recorded to both write-once CD-R and the then-new rewritable CD-RW discs. In 1999 CD-RW compatibility was still a selling point rather than an assumption. The drive offered four one-touch recording modes, two manual and two automatic, plus fade in/fade out, auto pause, and an auto finalize function. Erasing CD-RW media wasn't all-or-nothing. HHB built in four levels of erase, which is handy when you're reusing a disc for a session scratch rather than archiving a master.
The digital side is where the CDR850 separated itself from the pack. A switchable sample rate converter accepted any digital signal from 32kHz to 48kHz, including varispeed sources, so a deck running slightly off-speed still fed the recorder cleanly. The unit would copy track starts from CD, DAT, MD, DVD, and DCC sources, which meant it could index a compilation automatically instead of making the operator punch in every ID by hand. And SCMS, the Serial Copy Management System that normally locks down digital-to-digital dubbing, was under complete user control. For professional work that last point was close to essential. Anyone who'd fought a consumer deck's copy-protection flags would have been glad of it.
The front panel kept everything accessible through an on-screen menu, and the display was an easy-to-read LED type. A level margin indicator, reading in 1 dB increments, gave operators a precise view of headroom. An infrared remote control rounded out the package. HHB positioned the CDR850 as delivering the company's known sound quality "at a lower price than previous models."
The flagship of HHB's own lineup was the CDR850PLUS. The PLUS variant added a Word Clock input, essential per HHB's literature for playback when locking to a master clock source in an all-digital system. It also added a balanced AES/EBU digital output that carried track ID information. A set of rear-panel DIP switches let the PLUS reference its master clock through the word-clock input, the AES/EBU input, the coaxial and optical S/PDIF inputs, or its own internal clock. HHB's trade advertising in Mix (March 1999, p.77) framed the whole line as having "changed the rules" on what a fully loaded professional CD recorder should cost. The pricing bore that out: the CDR850 carried a manufacturer's list of $1,350 but sold for $995, while the CDR850PLUS held at $1,255 against the same $1,350 list. A third model, the CDR830, sat below both at a $795 list and $695 street, with unbalanced RCA analog inputs and a simpler feature set. It's a different machine, and owners chasing CDR850 performance shouldn't confuse the two.
What the CDR850 represents, two decades on, is a snapshot of a very specific moment: the point at which CD recording became genuinely affordable for professional rooms. The feature list reads like a checklist of everything a working engineer needed in 1999 — balanced I/O, sample rate conversion, SCMS defeat, CD-RW, auto indexing — and HHB delivered it in a single rack unit at a price that undercut the established pro market. Whether it's the right deck for a modern collector depends on what you want it for. As a piece of broadcast history, with its XLR-laden back panel and its front-panel menu system, it's a satisfying artifact. As a working CD recorder, it does exactly what the advertising promised: it takes whatever you feed it and burns a disc without drama.