Tascam CD-RW5000
A rack-mount CD recorder that reads and writes nearly every disc format you could hand it, with balanced XLR I/O and a wired remote.
Overview
The CD-RW5000 is a rack-mountable compact disc recorder. What sets it apart from the flood of consumer CD burners that arrived around the turn of the millennium is the I/O. Tascam's own product literature for the machine lists balanced XLR analog inputs and outputs alongside unbalanced RCA jacks, plus an AES/EBU digital input and S/PDIF digital I/O in both coaxial and optical flavors. That is a broadcast-and-studio connector set, not a hi-fi one. The balanced XLRs give it away. This deck was built to sit in a professional signal chain, patched into a console or a rack of outboard gear, not next to a bookshelf stereo.
The media support is the other headline. The CD-RW5000 reads and writes CD, CD-R, CD-RW, CD-R-DA, and CD-RW-DA. The "-DA" suffix denotes the audio-only disc variants that consumer standalone recorders of the era were locked into. This deck handles both the data-style and audio-style media, so it was designed to be flexible about what you fed it. Tascam's catalog copy described it as recording on "nearly any CD media including economical CD-R and CD-RW formats." CD-RW was the reusable option, and a studio that wanted to rehearse a master before committing to a one-way CD-R cared about that.
The feature list is long and practical. There is a sample rate converter, so digital sources arriving at something other than the CD-standard 44.1 kHz can be brought into line without an outboard box. There is a Sync Start function that can be set to trigger on all tracks or a single track. Track increment can be set to auto or manual. The erase function works on either a whole disc or a single track, which is the reason to buy a rewritable deck in the first place. Repeat play is on board. Output level trim control lets you match the deck to whatever it's feeding. And there is a wired remote control, which in a rack-mounted installation is less of a luxury than it sounds.
Tascam made a point of the control surface. The company's advertising described "familiar controls" that make CD burning "as easy as pressing the record button," and the marketing also touted "flexible control over the recording of Start ID messages," the track markers that let you navigate a disc. There is also parallel control I/O capability, the pro-installation feature that lets the deck be triggered from an external controller or automation system rather than by hand.
The price, per Tascam's own retail literature, was $1,299. That put it well above the consumer CD recorders of the period and squarely in the territory of a working studio or broadcast facility. The company's catalog was blunt about the intended buyer: "the most advanced dedicated CD burner you can buy," aimed at "professional, project and personal studios." That is marketing copy, and it should be read as such. The connector set and the media support do back it up.
Period evidence of real-world uptake is thin. Studio Sound (February 1999, p.83) ran a Tascam advertisement quoting Mark Thom, engineering manager at Classic FM, saying the station saw the CD-RW5000 at the SBES show and ordered seven of them for its new digital broadcast studios, citing straightforward operation in a broadcast production environment. Seven units is not a casual purchase. The same quote reappeared in Studio Sound (March 1999, p.124), so Tascam was evidently pushing the broadcast endorsement hard in its trade advertising that spring.
What the record does not give us is the deeper technical picture. Frequency response, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, converter bit depth, dimensions, weight — none of that is documented in the material available here, and it would be a mistake to fill those blanks from memory or from the specs of a sibling model. The CD-RW5000's story, as far as the surviving sources tell it, is a story about format flexibility, professional connectivity, and a $1,299 price tag aimed at people who recorded for a living.
Collectors and users chasing one today should go in with clear expectations. The deck is a format-flexible, well-connected CD recorder from the era when standalone CD burning was still a specialist task, and its value lies in the XLR I/O and the AES/EBU input more than in any audiophile claim. Whether a given unit still writes reliably to modern media, and what maintenance it needs, is not documented in the sources here — those are questions for the unit in front of you, not for the archive.
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