Teac AD-500
A $389 combo deck that promised "professional performance without the high-end price tag" - and meant it.
Overview
The AD-500 is a CD player and cassette deck sharing one chassis. Distributor literature of the period describes it plainly as "an affordable source machine featuring a consumer tape deck and CD player in one unit," and the numbers back that up: the manufacturer's list price was $389.00. It was not meant for the listening room. It went in the rack in the back of the room, and its job was to play a CD, dub it to a cassette, and keep doing that all day.
The cassette half is a two-head design with bi-directional record and playback, so it auto-reverses in both modes. It also has pitch control. The CD side gets a multifunction display, random memory programming, a three-way repeat function, and timer play. There is a headphone jack on the front, and the rear panel has unbalanced RCA inputs and outputs. A full-function remote control comes with it.
The AD-500 earns its keep through the integration. It offers continuous play in both directions, CD to tape and tape to CD, plus CD sync dubbing, so a disc can be transferred to cassette without babysitting the transport. That is the reason a machine like this exists. It moves material between the two formats without a patchbay and a second pair of hands.
Teac positioned the AD-500 as the value entry in its Rack Mount Series, alongside the CD-P1120 and CD-P1440 CD players and the W-790R and W-860R double auto-reverse cassette decks. The same distributor catalog that listed the AD-500 at $389 also carried the Tascam CD-A700 at $629, discounted to $525. The CD-A700 is a close relative with balanced XLR outputs and independent pitch controls. The AD-500's own rack kit, the RM510, was a separate $29 option. The rack mount hardware was not included with the deck.
That price gap shows the compromises. The AD-500 gives up the XLR connections and the separate pitch controls of the CD-A700 and keeps unbalanced RCA I/O only. As Studio Sound (December 1992, p.54) noted, the AD-500's internal clock slaves to incoming sources with a flywheel effect that reduces clock jitter while maintaining synchronisation. For a home rack or a small studio running short unbalanced runs, that is a non-issue. Anyone expecting the Tascam's flexibility won't find it. The company's own catalog copy for the Rack Mount Series pitched "professional performance and features, without the high-end price tag," and you were buying the second half of that sentence.
By the end of the decade the street price had softened considerably. A 2000 dealer listing shows the AD-500 at $249, down from the original $389 list. The same listing still described it as a "CD Player/Cassette Recorder Combo" with cassette auto-reverse record/play and pitch control, which is the feature set the catalogs had promised years earlier. The machine hadn't changed.
The AD-500 makes no claim to audiophile credibility. It is a consumer-grade transport and a two-head cassette mechanism in a rack-friendly box, built to a price that undercut its own stablemate by more than two hundred dollars. For a home archive project, a small production room, or anyone digitizing a cassette collection with a CD burner downstream, that combination is useful.
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