Uher CR 240

Six pounds of West German field recorder that NBC's foreign correspondents trusted from Biafra to Bangladesh, and that one British reviewer wanted thrown back in the box.

Overview

The CR 240 is a portable stereo cassette recorder built for field use. Uher's own documentation lays out the intent plainly. It has mic and aux inputs, a headphone jack, and an accessory socket for remote control, all in a machine small enough to carry to a story. It runs from six dry cells, a rechargeable battery, a 12V car battery, or 115/230V AC. That helps when you're recording somewhere the mains supply is a rumor. The published frequency response is 30Hz to 16kHz, and signal-to-noise is stated as better than 65 dB with Dolby engaged. The tape selector has three positions. Twin illuminated level meters span -20 to +3 dB for both record and playback, with LED indicators for record, start, and stop, and there's a built-in condenser mic. Uher's listed price was $780.

Compactness is the whole point, and every contemporary account comes back to it. AV Distributors, one of the big London Uher agents, ran a long series of advertisements through 1978 and 1979 billing the CR 240 as a stereo Dolby portable weighing as little as six pounds, priced at £299 plus VAT. That sat well below what the same dealer network charged in its service listings, where Photo Acoustics quoted £370. Uher's own general manager, Roy L. Campbell, wrote to Studio Sound (April 1979, p.43) to clarify the design brief. The CR 240 was never meant to replace something like the Sony TC150. It was meant to deliver the highest-quality stereo recording in the smallest and most convenient form Uher could manage. It's a field machine that happens to be a cassette deck, not a home deck that happens to be portable.

According to the people who actually used it, the CR 240 is not intuitive. Studio Sound (January 1979, p.80) ran an operational assessment that drew a startling volume of reader mail. The April 1979 letters page is essentially a CR 240 symposium, and not a friendly one. One reviewer complained about the cassette loading mechanism, battery security, and general complexity. That prompted a response from F.J. Kennedy of NBC News Worldwide, who had spent 22 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent and had used the earlier Uher 134 and Uher 210 in conflict zones from Biafra to Bangladesh and from Sapporo to South Africa. Kennedy reported never once having a battery fall out during on-scene radio work. He noted with some satisfaction that the same review still concluded the recorder "performed brilliantly" and the quality was "perfect." Campbell's letter was more surgical. The batteries cannot fall out while the machine is in its case, and the cassette loading mechanism is essential to the compact size. The controls labeled Dolby, Tape Selection, and Level are not actually cryptic, he said. The reviewer simply hadn't opened the instruction book, which would also have revealed the lamp that illuminates the cassette well in low light. A third correspondent pointed out that the CR 240 runs from mains, 12V car supply, a ten-hour rechargeable accumulator, or dry cells, so dismissing it as battery-only missed the point entirely.

The CR 240 rewards familiarity and punishes impatience. The people who lived with it, meaning correspondents, field reporters, and the general manager who signed off on its design, describe a tool that does a difficult job in a small package. The people who met it for an afternoon describe a fiddly box with a strange loading mechanism.

The spec sheet shows where it sits in the market. A comparison table in Audio-Collection (p.99) lists the CR 240 alongside the CR 210 and the CG 330 and CG 350. It shows the CR 240 as the one with battery or mains power, a three-position selector covering LH, Cr, and FeCr tape, peak-reading meters, and Dolby noise reduction. That is the fullest feature set in that group. The FeCr position is a period detail. Ferrochrome tape was a short-lived format, and a deck that supports it dates itself precisely. The twin peak meters rather than VU meters are the other tell. Peak reading suits unpredictable field levels better than an averaging needle.

The CR 240 turns up in the dealer listings of the era at wildly different prices depending on the year and the shop, from £276 to £370 in the Photo Acoustics cash lists alone, and the AV model variant carried its own price. The machine's reputation rests on its portability and its recording quality rather than on ease of service. The letters page raises hum levels on external power as an open question that Uher's own people did not directly rebut. Campbell corrected the battery and control complaints but stayed silent on hum. A CR 240 today suits someone who wants a genuine cassette-era field recorder and is willing to learn its controls properly. The lamp is in the manual.

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• Uher CR 210
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