Ricoh RS-1060C
A sturdy, quiet CD-R drive that did everything asked of it except the one thing musicians actually needed.
Overview
The RS-1060C is a 2x CD reader/writer in a case just under a square foot in footprint. It's the compact, stackable kind of enclosure that earned the nickname "zero footprint" because it tucked beneath the early compact Macs. It reads and writes at double speed over SCSI. It has a headphone jack, a volume control, RCA analog outputs, and a user-selectable SCSI ID. Ricoh finished it in beige, and the build quality is the first thing anyone notices. Reviewers called it sturdy and well-constructed, more solid than the cheaper plastic-shelled competitors.
It's quiet, too. In a four-drive comparison, the RS-1060C made far less fan noise than the other three units tested, which matters if the drive sits on a desk next to a microphone. Mix (December 1995, p.157) field-tested the unit in a Quadra 650 with a 270MB internal drive, a 2GB external hard disk, and 24 MB of RAM. Audio went through a Digidesign AudioMedia II card running Sound Designer. Setup was uneventful, and the bundled CD-Print software installed without fuss.
The software bundle is where the trouble starts. The RS-1060C is a track-at-once recorder, so it cannot write a disc in a single pass. For data backup and one-off demo discs, that's fine. For an audio master, it means fixed two-second gaps between every track, with no way to shorten them. The workaround is padding the tail of a track with digital silence, but that only makes gaps longer, never shorter. The drive also tops out at 76 individual tracks, not the 99 a disc can hold. It does not support track begin and end offsets, the padding that keeps the first fraction of a second from vanishing when a disc is played in shuffle mode. The bundled CD-Print software adds to the problem. It gives only basic control over audio masters, offers no track-index creation, and requires each song to live in its own sound file. There's no dumping a DAT tape into one large file and slicing it into tracks afterward.
The front panel drew criticism as well. There's a single multifunction LED, green when powered and idle, yellow when reading or writing. Reviewers wanted separate read and write indicators, since aborting a write mid-process can ruin the blank and the computer's software isn't always clear about what's happening. Mix (December 1995, p.158) also found that version 1.1.1 of CD-Print wouldn't recognize Sound Designer II files, so a conversion step was needed before any audio CD could be cut. The drive is supported by Digidesign's MasterList CD, but it doesn't appear on Digidesign's recommended list.
Interoperability had its wrinkles. In testing, discs created on a Pinnacle CD-R drive could not be mounted by the Ricoh. One MasterList CD session failed on a piece of Ricoh's own media, but that was an isolated incident that couldn't be repeated. Ricoh manufactures its own discs, and the box includes two blanks, with four more sent after product registration.
The verdict from the period press was blunt. Mix (December 1995, p.7) ran the RS-1060C as a Field Test feature and concluded that it could not be recommended for CD premastering. It works as advertised and is useful for demos and backup tasks, but the track-at-once limitation makes it a poor choice for musicians cutting audio masters. Reviewers pointed readers toward Ricoh's own forthcoming RO-1420C, which added disc-at-once, running OPC laser-power adjustment, 4x reading, and 2MB or 4MB buffers.
The RS-1060C arrived when CD-R writing dropped below $1,500 and became a desktop possibility rather than a studio luxury. It was one of the few external, cross-platform drives that met that bar when the comparison was assembled.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.