Philips CDR 770 Best Left on the Shelf
Written: Feb 06 '01
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Pros: No Computer needed
Cons: Very Labor Intensive
The Bottom Line: Much more trouble than it's worth. Very difficult to use effectively.
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| colleenmf's Full Review: Philips CDR770 CD Recorder |
My husband has always had the dream of making his own CDs. There are many albums he bought because he liked just one or 2 songs. What he had wanted to do is make his own “Favorites” C’s. (Back in the days of cassettes this was relatively easy and he did it all the time.)
Just over a year ago we installed a CD player in our Honda Accord and last May we bought a new Honda Odyssey with a CD player. Ted was ecstatic and he kept saying “We’re finally a 100% CD household”. Since we still had much of our music on tapes and, yes, even vinyl, he wanted to transfer some of it to CDs. This seemed like the perfect time to buy a CD burner.
We did quite a bit or research into the various products and we wanted a unit that had both digital and analog input. This way we could make CD’s from cassettes, videos, vinyl records, as well as other CDs. And so we bought the Philips CDR 770.
Luckily Ted is very technically astute. He had it set up and integrated into our TV/VCR, stereo system in about an hour. OK, he’s got a Ph.D. in engineering. It would have taken me all afternoon to do the same thing, as I would have needed every owner’s manual for each piece of equipment we own.
Now the fun part began – making our own CDs. Ted was able to make CDs from cassettes, videos, vinyl records, and other CD’s, but it wasn’t easy. After you record onto a CD you cannot play it back on any other unit until you “close” the CD. So if you put 7 songs on and have room for 7 more, you can’t play the CD in your car until you finish putting songs on and “close” the CD. If you “close” the CD before filling it up then you cannot “reopen” it and you have wasted space on the CD. Therefore, you cannot check that the CD will play in another piece of equipment until you have “closed” it.
Another problem is that the Phillips CDR cannot recognize breaks in the input. In other words, if you want to record 4 songs from a particular cassette you can’t just leave the system to “do it’s thing” Oh, sure, it will record the 4 songs but on the CD it will appear as one track. In order for the CD to recognize the 4 songs as 4 tracks you must stop after each song and mark the new track. This makes the process extremely labor intensive and we have ruined many blank CDs.
When recording from another CD, the system is supposed to recognize the tracks and mark them onto the new CD. That is, according to the owner’s manual, this should work. We have had no luck with this process. Each and every track must be manually marked. WHAT A PAIN! We really can’t do anything else but sit there and listen for the end of each song. If we try to read, we may get distracted and forget to mark the track at the end of the song. Ted made me a few CD’s for my birthday last year from a video with proper track breaks. Believe me, I know they were labors of love.
In addition, the unit uses special CDs only. You cannot use just any blank CD-R. You must use the ones that are specifically for digital music. We’ve tried. We get an error message about incorrect CD in tray. The way technology is developing, we also want to be able to record MP3 files onto CD’s and the Phillips can’t help here either.
My husband finds it so much more convenient to make CDs on our Acer brand CD RW on the computer. The interface is so much easier to read, understand, and program than on this Phillips. It recognizes track breaks, records various formats, and can run in the background as you do other things. (I may have to write another Epinion on that.)
I do not recommend the Phillips CDR 770. As a matter of fact we will be getting rid of ours soon and replacing it with a CD/DVD/MP3/etc.etc., as soon as we find what we want. By the way, it does include a remote but you cannot use the remote start recording. There is no record button on the remote. I’d call that marginally better than useless.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): $400
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Epinions.com ID:
colleenmf
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Member: Colleen Farley
Location: Lubbock, TX
Reviews written: 146
Trusted by: 147 members
About Me:
Happily married, mostly retired, and addicted to the internet.
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