Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony RCDW500C Compact Disc Player / Recorder

Folks, I have had mine for a few weeks, and after many calls to Sony I believe I sorta understand the mystery about the love hate relationship of this product. It appears that if one tries to burn over about 74 min of material (and this varies due to disc to disc variations) on a 80 min disc the machine freezes up after the recording process and will it not fianalize. Sony says that this normal for this machine. I know one needs to leave room for the TOC, but this is more than anyone elses home burner specifies. I like the changer and the ability to program and burn from multiple discs all at once, very nice! Keep your recording time down to around 72 minutes on an 80 min disc and it always works.

I previously owned an ONKYO CD recorder, which crapped out on me in about a year of frequent use (preceded by a year of very infrequent use). When it died, and Onkyo no longer made such a device, I bought this one. The ONLY trouble I've had with this unit is in recording CDs from CD-RWs using the high-speed dubbing. Simple solution, use the regular speed dubbing when recording from CD-RWs and, no problems.

I've never had a CD stuck in the unit. The manual, though not well written, is not as absurd as some.

My only fear is that this unit, and Music CD recorders, may become obsolete.

My experience with this has been a frustrating one. For the two years I had it, approximately one out of every five times, 20 seconds into the finalization process, I got the message "Incomplete!". That CD is now garbage. I threw away dozens of Sony CDRs because of this. When you look that message up in the manual, it tells you the recorder could not finalize your disc. Well duh! I sort of guessed that! Might as well have an explanation that says "This recorder doesn't always work". This is VERY ANNOYING! I'm doing nothing unusual and there's no rhyme or reason to it that I can determine. It even does it sometimes just straight "synchro- recording", though not as often. If you try to play that CD, you get an error message that says C14 TOC error and the explanation of that says something like "the recorder cannot read the table of contents". Yeah, I know... WHY????? I'm trying to take the advice of other reviewers and limit the recording to 70 minutes, but a cd recorder really should be able to record 80 min on a 80 min disc. And I'm trying to minimize vibration, but this continues to happen. Also, sometimes when I put a blank Sony CDR in, it reads "No disk". I get the impression Sony simply has not perfected the technology here.

I had rated this two stars, but have now returned to make it one star (but can't figure out how to change it). Because I now have a whole new problem! It just jammed on me! Loaded 5 CDS in the changer; played a few tunes. Went to eject one of them & the tray came out empty! Closed it & then it won't read or acknowledge any of the trays. It lights up like there are CDS in it, but does not play or eject any of them. Unplugged overnight- still the same. WHAT A PIECE OF JUNK!!!!! As others here have said Sony should be ashamed (but they're not). To have Amazon readers & users experience the same problems- the jamming, the finalizing, the non reading of discs- tells you this is simply an unperfected piece of equipment. Read all the reviews- you'll see a pattern. And Sony does not care. If only there was a better machine out there- even for more money. And that's what I'm off to find, since I now have to dismantle this thing in an attempt to retrive my CDS, before I throw it away. Sony won't get another of my (hundreds of)dollars.

BUYER BEWARE: You can take a chance- you might not get any problems- at least at first- but trust me- you will.

Update: January, 2007: I simply must comment on the issue of TOC (table of contents) and disc error messages that many reviewers have mentioned. YOU WILL EXPERIENCE THEM OVER AND OVER. I have tried all different brands of music CD-R's over the years and no brand, not even the Sonys, is exempt from this happening. Sometimes it happen to 2 or 3 discs in a row (after an hour of recording or so and especially when making mixed cd's). It is VERY frustrating and I must say with today's computer burning capabilities, it actually makes this unit a less that stellar choice in the home CD burning category. If you are looking for a CD burner, I'd have to suggest going with a computer because after 4 years of having this I can no longer use it. It just takes too long and the discs experience way to many read/TOC/finalizing errors thus wasting any time you may have spent recording. As a CD player, it works fine, but unless you like wasting hours in front of a component recording just to have it tell you "Unable to Finalize" or "TOC Error" at the end thus negating all your hard work, use a computer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I used to own a Philips single disc CD recorder which I had to hook up externally to my stereo and make analog recordings between the 2 components. It was a nightmare; Wasted discs, additional track numbers, skipped track numbers, unable to recognize disc if I stopped mid way through the mix, inability to finalize... I was so discouraged I thought I'd never buy another stereo CD recorder again, but then i took a chance on the Sony RCDW500C.

First of all, I have to admit that the instructions leave a lot to be desired. You'll find yourself flipping back and forth between pages trying to figure them out and half of it won't seem to make any sense, (downsampling, bbs, analog recordings, upsampling, optical input, manual sound levelling, set up screen options yadda, yadda, yadda) so I'd suggest you actually sit in front of the recorder and actually perform the steps as you read them. If you're looking for a recorder that you can hook a cassette player or turntable up to and record old formats, this unit will do that, but you'll find there are a lot of settings that can be changed that will make the recorder work differently, so you'll have to play with those to determine which is best for your own needs.

All CD to CD recording is done internally and digitally from deck A to deck B resulting in excellent data transfer between the discs as long as the unit doesn't have "disc error" problems which happen quite frequently. I made my first mixed CDR and then recorded it to another CDR with the touch of only 2 buttons and the 2nd CDR duplicated flawlessly. I also recorded a complete CD to a CDR using the "make disc" high speed button and was finished in less than 10 minutes. (The make disc function copies songs, full track CD text and finalizes the CDR for you all in one step.)

On the other hand, this unit is plagued with problems when it comes to reading and writing on the actual discs. I have stuck vehemently to the suggestion of another reviewer here to stop recording at least 5-6 minutes before the end of the CDR to leave space for the finalizing data track and that has reduced the number of "Unable to Finalize" messages I've gotten. If you just start off with the assumption that an 80 minute CDR should actually only record about 72-74 minutes of music, you'll be golden. Trying to squeeze that last song in up to the last few seconds of recording time displayed on the recorder may cause finalization problems. As for the "TOC error" and unable to read disc errors, well, you're on your own for them. I have not been able to figure out any way to reduce the number or frequency of them showing up and overall, I'd say that about HALF of the discs I've attempted to make end up with some sort of read/write error half way through. ;8^(

Another problem I did encounter in the directions is that they state when recording a CD track to the CDR, you first press the record button on deck B (puts deck B in "standby" for recording)then press the play button on track A. I found that when doing this, if there was more than a few seconds of silence between the time you press play on deck A and the time the song actually starts, deck B will skip to the next track number when the song starts. (ie. press record on deck B, press play on deck A, if more than 3 seconds pass while deck A is loading, when song starts deck B automatically detects the signal and then jumps to track 2, leaving track 1 as a few seconds of silence on your new CDR)

Supposedly this "setting" can be turned off in the settings menu, but after turning it to "off", it still happened, so to remedy the problem, I found it is better to switch the order in the instructions. In record mode, press Play on deck A first, wait a second or two while the player locates the proper track (you can hear the cd spinning inside faintly while the laser locates the track) then once the "spinning noise" from deck A stops, right before the track begins playing, manually start deck B recording. (It's pretty simple to do this and after a few practices, it will become second nature.)

If you have the time to sit down and get to know how it works and decide which settings you want to set it up with at the start, you shouldn't have many problems with this player except the read/write problems mentioned above. and when it works and you'll find out it can be a lot of fun.

I hold a Master's degree in electrical engineering, work as an electrical engineer, and have invented several items which have resulted in patents. In the past I have worked both as a cameraman and audio engineer at several radio and TV production facilities. I have also been a church organist for over 30 years, and have guided my middle son into a music career (He is currently doing graduate work in trombone performance and has been principal trombone with two pro orchestras and one band). I have a fairly extensive A/V system containing both store-bought gear and personally designed and built equipment.

I am a long-time Sony user and previously never had problems with Sony equipment, so I recommended this recorder to an 80-year-old former pro musician friend who has several hundred original tapes he wants to put on CD. The menuing system is similar to that in Sony's now-obsolete minidisk decks, two of which I own, so despite an incredibly poorly written manual, I didn't anticipate problems getting the recorder to work.

The recorder malfunctioned right out of the box and wouldn't finalize properly. After a few more tries, it appeared to not do much of anything properly. After a lengthy conversation with a tech at Sony's Laredo, Texas repair facility, during which he asked me to perform various diagnostic operations with the recorder, he finally announced what I already knew (it was broken) and said to send it in for repair, which I did. It came back still broken with the same symptoms. Three times it came back broken with the same symptoms. I finally convinced Sony to send me a new unit.

The new unit appeared to work correctly, but wouldn't play back CDs just recorded (yes, I used Sony blanks--Audio CD-Rs, not computer CD-Rs, and made sure [to try] to finalize them). The recorder didn't recognize a just-recorded disk in the record/play drive, which it should have even without finalization. It didn't recognize the disk in the play-only drive. My Denon CD player recognized the disk and could see the individual tracks, but couldn't play any of them.

I have now tried two different Sony units, both of which malfunctioned right out of the box, but with different symptoms. Those of you who have units that work correctly, keep your fingers crossed! The recorder could fail any time, then good luck getting it repaired.