These days there is no doubt that CDs are the preferred recording medium, having well and truly superseded vinyl LPs, reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes. But many people still have large collections of LPs and tapes and would like to dub them to the more convenient CDs. However, for many people this is not an easy hurdle to overcome, even though they may already have a computer.

In fact, if you want the full lowdown on dubbing to CDs using a computer, you need to refer to the January 2001 issue of SILICON CHIP. This very comprehensive article outlined the techniques, the software and the hardware you need to be able to do this job. But it must be said that there is a considerable investment in computer hardware and software and the inevitable learning curve in properly mastering this equipment.

Nor can you use just any computer – you need a reasonably recent Pentium model with a large capacity hard disk. For many people then, a freestanding CD Recorder which requires no computer at all would be a great advantage. The Marantz DR 6000 is that machine.

We should point out that, as with any freestanding CD Recorder, the DR 6000 need not stand idle when it is not being used for recording; it also doubles as a high quality fully featured CD player. This means that if you were considering acquiring a new CD player anyhow, you can now have both a CD player and recorder in the one machine.

More importantly, the DR 6000 will record both Recordable (CD-R) and Rewritable (CD-RW) discs. While CD-RW discs are considerably more expensive than CD-R discs, they have the particular advantage that they can be amended and added to at any time.