Quality of recordings, simplicity.

Somewhat cheap remote

I'm very pleased with my first forray into CD recording. Much easier to use than anticipated. (Some of the reviews of the Phillips recorders scared me.) I looked into the low-end Phillips recorders but wanted the ability to adjust recording level. I already had a great Yamaha CD player so I was just looking for a basic recorder and didn't want to spend $700. No complaints. Easy to hook up, great manual and digital synch makes it easy to create mix CDs. Bought from Crutchfield at $399. Looking at some of the other posts, it seems like I paid too much but Crutchfield has a great warranty and is an authorized Pioneer dealer, keeping the manufacturer's warranty valid. In addition, no sales tax saved me a few $$$. Email me if you buy from Crutchfield. I'll give you my id number so you get free shipping.

Similar Products Used:

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Price, relative to pro decks; ease of use; excellent A/D converter; monitor function allows me to use it as a stand-alone ADC to fed my digital pre/pro

None other than limitations of the consumer CDR format

I really wanted to buy the HHB 850 (which is basically just a pro version of this deck) but couldn't justify spending $1,000 for it when the PDR509 cost me $360. The only real advantage of a pro machine is you can make digital dubs of dubs. Even this, as it turns out, is not worth the expense. You can also use "data" discs with a pro deck but I don't see that as a major selling point. Without shopping around, I picked up 30 "audio" CDRs for $50. At $1.67 a piece they are even cheaper than the audio cassettes I normally buy. The HHB also lets you turn the sample-rate converter off, but the 509 does this automatically with a CD source anyway.

Never having used a CD recorder before, I first tried it with a TDK rewritable blank. When the source is CD I am confident that I can just use CDRs. With an analog source, I think I'll first get everything right on a CD-R/W then dub it to CDR. The news is good and better. The good news is the digitally sourced CD-R/W to analog input CDR dub is virtually identicle sounding, in fact, the difference in sound quality is so minimal it is not even worth describing, nevermind worring over. The better news is if your source was analog to begin with, you can do a digital dub of the dub.

The sound of its internal DACs is pretty good, though a bit bright and foward for my tastes. But I am not using it as a CD player anyway. The sound quality through the coax digital out is much the same. Those who think "bits are bits" should listen to this and compare it to the sound of my CD and DVD players. All are being processed by the same DACs (20 bit Burr-Brown) yet none sound the same. None of this really matters to me as I purchased it to record. It doesn't in any way sound bad, just different.

This deck is very well designed, as far as ease of use is concerned. You can tell that Pioneer has been at this for a while. Also of note is the superbly written owner's manual. It is an order of magnitude better than any other I have seen, and all of my other components are "high-end mass-market" (Marantz, Denon, Onkyo, Yamaha, and Sony ES). I also like the monitor function this deck offers. My digital pre/pro has some very good DSP modes for 2-channel music enhancement, and until now I had no way of using them with analog sources. Another deck I looked at only engaged its ADC while in record or record/pause. The digital record level control and fader are also useful. Some of the other decks I looked at omitted these features.

All in all, this deck is superb. Anyone considering a pro deck should first find a store with a decent return policy and try this one. I'm willing to bet it will suit your needs and you will keep it. Highly recommended!

easy to use once fibre optic cable is connected and produces very fine quality recordings

stylistically awful remote; unpleasantly noisy tray mechanism

I am very happy with this product and in general think that it represents good value for money. However, Pioneer would help their case if they started supplying a fibre-optic connector cable as standard; it is just a little frustrating having just unpacked and wired up the thing to find that the one kind of connector you need is not in the box. Also, similar to the experience reported by others here, I have also found the unit to be fairly fussy about the brand of CDRs used. I started off with BASF/Emtec only to find that occasionally (say one out of fifteen) tracks produced unpleasant distortion on the recorded version; after that, I tried Philips CDRs and found them consistently reliable in recording quality; then, I had a disastrous outing with TDK (a brand given the Pioneer seal of approval in its Instruction manual!) in which an unacceptable level of distortion occurred. At one point, the machine refused to continue recording, stopped completely and asked me to check the disc for damage. This is odd as another reviewer reported impeccable performance from TDK, while elsewhere Philips CDRs appear to have been criticised. My suggestion therefore is to try various brands until you discover the one the machine likes best; for my part, I am going to stick with Philips from now on as I have yet to produce a dud after eleven recordings. Another point worth making concerns the skip-ID facility which allows the PDR509 to pass by spoiled, distorted or unintended tracks: some reviews suggest that this works universally on just about any other CD-player. This is not true and Pioneer admits as much in its manual. For instance, CD recordings which include skipped IDS are still played through warts and all on my Sony CDP-XE530. I would be interested to know of other brands which support Pioneer’s Skip-ID function and wonder whether all Pioneer CD players generally support them. This would definitely be something to influence the choice of car CD-players- who wants to listen to dud tracks in the car?

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Ease of Use,Reproductive quality,Reliability,Flexibility
Sound beats the hell out of MD

Autotrack allocation when recording Vinyl or other analogue sources,Long finalisation,fiddly remote

After reading the other reviews I initially felt a knot in my stomach, thinking I had brought the wrong product.I had encompassed similar problems like phasing,stuck tracks,no play in my second player in another room to name but a few.

After investigation I discovered that the traxdata CDR's were 50% of the problems and my stupidity the other. I had been recording with the TV on which is next to it, all the other components in the rack were on and it was that page in the manual on how you must avoid electrical things that I had missed.
Four out of the ten CDR's were physically damaged that had had caused the sticking and the TV had caused the phasing and finalization problems.
Solution I now only record with everything switched off apart from the 509 and my source player which runs through an offboard DAC. The 509 makes effortless copies which are as near perfect as I could want and now I have sorted out the problems I have not made a duff recording in the last 12 CDR's that I have burned. If you think about it in a commercial CD production factory do they have noisy power supplies,huge magnetic force fields sitting next to them, I doubt it.
The truth is, this new technology is not as robust as good old compact cassette so it needs slightly more care, respect and attention.
The 509 in my opinion is exeptional at what it does,put in a CD, programme the order of play, press DigitalSync twice and go out for an hour switching off the amp and anything else that doesn't need to be on. On your return a perfect copy is waiting for you, now the Phillips on the other hand.......

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None but friend has Phillips which is more like a gramaphone in comparison

This is in response to the previous person that has had all the problems with the distortion on your recordings. Your problem may well not be with the Pioneer unit itself. I have had mine since October and have made dozens of recordings, both digital and analog, without ever running into this issue. If they play error free on several other machines but hiccup on your Sony, that definitely suggests the problem is with your Sony changer, not the recorder. It could be that the brand of CD-Rs you're using aren't reflective enough in some spots or are just of a questionable quality, and that the Sony is having trouble reading them. You also could possibly have a cable connection problem somewhere down the line that is causing problems between your source and the recorder too. I have tried my recordings on home/car players from Pioneer, Yamaha, Blaupunkt, Sony, RCA, and Panasonic with no problems on any of them. The only other thing to point out, even though I'm pretty sure you aren't doing this, is that you cannot make a copy of a digital copy due to copy protection. I'm not sure what effect it has, I just know that it doesn't work so I've never tried it. Sorry you had trouble with the Pioneer, but mine has been just great and I would recommend it to anyone.

very good copy from cd to cd.Easy to use.

Impossible to use cd-rom media,SCMS (protect of second digital copy)

Recordings on traxdata ,Maxell and Sony blank media are perfect.
Bad characteristics of this product are:digital synchro rec and possibillity to use only CD-Digital Audio blank media.
SCMS is also big problem and I would like to ask anybody who possibly know how to remove those two protections to write me.

easy to use, sounds good

auto sync & tracking not 100% reliable

I recommend using the 'manual' recording mode for all dubs. By 'cueing' & 'numbering' the tracks manually you can be sure of achieving the quality recording your after.

The 'flagging' of unwanted tracks during recording worked on playback thru the pioneer deck but not my mid 70's sony changer. It played the 'flubbed track' although it was suppose to skip it.

I've tried sony, maxell, tdk, & memorex cdr's & all have worked fine. Any source for good prices on the blanks?

As of today I'm extremely pleased with this recorder.

Don M.

Has an optical ouput

Not compatible with Satellite receivers, which is states is is!

The Pioneers have a defective sampling rate converter. They will not convert Dish Network's satellite receiver's digital signal. I tried three 739s and two 509s. None would work with Dish Networks optical digital satellite signal!!


The recorders acknowledge the signal with a 44K display, but no signal is present in level or audio. Pioneer's very unhelpful support(same # for their "ELITE" equipment also)people didn't even know what an optical signal or sampling frequency converter was. They should be on the street if they do NOT know the basics!

If it wouldn't work with a digital device that is here today, I don't want to gamble on whether it would work with other digital formats in the upcoming future. It does work with CD, MD, and DVD, but would not work with Dish Network's DBS digital PCM signal. To bad, for such a big name, they should be able to use a satellite receiver's digital optical output. Even even states in the manual it "should" be compatable, but clearly isn't.

Their reps. are not even intelligent enough to know the technology they are suppose to be supporting. I guess Pioneer just doesn't care, and so I don't care that this is the last Pioneer product that I will be buying. So long Pioneer!!

Similar Products Used:

HK CDR2(design flaws galore),Pioneer 739(same incompatable sampling frequency converters? or just plain incompatable with digital satellite receiver's PCM output.) Philips CD-R785(By far the best sounding, the most compatable "with digital satellite receiver's as is the HK CDR2", the only CD recorder that allows """EDITING""" on the source disc while being played in the changer side. This allows editing similar to 'YES', minidisc, but with far more inconvenience. It's possible with the A/B disc editing feature. Philips is the only brand that offered EDITING!)

It only uses Audio CD's

I have just bought the machine and discovered that it only uses audio CD's - which are 3 (CD-R) to 7 (CD-RW) times more expencive than data CD's here in Denmark.
Pioneer recomends the following brands
Kodak
Fuji
TDK
Verbatim
Pioner
Ricoh
Can anybody fill in the rest of the brand-name??
Please make a CC to my e-mail: cosa-nostra@forum.dk

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Consumer-friendly ease of use -- excellent configuration of panel buttons; great CD dubs in both digital and analog; digital volume controls; 3 synchro digital recording functions

Slow finalize time: 4 minutes

I can only echo the positive reviews submitted here. My past history with CD-R audio recorders has been a ongoing catastrophe of ever-failing machines. This 509 is my SIXTH CD-R recorder since August -- the others, all Philips, were lemons and had to be returned to Good Guys for credit.

What first struck me about the 509 control panel was how more user-friendly it is compared to any of the Philips CD-R recorders. While my first 509 had big problems -- it would not record 80-minute discs -- this one is doing everything in an outstanding fashion. I couldn't be happier (cross my fingers).

I plan to mainly use the 509 to dub my extensive record and cassette collection onto CD-R (as well as digitally- recording library-borrowed CDs). The analog volume meter/controls are accurate abd easy to use, and the resulting recordings sound identical to the originals.

I was stuck having to use Good Guys store credit, so I probably didn't get the greatest price, but, even at $400, I am very satisfied with this machine. Due to my checkered past with the previous 5 CD-R recorders, I would recommend considering an extended warranty (I got a 3-year policy).

While it is true that the CD may be on its last legs, I am thrilled to finally be able to make actual digital recordings in my own home. Thank you, Pioneer!

Similar Products Used:

Philips CD-R Recorders