Customer Reviews

Microboards CWL6200 CopyWriter Live CD Recorder

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While a bit pricey for home use, this is a great tool for live recording. The controls are easy to learn, the manual is brief but complete- you aren't bombarded with a bunch of bells & whistles that you'd probably never use. You can easily feed a variety of signals, and either make two CDs at once or keep recording continuously as long a you keep feeding blank discs. And, make high speed copies of discs very easily.
Not fancy looking, but very well built- should last for years with reasonable care. Nice heavy duty rack mount ears included. This product is aimed at on-site recording- so no guitar tuners, effects, or other goofy add-ons put in bedroom recording studio units. This is all business, and does it well!
One small complaint- a better recording level meter would be nice, but set levels carefully before recording and all should be fine.

We purchased two of these machines to record high school and college football games that we have the rights to at our two radio stations. We really liked the concept of starting a second disc automatically when the first disc was getting full, one less thing for the control room operator to worry about during a live game. We also like the fact that they record live audio direct to audio CDs, eliminating the time consuming steps of recording to a .WAV file, breaking up the file into two or more parts if the content is longer than 70 minutes, then burning the segments to CD. If you have a really long show to record, no problem. One can go from A to B, then put a fresh disc in drive A and the machine will start recording on drive A when B gets full. In theory, one can keep going back and forth between the A and B decks until one runs out of blank discs.

Features: Besides being able to automatically start recording a new CD when one is getting full, the machine can be used to record two CDs at the same time if you know that your program is going to last less than 70 minutes. It can also be used to duplicate CDs at 20X speed. It has balanced inputs (plus 4) on XLR connectors, as well as unbalanced (-10) RCA inputs on the rear, plus unbalanced inputs and a 1/4" mike input on the front. There is no mixing facility, one stereo input pair at a time is chosen from the menu. The only outputs are RCA unbalanced jacks on the rear and a stereo headphone jack on the front. During live recordings the machine can be configured to place track markers 3, 5, 7, or 10-minute intervals onto the disc. It will write to CD-R and CD-RW media, but for the discs to be playable on older audio CD players CD-R media must be used. If you are not concerned about the playability of discs on a home CD player, audio can also be recorded in CD-ROM/XA, Mixed Mode, Multi-Session, HFS CD Bridge, CD Extra, and Video CD (with no images of course) formats.

The recorder is 11 1/2 " D x 16 1/2" W x 4 1/4" H. Weight 12 1/2 pounds. Power consumption 80 watts. Sharp readers will note that this is 2 rack units high and the recorder does comes with a rack mount kit, which is how we installed ours. Frequency response is 20 Hz - 20,000 Hz /- 1db, channel separation 70 db.

When we first got the machines both of them would only work sometimes for starting the next disc automatically. Sometimes they would "hang" during the middle of recording the second disc. Sometimes the second disc would fail to start at all. Sometimes they would not properly close out the disc, making it unplayable on a standard CD player. We thought at first that the problem might be operator error, but even our most experienced control room operator had problems getting the machines to behave. We could find no pattern to the problems. Both the left hand and right hand CD drives would fail. We upgraded the firmware to version 1.35, which helped some but the final solution was to use only Tayio Yuden/JVC 52x CD-R media in the machine.

Once we standardized on the Tayio Yuden media, we had no more problems with either sample of our machines. While upgrading the firmware is a good idea, I think that changing the brand of media made the biggest difference.