Sony RCDW500C Compact Disc Player / Recorder

When it works it's an awesome piece of Sony engineered home audio recording equipment...When it doesn't it's scrap pile. I can sympathize why some reviewers might have chucked theirs in the dumpster...

The first one I bought had some serious locking up issues;It just malfunctioned on the same day I purchased it.It even trapped one of my cd's inside;to retrieve the cd back was no small feat without almost busting a knuckle.As I found out after removing the cover that space for the elevator/built in cartridge exchange mechanism is pretty tight. If you ever get a cd stuck in there, good luck!I immediately exchanged it for one that worked properly at my local electronics dealer.

This one has worked flawlesly for me for the past two years without failure ! I have not encountered any finalizing issues. Sony has crammed the RCDW500C with loads of features and then some. The only minor complaints I have is that you have to really read the manual from top to...Read more

Let me echo the other comments here and say that this is a great CD recorder. The user's manual, though, is awful -- Sony should be ashamed for putting out a manual that's confusing, skimpy and almost worthless.

REMEMBER: Buy CD-R MUSIC discs, not regular CD-R discs (they won't work -- as the manual not-so-clearly points out.)

I owned a Philips CD burner for five years before it petered out, dying a little at a time for about a year. When it would no longer reliably record I took it back to Sears, where I had an unexpired warranty for shop service. It couldn't be repaired and was no longer available (Philips quit making them a couple years ago) so I bought one of these, the only other CD player-recorder I could locate in the marketplace.

There are many similarities between this player and the Philips, especially the way it burns CDs. I made two new ones the first evening I had the thing out of the box. It tooks about 15 minutes with the instructions to figure out how to make one new CD from tracks on each of two prerecorded originals. Sony could have made that process a little easier but it wasn't hard to figure out. You have to toggle between two pages in the manual until you learn the process.

When you combine tracks from one of more CDs on the new one you're burning (there are...Read more