chung wrote:

(CLIPPED: description of how the behavior of clamping diodes on the
input of the CD recorder causes a nonlinear and low-impedance load when
the machine is not powered on)

The solution is either to always turn on the CD recorder, or disconnect
the CD recorder when it is not used. You can also isolate the CD
recorder by putting a switch in series with its inputs.

I ran across this on a friend's cassette recorder, some years ago. The
preamp did not have a separate Record Output switch (which would solve
the problem handily) and the user did not want to reach behind to
disconnect cables. The recorder had a motor which ran all the time the
unit was powered up, so leaving it on all the time was a bad choice,
too. The solution we came up with was to plug a pair of 1/4 inch plugs
into the microphone jacks, which had built into them the switching
needed to disconnect the line inputs when microphones were used.