[Peter A. Stoll]

A micro-review of the Roland CD-2 portable CD-recorder.

My voice teacher purchased one of these last week, and I've had its custody
for a few days. (I recommended a used "pro" CD recorder plus cheap pre-amp
and cheap microphones--her living room appearance could not handle that,
and my warnings of media compatibilty issues alarmed her.

Her target applcation: Record student lessons (mostly junior high school,
some high school and adults). Send them home with a CD they can use to
hear how their voice responded to instruction, remind them of their
assignments, and a few minutes of accompaniment for rehearsal purposes.

Previous method: a $60 Radio Shack small compact cassette recorder with
tiny, lousy, onboard microphone, and (shudder) VOX.

Roland suitability to task summary:

+ Massive upgrade in sound quality from the onboard mics compared to RS
compact cassette. Subtle vocal nuance pretty well captured.

+ Very wide media compatibility: no failures to record or finalize in over
ten different samples of CD-RW and CD-R media, ranging from ancient (CD-RW
labelled as 2x) to modern (CD-R labelled as 52X, CD-RW labelled as 12X).

+ Finalize times with ancient media about 1 minute, modern media 20 to 30
seconds.

- Really unpleasant capture of CD drive operating sounds by the onboard
microphones. These are especially dramatic if the capability to increment
the track number is exercised. They are not, however, loud enough to
compromise appreciably the pedagological goal (you can still hear very
subtle vocal nuance, and the sound is otherwise much better than I expected
from tiny integrated microphones).

I could comment in more detail on other aspects of the machine, but am
unsure whether the group regards this machine and myself as too far afield
from its subject matter to consume posting bandwidth.

[Marky A]

Any addition to the lexicon is appreciated, cheers.