Hi Bmp & Ramstl; Thanks for a "hands on", informed opinion. Our words have crossed before on this site Bmp, and I respect your observations and opinions on this subject. It seems that Ramstl's skepticism was well placed and I probably owe him an apology. So Ramstl, I hereby apologize. I based my buying decision, and recommendations, on articles I read in audio magazines, info. gleaned from the i-net, and of course advertising information. And although the HHB is undoubtedly a better built recorder (ie it's about twice as expensive), I will defend the Pioneer W739 based on its features and recording quality (I'm sure that in a blind test, I could not tell commercially made CDs from those made with the W739). Before I bought the W739, I tried a Pioneer 509 single drawer recorder that would not copy track information from my two out board Sony CD players. I was pretty frustrated and returned it. Then the W739 came out; it is a "dubbing" recorder, that has built in play and record sides, so it is completely self contained. A Three CD drawer on the left can be programmed in any way you want and recorded on the right side, or a single CD and CD-R can be dropped in and a "one touch" copy made-- neat. I rechecked, and the W739 digital out signal does bypass the sample rate converter when 44.1 (ie CDs) is used. Anyway, the features and versatility of this recorder were also big reasons I chose to go with a "dubbing" "consumer grade" CD recorder. I still stand by my assertion that recording quality of the W739 is excellent. As for SCMS, I suppose that it will have "some" impact in reducing wholesale digital copying, but if I wanted to go into CD copy sales, I would just buy a pro unit that didn't have it in the first place, and that could also use the cheaper computer CD-R blanks. I can see that fairly inexpensive pro copiers (and computer copying) are signicant loopholes in the SCMS (system).
