Denon Introduces $19,000 Compact Disc Recorder

Consumer electronics manufacturer Denon on Thursday introduced what it billed as the first compact disc recorder for the home at a price of $19,000.

Up to now, consumers have been able to buy prerecorded compact discs and players but could not record their own CDs from existing records, tapes or other discs. The Denon system enables them to do that--albeit, at a hefty price. Denon said it expects its prices to drop sharply within the next year and that units could sell for $5,000 in two years. Recordable discs for the system sell for $40 each.

The Japanese manufacturer said it expects a limited market--affluent hobbyists and professionals--for the system at current prices. Total sales are expected to be in “the tens” of units in 1991, increasing to “the hundreds” of units in 1992, Denon America President Robert Heiblim said as the product was introduced at Dow Stereo Video in San Diego.

The electronics retail chain said it sold two systems Thursday. Jim Kunisch, the wealthy owner of a Cardiff, Calif., mail-order business, said he bought one of the systems to make duplicate discs to play in his car on long-distance business trips.

But more is at stake than short-term unit sales, Heiblim said. Manufacturers are jockeying for marketing advantages in the fast-growing compact disc player market, now estimated at 6 million unit sales per year. Companies such as Denon can exploit technological superiority, even if the price is out of the reach of the vast majority of consumers, said Paul Gluckman, managing editor of the New York-based Audio Week newsletter.

“I’d caution against making too much of it,” Gluckman said of the new Denon product, adding that the product was designed with a professional audience and market in mind. Gluckman said Thursday that he doubts Denon’s claim that it can lower its price to affordable levels any time soon because he doesn’t believe that it can move to mass production until industry standards are set.

But Heiblim insists that unit prices will fall, following a trend set by digital audio tape players, big-screen color television sets and several other consumer electronics products whose prices have fallen in recent years.

Marketability aside, the new Denon model strikes at the core of one of the hottest issues in home audio: the future direction of compact disc player technology and how much of a part home recordability will play.

Several observers believe that the future of compact disc players will belong to manufacturers who can make systems that allow consumers to record on the same disc several times, much like the ability to erase and re-record on audio cassette tapes. The lack of eraseability puts Denon’s system at a disadvantage, those observers said.

Sony, the world’s leading compact disc manufacturer, announced in May that it expects to introduce an re-recordable, $300 to $600 compact disc system in late 1992 called Mini Disc that will be highly portable, much like Walkman tape players, Sony spokeswoman Shari Haber said.

The disadvantages of the Sony system, according to industry analysts, are that the sound quality does not match store-bought CDs and that the discs can be played only on Sony machines. Heiblim said the Denon CDs can be played on CD players made by other manufacturers.

And Heiblim cautioned that technological hurdles in making high quality, re-recordable compact discs will take years to overcome because the re-recordable disc medium as it now exists is too easily damaged by outside light, ultraviolet rays and magnetic power.