If you have a computer at home (where are you posting from?), a CD burner will do most of the work for you. Another alternative would be to buy a cassette deck, feed it from the sound board, replay the tape into a computer (either using your sound card's analog inputs or getting a cheap analog-USB device) and then editing and burning. Or ... you could use the cassette deck for recording and playback and buy a standalone CD burner (they're available for $250 and up; not sure where the $800 comes in).

What do you have available to you? That will help us in giving you the best options.

Yes, I have a computer, with a CD burner. I need to find a better way to record off of the sound board/mixer so I can then take the recording home to my computer for editing and CD burning.
Even though an extremely clean recording is not essential, it seems that using a tape recording for this would introduce a bit of additional noise, plus need over an hour to create the audio file on my computer. If I could record directly into a digital file, I could then just transfer it to my hard drive and start editing.
The $800 for a CD audio recorder comes from the cost of a professional recorder, having experienced numerous recording failures when trying to use a $250 model (the KLH).

I see.

A tape recording would introduce some noise unless you got a really good deck (one old enough to make repairs a consideration). Have you considered Mini-Disc? It locks you into a Sony format, but the price and speed may be right. I don't know if they exist, but you could see if there are MP3 recorders out there, though I don't know if you'd consider MP3 high-enough quality. You may find by the time you get the pieces-parts together, that a $500-600 laptop may be your best bet....

Randy,

When I saw the title of your post, I wondered if you can even still get CD recorders, however, you can get DVD recorders pretty cheap now. What about one of those?

The only issues I can think of are 1) most need a video signal to record, they won't run without it (but you could experiment) - it could be anything, a feed from a camera or a cheap test pattern generator...

The other issue is whether you'd have trouble ripping the audio from the dvd, although there's plenty of software out there to do it, much of it free for download....of course, you could also just digitise it in through your audio inputs, I seem to remember Windows have that provision somewhere....

You can get a DVD recorder for less than $200 and the quality's good, even better than CD depending on your options....and the recording duration can be quite lengthy depending on quality levels ( it affects video, not sure if audio's scaled back too) and if you get a dual-layer recorder, well even longer.

Lots of these recorders work with rewritable disks, so there's a saving for you.

I would suggest you go to musiciansfriend.com and search for Fostex digital recorders.

You can record directly to the Fostex or patch into it from a board. From there its easy to download to your computer and then burn.

This seems to be the easiest and most inexpensive way to go.

Enjoy the journey.

eal51 in western CT

I realize this may be a bit outdated, but try this site for equipment that is reasonably priced:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/audio/a2bf/

Good Luck

Thicke in Central Illinois