With countless portable disk-based MP3 players coming to market, it's surprising that we haven't seen more that come with a recharger cradle that also instantly connects the player to your home stereo, like the Rio Karma. That way, you'd get the best of both worlds -- a portable device that puts your music library at your fingertips in your entertainment center.

TDK's newest jukebox may not be portable, but it does put 20GB of storage into your home A/V rack and lets you rip and burn from the comfort of your living room. The DA-9000 represents yet another attempt to merge a PC's functionality with a CE device's simplicity. We've seen other recent appliances like Gateway Wireless Connected DVD Player and its DVD Recorder, which focus more on video but can tend to audio chores as well.

We took the DA-9000 for a long spin and found it to be a less than smooth ride. Is a burner/ripper that can't be connected to your network a wise choice in an era of increasingly interactive home-based devices? Probably not.

Here's a quick rundown on the DA-9000's vital statistics:

Hard Drive Capacity/Type 20 GB ATA-100 Display 4-line backlit text display Playable Formats Compatible CD Type Audio CD, CD ROM, MP3 CD, CD-R DA, CD-RW DA Audio Format CD-DA Electrical Specifications AC Voltage AC 120V 50Hz/60Hz Max Power 55 W Other Information Data Transfer Port USB Port Digital Audio Out Optical SPDIF Consumer Format Analog Audio In/Out Stereo RCA Database Upgradeable Gracenote CDDB® Music Recognition Service Digital Audio Formats MP3, WAV

An important note: the DA-9000 can only use CD-R DA and CD-R/W DA discs, which are expressly meant for storing music. The player cannot use regular CD-R and CD-R/W media, which we found out the hard way. Media that use this format carry this logo:

We had to run to the store to get media that supported this format so we could conduct our burning tests. Now, here's the funny part: the store we went to had TDK media, and while it may have supported this format, the DA logo was nowhere to be found on the packaging. So instead we bought Fuji Film media, which had the logo. TDK, primarily a media manufacturer, doesn't even include a single CD-R DA or CD-R/W DA disc in the box with this player, nor does it have any coupons or promotional deals on its own media. If the company is trying to run the old "razors and razor blades" ploy with its players, it's doing a pretty lousy job.

Every CD has a "disc application flag," which tells the device what sort of application the CD may be used for. Most PC CD drives don't check this flag or don't enforce the results. Consumer players, however, do use the application flag. CD-R DA discs have Serial Copy Management System (SCMS), which will prevent the recorder from making copies of a CD-R DA disc.

One glaring problem with the aforementioned specs is that the DA-9000 has no support of any kind for WMA. Granted, 320Kbits/sec MP3 sounds fine, but at 128Kbits/sec, WMA sounds markedly better than 128kbps MP3. Users who have large amounts of content already ripped to WMA and want to deposit it on the DA-9000 are out of luck.

The CD player doesn't support DVD-A or SACD, so if you're interested in building a collection of music that uses either of these formats, the DA-9000 is not for you.

We should mention, although it's fairly obvious, that the DA-9000 is purely an audio device – there's no video functionality whatsoever. Despite the rising number of digital media adapters on the market, the DA-9000 has a singular purpose: music. Another limitation is the absence of network connectivity, indicating that the DA-9000 is squarely aimed at users who don't have home networks or don't mind their content being on a unique, non-connected storage device.

We first evaluated its output's signal quality using RightMark Audio Analyzer 5.3. To do this, we created reference test 44.1KHz/16-bit WAV files (calibration tone and actual test tones) and burned them to a CD-Audio disc. We then played the disc in the DA-9000 and fed its output into our Audio Test System (ATS), which is equipped with an Echo Audio MIA, whose measured signal-to-noise ratio is -101dB.

Next we conducted three tests using The Best of David Sanborn, testing how long each of DA-9000 three supported resolutions (uncompressed, 320Kbits/sec, and 128Kbits/sec) too to rip a disc.

We then tested the DA-9000's disc-burning performance using CD-R/W media, writing out one CD's worth of content, once again using The Best of David Sanborn as our test case.

We also did a "Stump CDDB" test, where we put in nine different CDs to see if the built-in Gracenote CDDB could properly identify the discs' names, track titles, and artists.

In gathering this result, we weren't able to get the -1dBFS calibration tone that RightMark specifies. The DA-9000's output was reading -4dBFS, but we pressed ahead to see what results it would yield. Given the low signal level, we expected the player's numbers to suffer. To our surprise, though, the DA-9000 turned in some very solid results.

Noise level, dB (A): -93.3 Dynamic range, dB (A): 93.3 THD, %: 0.0021 IMD, %: 0.024 Stereo crosstalk; dB: -94.6

Ripping/Burning Test Results

We used The Best of David Sanborn for all three tests, so as to keep the workload constant. This album's total playing time is 73:52, and it contains about 744MB of audio data. We did three different rip tests, using the three settings the DA-9000 makes available: uncompressed, 128Kbits/sec and 320Kbits/sec.

Rip time for The Best of David Sanborn (73:52 of music)

Format Time Compressed 13:21 320kbps MP3 54:52 128kbps MP3 46:28

Since there's no encoding overhead, the uncompressed rip is obviously much faster than the other two settings. Interestingly, the DA-9000 appears to have been optimized somewhat to rip to 128Kbits/sec, since ripping to that format was more than eight minutes faster than ripping to the 320Kbits/sec format. To the DA-9000's credit, it can also rip in real-time as you're listening to a CD, so you don't have to twiddle your thumbs while the ripping/encoding is done.

Burn time for Best of David Sanborn

Uncompressed: 18:04 (745MB) MP3 CD: 2:30 (68MB)

Next, we turned the data flow around and pushed the Sanborn album from the unit's hard-drive to CD-R DA media. The DA-9000 did better here, particularly with writing out an MP3-CD, which only took about two-and-a-half minutes.

One of the DA-9000's slickest features is that it houses the Gracenote CDDB database, so that CDs can be identified by the player without needing a live Internet connection. The database can be updated using a utility that you have to download from the TDK Web site. However, the CDDB does get updated when you do a firmware upgrade. We used the following CDs:

David Sanborn, The Best of David Sanborn Various Artists, Casa de Samba 2 Norah Jones, Come Away with Me Larry Goldings, Whatever it Takes Cannonball Adderly, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy Joshua Redman Quartet, Spirit of the Moment/Live at the Village Vanguard Tim Warfield Quintet, Gentle Warrior Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays, As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls Frank Sinatra, Sinatra at the Sands with the Count Basie Orchestra

These nine CDs represent a mix of age, genre, and availability. We were curious to see if the DA-9000 could identify the Casa de Samba CD (a Brazilian import) and the relatively obscure Tim Warfield disc. To its credit, it correctly identified all of the discs except for Warfield's, a recent jazz album released by the Netherlands-based label Criss Cross. Eight out of nine is still a respectable showing.

TDK has a utility for updating the CDDB database on the DA-9000, however it doesn't ship with the unit. You have to download it instead from TDK's site. As it turns out, the utility is unstable, giving us one of the most confused error messages we've ever seen:

Not only did we not know what this message meant, it doesn't look like the app did either. It may be that the text in the message was hard-coded in Kanji (Japanese), so our test system (set to U.S. English) couldn't display the characters. In any event, we repeatedly received this message when trying to update the DA-9000's CDDB database. As it turns out, the update was successful -- on our third try, we got a message telling us we didn't need to update the database again.