if anybody's mousy about flashing their own drives, i've upgraded about a dozen CTD-8000 drives and would be glad to give an assist to whoever needs it.
the used CTD-8000s i buy on ebay have about a 33% success rate. most of them flash successfully with the audio firmware, but even after that many times the drive won't successfully mount a tape with audio content. (i forget the exact error in dat2wav, but.. suffice to say the end result is you get no juice!)
seriously, drop me a PM if you need a helping hand.
peter