Yamaha has announced the pending release of its CRW3200 LightSpeed3 CD-RW drive family. The new CD-RW drives sport a 24x mechanism and will debut later this month with an internal IDE model. Additionally, the drive can rewrite CD-RWs at 10x and can read CD-ROMs at up to 40x. Although the E-IDE model has limited interest for Mac users, Yamaha will also be releasing external units in November that feature Ultra SCSI, FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces.
The CRW3200 feature the now-requisite buffer underrun technology that’s ubiquitous on faster CD-RW burner mechanisms. Yamaha’s implementation is called SafeBurn and it is designed to prevent the drive from burning “coasters” — CD-R discs that are rendered useless because they didn’t have enough data during the mastering process. Yamaha said that its system has a “Triple Protection Architecture.” The system incorporates the buffer underrun control, an 8MB buffer, and Yamaha’s Optimum Write Speed Control, a system that automatically selects the best writing speed depending on the CD-R medium and recording conditions.
Yamaha said the new drives also sport the Audio Master Quality Recording System. When activated, the system widens the lands and the pits of a CD-R when it’s being burnt, which reduces jitter created during the recording process. Yamaha claims it provides nearly pro-level music quality. Yamaha Multimedia Products Division general manager Allen H. Gharapetian said that the exclusive Yamaha technology improves quality by 30 percent.
Like the LightSpeed2 family, Yamaha’s LightSpeed3 drives feature Partial Constant Angular Velocity, or P-CAV, technology. The system keeps disc rotation speed constant and adjusts the data transfer rate depending on what part of the disc is being recorded to.
The CRW3200 Series also sports a blue LED that lights up during the recording process. The LED shifts to purple-white when the drive is idle. The product has been molded in a Platinum White chassis and faceplate color and utilizes a new “super-smooth” tray loading system.
The drives include Ahead Nero Max, Neato MediaFace II and Adobe Photoshop LE 5.0 for the Macintosh.
The Ultra-SCSI version of the drive will be available for US$349.99; the FireWire version will cost $329.99, and the USB 2.0 version will be available for $299.99.