Product: CRW2100E
Company: Yamaha
Website: http://www.yamaha.com
Estimated Street Price: $249.00
Review By: Julien JAY

Introduction

Yamaha the well-known Japanese manufacturer that sells cars, pianos and more has just unleashed the world’s fastest CD burner. Generally Yamaha products are high end ones that are manufactured with great care and this burner doesn’t deny this. With this product Yamaha overwhelms Sanyo since the 16x recording technology from Sanyo will only be available in early 2001. This new burner can record CD-R at the incredible high speed of 16x, CD-RW in 10x and can read your normal CDs at the speed of 40x. Best of all, digital audio extraction can be done at 40x. This new burner is the fruit of Yamaha’s experience in the CD burner domain. As a quick history reminder in 1988 Yamaha introduced the first CD recording system for mastering purposes followed in 1990 by a 2x model to boost master production. Then in 1994, Yamaha launches the first 4x burner intended to general public that was enhanced later in 1996. In 1997 Yamaha renews its burners’ models by unleashing the first CD-RW 2x burner followed by 4x ones and more recently, at the end of 1999, Yamaha released the first high speed (8x) CD-RW burner. This new “16 write, 10 rewrite, 40 read” model is really a –jewel- and many burners fans will surely want one before they have reached the end of the review.

Setup

After I’ve unpacked the Yamaha box, I’ve discovered among blank CD-RWs, software and manual, what I can call the beast: this new burner features the same modern look as previous Yamaha models introduced in 1999 (as you can see on the picture below); except that it comes with only one LED to indicate status and that two horizontal holes are placed on the front panel for heatsink purposes. Due to the use of a new DSP component along with a new pickup technology the rear fan that Yamaha burners usually have is definitely dead with this model. You can see on the left the internal mechanism of the burner. The CRW2100 series is available in three different interfaces: SCSI, IDE, FireWire. The model we were sent and we’ll review is the IDE one: a future best seller. Installing this new unit was very easy: after dismantling the old burner, I installed the new one making sure the Master/Slave setting was correct and I connected on it, the Power plug, the IDE controller cable and the soundcard audio link cable. I’ve mounted back the computer and restarted it. Windows Me instantly recognizes the new burner and the last thing I did was to install Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4.02e that was provided with the burner. Installing this software was a breeze and after everything was installed correctly I was prompted to reboot the computer in order for the changes to take effect. A reboot later and the burner was ready to use for my greatest pleasure.

Features

Let’s have a look to the intrinsic characteristics of the CRW21000E burner: 

• New Partial CAV technology that enables writing at speeds up to 16x for CD so you can burn a complete CD in less than 5 minutes!
• Conventional CLV mode ensures you can write CD-RW at 8x speed, and due to an enhanced CAV mode you can reach a speed of 10x when burning CD-RW using packet-writing method of DirectCD. So you can burn data on a CD-RW as easily, and faster than on a floppy disk.
• Unprecedented High Speed Digital Audio Extraction: the Yamaha burner is the first burner (as well as CD or DVDdrive) to feature a digital audio extraction speed of 40x due to the CAV technology. Extracting a 74-minute audio CD can be done in less than 3 minutes.
• The burner comes with a wide 8MB buffer memory (double than in previous models) so you’ll be protected against all kinds of buffer underruns,
• This burner is the first model to feature the Yamaha Pure Phase Laser System that improves jitter level – an indicator of digital recording quality – by 25%. This system stabilizes the laser power and eliminates unwanted reflections and glare produced when recording a CD resulting in a more accurate recording. This interesting system also ensures the resistance and lasting in time of burned CDs.
• The 2100E burner is ROPC enabled: a new technology named Running Optimum Power Calibration that ensures optimum laser output power is adjusted for each disc.
• CD-Text Support: like its predecessors, the CRW2100E burner supports CD Audio that use CD-Text norm: when reading CDA on your computer if you’ve got a compliant CD player software you’ll see the title of each track appears on the screen but best of all you can burns audio CDs with CD-Text data so when you’ll read them later in real CD player the title of each track will appear (if supported by your HiFi CD Player).
• Writing Methods Supported are Disk at Once, Session at Once, Track at Once, PacketWriting. The supported writing formats are CD-A, CD-G, CD-Text, CD-Rom, CD-Rom + CD-DA, CD-ROM XA, CD-I, Photo CD, Video-CD CD-Extra.
• DAO-RAW burning mode supported.
• Average random access time of 160msec.
• IDE version supports UDMA/33 mode up to 25Mbps.
• The IDE version of the burner is the only one that comes with a digital audio output as well as an analog one.

The beast