Yamaha Brings New Audio Boards and CD-Rewritable Drives to Comdex Fall '99; Yamaha CD-R/W Partners Also Demo in Sands Booth No. S2048

Business Wire, Nov 10, 1999

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 10, 1999--

Yamaha brings an abundance of new products and partners to Comdex Fall '99 November 15-19.

The new XG-Quad and XG-Movie 5.1 will each be demonstrated in the Yamaha booth. Another stand will feature the recently announced `ringing melody chip,' YMU757. Sega DreamCast(TM) will be playing in a fourth station, showcasing the Yamaha XGlite sound set. In addition to the audio products, The new Yamaha CRW8424 CD-R/W drive will host three partners, all of whom will demonstrate their solutions using the CRW8464.

"We are excited by this year's product line-up," said Jose Villafuerte, Director of Sales and Marketing for Yamaha Systems Technology, Inc. "These are all new designs and reflect the many years of design experience resident at Yamaha. We hope everyone at the show will have a chance to hear the new sounds and see the new CD-R/W drives."

Partners

Three Yamaha partners will share the booth with Yamaha's CD-R/W Group. The partners are: ahead software, ECI Software using IXLA's software engine, and Octave Systems. The partners will demonstrate their software products in the booth. ahead software, a CD recording software developer from Germany will demonstrate Nero, a powerful premastering backup, and Nero's MP3 encoding/decoding tools and other audio tools for the Yamaha CD-R/RW products. ECI Software, an interface designer, will show ixla's Explorer, a digital photography application which won PC Week's Best of Comdex award for best desktop utility. Octave Systems a Yamaha VAR specializing in CD-R/W solutions, will demonstrate a variety of Yamaha-based, CD-R/W duplication products.

XG-Movie 5.1(TM)

This newly available Digital Surround Card is designed for PC home theatre and game users. It supports Dolby(TM) Digital and Digital Theatre Systems, Inc. for DTS(TM) using YMF744 and YSS912 audio chips. DSP sound effects provided include church, jazz, hall, disco, live, stadium and theatre.

XG-Quad(TM)

Also recently announced, the XG-Quad Digital sound card features 4-channel sound with 64 XG voices in hardware. This is an affordable, high quality XG sound card for OEMs and VARs that also supports legacy and the latest technologies. A digital output allows for external decoding of AC-3 bitstream. Software providing 512 XG voices is available as an option.

YMU757 Ringing Melody Chip

Designed to personalize mobile phones and PDAs, the YMU757 allows the download and playback of user-selected sounds and melodies. The same Yamaha proprietary FM sound source used in synthesizers and PC sound cards provides the user with 128 instruments. The YMU757 can play up to four sounds simultaneously, assigning a different timbre to each sound, resulting in high quality melody reproduction.

CRW8424 Drive

This new CD-R/W drive is completely re-designed for highest reliability and quality. The new drive will write at 8X; rewrite at 4X; and read at 24X normal speed. The SCSI version is available now; the ATAPI version will follow soon.

The new optical head of the Yamaha CRW8424 is designed by Yamaha to assure optimum recording quality, and reflects their ten years of experience in the CD recorder industry. The CRW8424 boasts true, sustained 8X recording, surpassing in quality both 4X and 8X from the competition. Also new, is a 4MB buffer, to assure reliable, high speed data transfer.

Yamaha CD-R/W drives are available through distributors: Advanced Optical Distribution, Bell Microproducts, Inc., Consan Storage Solutions, Law Cypress Distributing Company, Megahaus, Optical Laser, Pacific Magtron, and Yamaha of Canada. A retail version, bundled with software is available through Yamaha Corporation of America, Consumer Products Division.

The Yamaha Booth No. S2048 is located in the Sands Expo Convention Center.

Yamaha Systems Technology Inc. was founded to manufacture and market integrated circuits, board level products and complete systems to OEMs and Distributors. The product line includes multimedia audio, graphics and communications products, as well as custom and semicustom ASICs, and CD Recorder products. http://www.yamahayst.com