Kenwood Makes PC Peripheral Push : Deputs high speed CD-ROM

Electronic News, March 15, 1999

New York-Consumers have long known of Kenwood Corp. as a maker of home and auto stereo equipment. Now the company is making forays into the computer peripheral market, with what it says is the fastest CD-ROM drive on the market.

Kenwood Technologies, a Cupertino-based subsidiary of its parent, has recently released the second of its family of CD-ROM drives, the TrueX 52X drive, which the company said can deliver data transfer rates of 6,750 to 7,800 KB per second. The technology was developed by Zen Research, a privately held research and development firm also based in Cupertino.

But what's unusual about the drive is not that it spins the CD faster than the other CD-ROM drive, but that it's actually spinning it more slowly. The drive illuminates the disc with a wider laser, enabling the drive to read more information more quickly than traditional drives. The result, Kenwood says, is a drive that is faster, more reliable and quieter.

Kenwood vice president of marketing Robert Selzer said that the performance ratings of most CD-ROM drives, the so-called X-rating, is usually a maximum rate rarely achieved. A 32X drive will only read that fast on the outer tracks of the disc while reading at slower speeds of 12 to 16X on the inner tracks.

Robert Katzive, vice-president of Disk/Trend, Inc., a Moutain View- based market research firm covering the disc drive market, said Kenwood's approach will earn some attention. Indeed, Compaq Computer Corp. has adopted the drives as an option on its Presario, Prosignia and Deskpro line of desktop PCs.

"I think they are making a drive that many people will find interesting," he said. "By being able to read multiple tracks at once they have achieved a high rate of data transfer without spinning the disc at an unreasonable rate of speed. That means less wear and tear on the drive, and less noise. With a lot of the drives today, when they spin up they make a lot of racket."

Kenwood also has plans to ship faster CD-ROM drives later this year, and by the fourth quarter plans to unveil its first DVD-ROM drive, which will be based on the same principals as the CD-ROM drives. A hybrid drive that will read and write both CDs and DVDs is on the company's roadmap for the second or third quarter of 2000.