The 4X CD-R record: fast to present

Emedia Professional, April, 1998 by Robert A. Starrett, Lee Hollman

Like super-quick punt returners and sure-footed place kickers, 4X CD recorders have, until recently, served as role players in the CD-R game. High-speed recorders are indispensable in certain settings, like low-run duplication and prototyping from well-wrought disc images, but ill-suited for many everyday tasks, sub-par systems, and cluttered hard drives. Many users have exploited CD-R's strengths for years without ever employing a quad-speed writer. Still others have purchased up-to-spec 4X devices and rarely found opportunities to run the units at speeds over 2X.

That quad-speed devices and bundles are now approaching critical mass--with the number 4X mechanisms doubling in 1997--is no coincidence, nor does it reflect misguided marketing strategies. The age of quad-speed recording is upon us, ushered in not only by more, better, and cheaper recorders, but also by parallel advances in the systems, software, and media with which they work in tandem. Today, the undeniable advantages of being able to record entire CDs in less than 15 minutes are at last accessible to the technology's end-user mainstream.

A QUICK HISTORY OF THE SLOW EVOLUTION OF FAST CD-R

As quick and easy as quad-speed CD recording seems in most quarters today, the 4X heyday now approaching has been a long time coming. The first 4X recorder didn't even ship until April 1994, six years after the original Orange Book spec was finalized and the first stadium-size CD recording systems were installed. First in the 4X field was Yamaha Systems Technology's CDR 100. Initially priced at $5000, the Yamaha CDR 100 remained the only 4X recorder available until late 1995. And it remained the world's fastest half-height until well after that.

The second 4X recorder to hit the streets was the Pioneer DW-S114X, which shipped in late 1995. The DW-S114X was a full-height external recorder based on the recording mechanism that Pioneer used in its DRM-5004X 500-disc CD jukeboxes. Priced at $3250 when the Yamaha was selling for less than half that, the Pioneer 4X found little market acceptance, although it was an industrial-strength unit well-suited to mass duplication jobs. CD-R duplicator manufacturers had already successfully integrated the half-height caddy-loading Yamahas into their subsystems, though, and were loath to retool for a full-height tray-loading recorder. Pioneer quickly retreated from the duplicator-dominated 4X market, discontinued the DW-S114X as a retail and OEM product, and re-directed its CD efforts to the jukebox business and, more recently, to the development of its forthcoming DVD-R drive.

TEAC became the next manufacturer to enter the 4X recording market when the company's RS-50S 4X tray-loading recorder shipped in late 1996. Initially constrained because of its media-limiting BIOS table, TEAC has since established itself as a credible Yamaha competitor in the duplication market, shipping with many disc-production systems, including the Rimage Perfect Image Producer and Mitsui's TransCorder system. Two factors that created immediate appeal for the TEAC drive, particularly in OEM markets, was a lower list price than the Yamaha CDR 400 series and a less temperamental loading tray.

Both the Yamaha CDR100 and TEAC RS-50S were 4X write/4X read models. The first new 4X entrant to emerge in 1997, Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, immediately upped the read-speed ante with its 4X write, 8X read model. The product debuted in the U.S. under the nameplate of Matsushita subsidiary and primary U.S. distributor Panasonic as the 7502B.

Plextor Corporation, a read-only CD-ROM institution with its high-speed CAV/CLV drives and towers, completed the current quad-speed quartet in fourth quarter 1997 when the company debuted its 4X write/12X read Plextor PX-R412Ci at COMDEX 97.

HURRY UP AND WAIT: FUMBLING FOR 4X

Why did it take so long for other manufacturers to join Yamaha in the 4X race? That Yamaha reached the 4X starting line first is no surprise, since Yamaha already had a head start after releasing the industry's first 1X CD recorder in 1988. During the six-year interval between that drive's debut and the 1994 release of the CDR100, as newer entrants to the field fought the battle of 1X and 2X, Yamaha was free to devote more research and development resources to its quest for quad speed. And given the state of CD-R technology to that point, Yamaha engineers surely faced an arduous process. Writing at 4X meant implementing significant improvement in the recorder's optical head and large-scale integration of the chips that drive the drive. A look inside a Yamaha CDR 100 shows what was necessary to implement 4X recording in 1994. The CDR 100 has seven VLSI chips and more than 30 supporting chips on the controller board.

The next still-shipping model in general release, TEAC's RS-50S, carried a comparable chip-load. However, a glance under the hood of Yamaha's next-generation 4X model, the CDR400, finds the set-up significantly streamlined, requiring only 3 VLSI chips and 12 supporting ICs.