Encased in a stylish, high quality, titanium-colored durable case, the CRW-70 has a top-opening design, resembling most of the portable CD players in the market today. This convenient design allows quick and full access to the disc, and is much safer than slot feed or pop out tray designs.

``To design our new Spyder, we focused heavily on the trend that lifestyle-oriented products are gaining increasing popularity, just like they did in the home audio business a few years ago,'' states Allen H. Gharapetian, general manager, Yamaha Multimedia Products Division. ``Our CRW-70 not only performs above and beyond any slimline CD-RW recorder in the market, it also looks great when placed next to any new desktop or notebook product.''

Another exclusive feature that Yamaha has built into the Spyder is an MP3 Playback mode, designed for today's extensive MP3-driven music uses. The CRW-70 comes with built-in hardware decoding for MP3 playback, allowing the user to play hundreds of hours of music from a single data CD. The software suite included in the product package features both encoding and decoding of MP3 and other condensed music formats.

The CRW-70 can also be used as a stand-alone CD player. Yamaha includes all necessary control buttons on the unit itself, allowing it to function as a CD player without the need to be connected to a PC. In addition, the CRW-70 is able to play back up to 300 MP3 titles from a CD, effectively functioning as a practical MP3 jukebox.