detail information

As mentioned before the Yamaha CRW-F1 can write discs at a maximum speed of 44X using the Full-CAV method. Yamaha has always been known for their CAV write method with which the speed is steadily increased during the write process instead of dividing the disc into different write zones (Z-CLV). CAV or Full-CAV is a lot faster than Z-CLV and many manufacturers are switching to this technique.

For the write tests We set-up a basic write process using the latest Nero Burning Rom version 5.5.9.0. We used the DAO (Disc At Once) method for writing the disc. The disc was finalized and set-up as a non-multisession disc. In the screenshot below you can see the burn process completed successfully at 44X:

The disc was written without problems in 3 minutes and 4 seconds. Another thing we have to mention here is the limited amount of available write speeds the Yamaha CRW-F1 offers. You can write at 1X/4X/8X/16X and then a big leap to 44X. The Yamaha CRW-F1 doesn't offer any speeds in between. This means that you're letting the drive itself decide the best write speed when you select 44X writing. During the write process the Yamaha chipset will determine the best write speed and will increase or decrease the speed accordingly.

Is this an advantage or disadvantage? Well you will have to decide for yourself since this is totally a personal feeling. Of course when you're letting the drive decide the best write speed you can't do anything to prevent a bad burn, except by of course decreasing the speed to 16X. But on the other hand if the drive makes a good burn at the highest speed possible and does this reliably then there's no problem. We did several burns with the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive and all discs worked fine afterwards. There were not all written at 44X but they did all work and that's what's important.

You can force the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive to write all media at 44X by disabling its 'Optimum Writespeed Control' in Nero Burning Rom but we would never recommend this since the chance of a shiny coaster is simply to big.

Comparing:

Because the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive doesn't allow the user to select different write speeds between 16X and 44X we couldn't directly compare the drive for each write speed. We can tell you that a write time of about 3 minutes and 4 seconds is in between the write times of a 40X and 48X recorder as expected. Some of the drives were however faster when writing at 40X than the Yamaha writing at 44X such as the Lite-On LTR-48125W. This is not that strange since this drive uses a very aggressive write strategy.

On the 'Media Compatibility' page of our Yamaha CRW-F1 review you can see some of the write times we achieved with different media.

Writing Audio:

The next thing we're going to check is the Yamaha CRW-F1's audio writing abilities. As already mentioned on page 3 (features) of our review, this Yamaha drive supports the 'Advanced Audio Master Quality' recording technique. We already saw this technique with Yamaha's previous model but with the CRW-F1 drive they've taken it one step further introducing 1X and 8X recording (besides the standard 4X) and support for 99 minute media so you can burn 79 minutes of music.

The memory capacity of a 650MB or 700MB CD-R is respectively 63 or 68 minutes. This is because the 'pits' and 'lands' on the disc are longer and take up more space than with normal writing. With 99 minute media it's now possible to write 79 minutes of music to the disc.

To test the Yamaha's 'Advanced Audio Master Quality Recording' feature we ripped the tracks (in WAV format) of an audio disc with Exact Audio Copy (Secure Mode) and then started a new audio session in Nero Burning Rom version 5.5.9.0. When writing audio you can see an option to enable 'Audio Master Q.R.':

Because we made a compilation of 79 minutes we need to overburn the disc (since, as explained above, normally you could only fit 68 minutes on a 700MB CD-R when writing in the special audio mode). We used some DataTrack 99 minute CD-R discs for the tests.

In the screenshot below you can see the process completed successfully. The disc was written at 4X without any problems in 24 minutes and 16 seconds:

We then listened to the created disc and tried them in a car stereo (Sony CDX-L400X). As we already suspected the disc played fine and we couldn't hear the difference between a disc created with the 'Advanced Audio Master Quality Recording' mode or without it.

Conclusion:

The Yamaha CRW-F1 drive does what it promises but it falls a little short of the claimed 44X writing (see page 4: features continued, write method). The Yamaha CRW-F1 is faster than most of the other 40X recorders we've reviewed and is of course slower than the 48X recorders. As we saw when we did the various write tests the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive has a limited amount of available write speeds. It's really up to you to decide if this is an advantage or a disadvantage. On the next page we did some quality tests with various media at full write speed which will clarify some things.

When writing audio the Yamaha CRW-F1 offers the mentioned 'Advanced Audio Master Quality Recording' mode but unfortunately we, just as with the Yamaha CRW3200E with its 'Audio Master Quality Recording', couldn't tell the difference between a disc written in this special audio mode and an audio disc written at full speed. What does this mean? Well maybe our ears aren't that good or maybe it's just that the CD-players we tested aren't very picky. However if you have a sensitive CD-player like a car stereo which has problems playing CD-Recordables, 'Advanced Audio Master Quality Recording' will definitely come in handy.

On the next page of our Yamaha CRW-F1 review we've done some write quality tests using Lite-On's C1/C2 error measurement software...

Scratched/Low Quality Disc

Write Quality