detail information

Review: Yamaha CRW3200E
Reviewer: G@M3FR3@K
Provided by: Yamaha Europe GmbH
Firmware: version 1.0d
Production date: April 2002

The Yamaha CRW3200E (24/10/40) is Yamaha's latest CD-RW drive and has been around for a couple of months now. The drive we're going to review however, has been manufactured in April of this year (2002) with the latest firmware (1.0d). Therefore this review will give you a fresh new look on this 'old' writer. We asked Yamaha why they haven't released a new (read: faster) writer yet and we received this reply:

"..Our opinion is that the speed of CD-writers isn't any longer an argument. The advantages between a 24x drive and a 32x drive are not so big. Unfortunately speed is still the main criterium in press reviews of cd-writers. For us it is more important to offer the best quality. Our drives are working with the Partial-CAV writing method which offers the best possible writing quality without "links" due to the constant increasing of speed while writing. Other manufacturers using Zone-CLV writing method are producing links everytime when the laser has to pause in order to increase the speed (by the way: in some reviews, editors found out that our 24x P-CAV drive is faster than a 32x Z-CLV drive of a competitor). Furthermore we created with "Audio Master Quality Recording" a feature which is the perfect solution for users which want to have the best possible sound-quality of home-burned Audio-CDs.

In summer 2002 we will launch the successor of CRW3200, which will offer higher speeds (faster than 40x), the feature which can print graphics on the unused part of the data-side on a CD (see picture on the right) and improved Audio Master Quality Recording.."

So big things are planned for this summer... Faster than 40x writing probably means that Yamaha will introduce a 48x recorder but of course we're speculating here. Like mentioned this future drive will also have the option to write images on the unused part of the CD-R as introduced during the CeBit conference this year. Very interesting!

Now let's continue with our review. The Yamaha CRW3200E, like mentioned before, is a 24/10/40 drive and it's the first writer that we're going to review that writes in the so-called P-CAV mode. In this review we'll take a look at if the drive can compete with other drives using the more popular Z-CLV writing method and if it's indeed faster. We'll of course also test the drive's abilities to read discs and its claimed supported technique's (and this drive supports quite a few). Read on to see what we have to say about this drive.

Test Machine:

For the tests we'll be using the following configuration:

Hardware:

• Processor: AMD Athlon 700Mhz
• Motherboard: ASUS K7V
• RAM: 256MB (PC133)
• Harddisk: Maxtor 30GB 7200rpm (UDMA 66)

System set-up:

As you can see the Yamaha CRW3200E was set-up as MASTER on the Secondary IDE Channel and identifies itself as "YAMAHA CRW3200E". DMA (Direct Memory Access) and Autorun were enabled for every device. All drives (including the Yamaha CRW3200E) support UDMA33.

Used Software:

The Windows XP Professional operating system is installed on our test machine. We'll be using the following software to perform the various tests:

• Ahead InCD v3.28.0
• Ahead Nero Burning Rom v5.5.8.2
• Ahead Nero CD Speed v0.85e beta
• Ahead Nero InfoTool v1.01
• Elaborate Bytes CloneCD v4.0.0.1
• Exact Audio Copy v0.9 beta 3
• G&M CDR Identifier v1.63
• Software Architect's WriteCD-RW! Pro v3.04

Let's take a look at the package of the Yamaha CRW3200E...