New Box In Town
The Age
Thursday December 19, 2002
Yamaha's new CD recorder makes skip-proof discs and has enough holding capacity to be a jukebox, says Greg Borrowman.
Compact discs aren't supposed to skip, but try telling that to anyone who owns a car CD player. Potholes and speed bumps can wreak havoc on playback.
A CD skips when the reading laser is jolted so hard the beam cannot track along the spiral of pits moulded into the disc. When you consider that each pit is just half a micron wide, it's surprising CD players don't skip at the slightest bump. Whether or not a disc skips sometimes depends on how the disc was made. Discs made at home on a computer burner or a CD-recorder are far more likely to mistrack than a commercial pressing.
Yamaha's new CD recorder is able to burn CDs with pits that are 17 per cent larger than those produced by conventional CD recorders. Discs made using its Audio Master Quality Recording (AMQR) mode are far more resistant to skipping than ordinary CDs.
Yamaha says larger pits are less likely to be affected by ultraviolet radiation, so discs regularly exposed to sunlight will last longer.
The company also claims that larger pits reduce a technical problem known as jitter, which affects the stream of data being recovered by the CD laser. As the jitter rate goes down, sound quality goes up.
AMQR has one drawback. Because the pits are larger, there is a corresponding reduction in record/play times, so you can't fill recordable CDs to their stated maximum capacity. In AMQR mode, 63 minutes of sound will fill a 74-minute blank CD-R.
The CDR-HD1300 is not just a CD recorder. It also contains an 80GB hard disk on to which you can copy the music from 120 CDs for instant replay, effectively turning the Yamaha into an enormous jukebox. If you own more than 120 CDs, you can get additional 80GB drives from any computer store for about $240 each.
The Yamaha stores music in uncompressed PCM format to ensure playback quality from the hard drive is identical to that from the original CD. Most other hard-disk machines compress the music before recording it to disk, resulting in inferior sound quality.
Transferring a CD to the Yamaha's hard drive is a simple matter of inserting a disc and pressing the "disc copy" button. Discs copy at 10 times normal speed, so each disc transfers in about six minutes.
Once the tracks are loaded on the hard drive, they can be replayed like an ordinary CD, or arranged in any order to dub down to a blank CD-R or CD-RW, with or without AMQR mode enabled.
If you want skip-proof CDs or to have fun with a high-tech CD jukebox, Yamaha's
CDR-HD1300 is just the ticket.
Greg Borrowman is the editor of Australian Hi-Fi magazine.
SPICKS & SPECS
PRODUCT Yamaha CDR-HD1300 HDD/CD Recorder
PRICE $1599
DISTRIBUTOR Yamaha Music (Australia) Pty Ltd
99 Queensbridge Street, Southbank, Victoria, 3006
PHONE 1800 682 705
E-MAIL info@audiodynamics.com.au
WEB www.yamaha.co.jp/english/
© 2002 The Age