Yamaha drive - part deux

[David R. Modny]

The damned thing died on me last nite...after 28 days of use! Made a godawful noise, bounced one of my treasured discs around inside for a few seconds , slowed down spinning, then started up spinning again and did it all over again. Eventually I cut the power, and it starts reeking of that famous burnt electrical smell. Out comes the said disc looking like it was used as a brake pad.

^&$%^#$%)&*!!!!....happy new year.

[rontokyo]

So lemme see if I got this straight: I dump my Plextor [which I was veeery happy with, I might add] and pick up a Yamaha on account of all the glowing testimonials I read here. And NOW I find out that the sucker's gonna eat my favorite CD and die within a month!?! I'm not reading the "Audio Hardware" forum any more! [Oh. Sorry about your CDR. I assume you can return it??]

[Gary Freed]

Hi Dave,

That hurts big time. I feel your pain. Yamaha makes fine products and the users reviews have been pretty favorable. Sorry to hear about your misfortune.

[mcow1]

Originally posted by rontokyo
So lemme see if I got this straight: I dump my Plextor [which I was veeery happy with, I might add] and pick up a Yamaha on account of all the glowing testimonials I read here. And NOW I find out that the sucker's gonna eat my favorite CD and die within a month!?! I'm not reading the "Audio Hardware" forum any more! [Oh. Sorry about your CDR. I assume you can return it??]
Still got the Plextor? Yamaha makes pretty good stuff but I don't think I'd dump a Plextor for one

[David R. Modny]

Well, I exchanged it for another one tonight. What can I say...I'm a masochist. Let's hope this one does the trick.

BTW, I just wanted to post my experience as a *personal* anecdote. I've had e-mails from others who are having no problems with theirs. Also, mine sounded kinda sick (i.e. mechanically noisy) from the start. T'was a shame.

[rontokyo]

Originally posted by mcow1
Still got the Plextor? Yamaha makes pretty good stuff but I don't think I'd dump a Plextor for one

Guess I should've inserted a smiley face. Nah, I was just joking. Actually, I got my 24X Plextor almost exactly a year ago and haven't had even a whiff of trouble ["whiff" of trouble??]. And as I "splurged" at the time and got the latest, newest, fastest model [the 16X had just been surpassed], I was bummed to soon find out that the Easy CD Creator software I'd been using wouldn't support the Plextor. So after much searching and auditioning demos, I finally settled on EAC which, after the purchase of the Plextor became the second smartest decision I'd made in recent memory.

As an aside, I noticed last week that the new 48X Plextors are out and selling for about $20 less than I paid for my 24X. When will all this end? Are there no limits to speed increases and cost reductions? Well, to answer my own question, the default write speed on the 48X is set at 40X max unless you press the eject button three times to goose it up to 48X. At those speeds there exists the real danger of minor imperfections on the disc itself causing it to shatter inside the drive. So I guess there may be limits after all.

[Grant]

David,

What did the box for the Yamaha drive look like? Was it the older box with the stupid speed meters on the front, or the newer, less cluttered white box?

Also, were you writing at the higest speed, or ripping?

I never write at very high speeds with the Plextor, and I tend not to rip that quickly, either.

[David R. Modny]

Grant,

The defective one was the older "hi-tech" looking box. The replacement I got today is the white box -- manufactured Oct. 2002, Firmware 1.0 d.

I'm probably going to do the firmware revision on Yamaha's site before I do anything else.

When it crapped out, I was just getting ready to do an extraction. The drive started spinning up and made the horrible noise before all hell broke loose.

Up until that point, I was mostly doing AMQ burns at 4x. Though, I did get a little naughty a few times and made some standard 16X burns.

Funny thing is, I mentioned to someone that I almost thought the 16x standard burns sounded a bit more refined and delicate on a couple of discs than even the comparable AMQ slow-speed burn. I'm wondering if the Sony media I was using was optimized to work better with higher speeds. Unfortunately, I was just getting warmed up with comparsions when it fritzed out.

Also, a fellow board member did mention to me just how well defined the lands and pits were from the Yamaha when put under the microscope. So, it's a good unit...if it stays working this time for me.

[Grant]

David, you could very well have gotten a bad unit.

About blank speed ratings. They DO mean something, and one is very wise to heed them. But my course of action is to burn music at less than half of what the top speed rating is. I NEVER use the burn-proof feature for music because it works by basically making the laser pick up where it left off. This causes a high amount of errors at the point of continuence, which is unacceptable for serious, master quality burns. Just a little something they don't tell you...

I guess i'll still buy this unit. But I am going to check the Yamaha message board first. I can't wait to make AMQ burns, as the majority of my work is restoring vinyl LPs that usually don't run over 45 minutes.

[Ronflugelguy]

Originally posted by Grant
David, you could very well have gotten a bad unit.

About blank speed ratings. They DO mean something, and one is very wise to heed them. But my course of action is to burn music at less than half of what the top speed rating is. I NEVER use the burn-proof feature for music because it works by basically making the laser pick up where it left off. This causes a high amount of errors at the point of continuence, which is unacceptable for serious, master quality burns. Just a little something they don't tell you...

I guess i'll still buy this unit. But I am going to check the Yamaha message board first. I can't wait to make AMQ burns, as the majority of my work is restoring vinyl LPs that usually don't run over 45 minutes.

Went to circuit City to buy one tonight. They were out....said they would have some in on Wed. Maybe I'll hold out a bit longer......Any other suggestions for a burner?

[garryfp]

The only two programs that I know of the use the Audio Master Quality Recording mode is Nero and Feurio!. And the only speeds that can be used in that mode are 2x, 4x, and 8x. Anything above them and its not being used.

garryfp

[Grant]

I posed a question to Yesman. I wondered if he, or anyone in the recording community uses the AMQ feature. As far as we know so far, none do. My other question was if AMQ recordings fall in line with red-book standards.

See, We have a Plextor on one machine but I need a better burner on the other and I was seriously considering getting a Yamaha F1 internal unit tomorrow for the other PC. The burner has oter great features too, just like the Plextor, but the Yamahas are a bit cheaper and in abundance these days.

[Paul C.]

I have had my Yamaha F1 for about four months, and love it. No problems at all. I like the AMQ feature, but I have had very good results doing burns at higher speeds without using AMQ. It seems to be a well-made unit. I upgraded my firmware to 1.0d from the Yamaha website, no problems.

I recently transferred on old Australian jazz-rock LP to CD, using the AMQ feature. Used CoolEdit with no noise reduction or anything, then burnt using Nero. I have been having a ball playing that disc over and over - sounds indistinguishable from the vinyl.

[Grant]

I just need to know if AMQ is red-book compliant.

[Paul C.]

According to the blurbs put out by Yamaha, the AMQ feature creates discs that conform to redbook specs re pit-length. It would have to be, I would think, or it would not be very useful on many CD players.

Check out this page from a review on Tom's Hardware:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020927/yamaha-04.html

It mentions that the speed of rotation is increased from 1.2 to 1.4 m/sec, increasing pit length by 15% - within redbook.

I think it is significant that this drive can create "cleaner" pits than some others, as reported above. That's got to be good for playback, whether using AMQ or not.

[Grant]

I just installed this baby! Now, how do I turn on the AMQ feature?

[Sckott]

I had bought a 16X Yamaha CDR drive about 3 years ago. Let's just say even under warranty, I can't give the company stellar reviews.

They sent the drive back to me unscathed. No repair, it works fine. Welp, it didn't. I tried re-contacting them, and it became a career. I gave up and got a Sony drive, and now I'm on a Lite-On drive happilly.

Again, if you have wonderful experience with Yamaha, all the better!

[Paul C.]

Grant, you need to have Nero installed to make use of the AMQ - are you familiar with Nero? It's not my favourite burning program - I find the interface a bit odd, but it does a good job of burning. I'm not sure whether the drive comes with Nero usually - when I bought my drive, it was part of a system, and Nero was a separate item, a version with serial number tailored for Yamaha burners, at AUD $10 (US $6) extra cost. I hope you've got Nero, because as mentioned elsewhere, it looks like only Feurio can also handle AMQ.

So in Nero, in the write dialog box, on the last tab, you'll see a pull-down box that allows you to specify the type of burn for a given situation eg. DAO, Track at once, etc. (I can't remember the exact options) one of the options is Audio Master Quality. When you select that, you burn speed options are restricted to 1x, 4x and 8x. The option for AMQ should appear in the pull-down menu when you are doing various types of burns, such as Copy CD, Make Audio Compilation, etc. I assume it is not an option for data discs - I haven't tried it.

Good luck and happy burning

[Claviusb]

Originally posted by Grant
I just installed this baby! Now, how do I turn on the AMQ feature?

Paul, unless Grant bought an OEM version, Nero ships on a CD with the Yamaha in the U.S. and is already enabled with the code for Yamaha drives. You have to pay extra to purchase a serial from Nero that enables other drives as burners.

Be forewarned, AQM at 4x will take over an hour to burn a 40 minute disc. It's worth waiting for IMO.

[Paul C.]

Thanks for clearing that up Claviusb. Are you sure about it taking an hour at 4x AMQ? It does certainly seem to take a fair bit longer for the lead-in and lead-out to be processed when doing AMQ burns, but I would have estimated that an hour would have been about right if you chose to burn at the 1x speed. But I could be wrong.

[garryfp]

Try Feurio!, it's what I use to burn all my music cdr's. You can download a full featured demo at Feurio.com. It can be a bit confusing at times but once you use it a while it becomes second nature. One of the best music burning programs I have ever used.

garryfp

[Claviusb]

Originally posted by Paul Christie
Thanks for clearing that up Claviusb. Are you sure about it taking an hour at 4x AMQ? It does certainly seem to take a fair bit longer for the lead-in and lead-out to be processed when doing AMQ burns, but I would have estimated that an hour would have been about right if you chose to burn at the 1x speed. But I could be wrong.

Paul, maybe the ones I burned that took over an hour were closer to the 45 minute mark as far as total time of the original disc, but that's still odd, as it only takes about 3-9 minutes to rip the CD to the hard drive. As you can see in this screen-shot, I am burning at 4x and the 36 minute disc took 51:55 to burn (3 minutes of that is for ripping, though). You can see how a disc that has a time of 45 minutes could easily go over an hour. As you noted, the lead-ins and lead-outs take an unusually long time to burn (it took over 2 ½ minutes just to burn the lead-out, some burners burn an entire disc in that time.) This translates into a 4x burn that takes longer than real-time to do-- if you use AMQ.

I'm not knocking the results, but that's what kind of times I'm seeing.

[Grant]

OK,

I bought a retail unit with the firmware revision 1.0d. Yes, it has Nero, I don't like Nero, but it's the only way I can use some of the features. The drive works flawlessly in Cool EDit Pro 2.0 as well, but I have to update CD Creator to write. CD Creator, however, reads from the drive.

I am about to upgrade the firmware version to 1.0f. This is a good a place to tell you, David Modny, the reason for your first drive's failure. I found the reason on the website. All you needed to do was upgrade the firmware.

Here it is:

New firmware 1.0f provides option to change maximum read speed in Audio CD extraction.

CRW-F1 can extract audio tracks comfortably at a maximum speed of 44x. However, in rare cases, some bad-conditioned Audio CDs may unlocked from the disc holding mechanism and may be damaged, due to the fast rotation speed of the disc (8700 rpm).

Examples of these bad-conditioned discs include:
1) Unbalanced CDs such as ones labeled with sticker;
2) CDs with extremely thin clamp area (plastic area around the center hole) worn down after long time use.

The new firmware version 1.0f sets the default maximum read speed of Audio CDs at 24x (4700 rpm) for safe and stable audio extraction even with these bad-conditioned discs.

The speed limitation by this ‘safe mode’ can temporarily be removed by the following operations.
1) Open the disc tray and put an Audio CD;
2) Keep pressing the eject button for about five seconds;
3) Make sure the tray is properly closed, then let your finger away from the eject button;
4) Now CRW-F1 should read the Audio CD at a maximum speed of 44x (8700 rpm).

By re-opening the tray, the CRW-F1 goes back to the default ‘safe mode’ that reads the Audio CDs at a maximum speed of 24x (4700 rpm).

Please note that it is applied only to audio extraction from commercially available pressed Audio CDs. Below is a list of default maximum read speeds depending on the disc types with firmware version 1.0f.

Audio CD (commercially available pressed) max. 24x (4700 rpm) can be switched to max. 44x
CD-ROM (commercially available pressed) max. 44x (8700 rpm)
CD-R (audio/data) max. 44x (8700 rpm)
CD-RW (audio/data)


One more thing: this drive makes GREAT-sounding CD-Rs! The T@2 technology is pretty much worthless unless you use the dark-blue Azo dye CD-Rs. It is useful for watermarking your CD-R with any brand of blank. Another interesting thing, the website shows that blanks made by Ritek(!) have lower jitter than TDK cyanine when used in this unit. I guess it's safe to use those TDK and Memorex blanks if you didn't trust them before!

[lukpac]

Originally posted by Grant
I am about to upgrade the firmware version to 1.0f. This is a good a place to tell you, David Modny, the reason for your first drive's failure. I found the reason on the website. All you needed to do was upgrade the firmware.

If I'm not mistaken, David *had* upgraded the firmware already. I know he did on the second unit he got, which was burning unreadable discs. Last I knew he was about to try #3 (and *not* upgrade the firmware this time).

[Claviusb]

Luke, David told me that upgrading the firmware was the *next* thing he planned to do with the first burner. Wow! I hadn't heard that he'd moved on to unit #3, though...