Yamaha announced they will exit the CD-RW drive market. They make the excellent CRW-F1 drive, which is unique in that is capable of imprinting messages such as titles in the unused portion of the disc. The user interface for this “Disc@T2” feature is somewhat clunky, but this is a great feature that is easily worth the price premium in my opinion. Unfortunately, it seems my opinion is not shared and most people would rather pay less for a commodity than pay for innovation.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, Kenwood discontinued its line of 72x CD-ROM drives a year or two ago. When mine failed, I had no spare and no alternative but to get a noisier, slower Sony 52x. The Kenwood drives managed this by using a Zen Research beam splitter head to read multiple tracks in parallel, and thus did not need to rotate the disc as fast and induce as much vibration as conventional designs.

This time, I am prepared and I am hoarding 2 of these Yamaha drives before stocks run out…