Emedia Professional: 8x cd recording: double down, odds even - Smart and Friendly's CD Rocket

It's not the visceral razzle-dazzle or even the $2.99 buffet that makes Las Vegas so spectacularly compelling, it's the possibility that it could all be as easy as double down, double your money. If anything, the week when the entire computer industry descends en masse on the city heightens the feeding frenzy and sense of expectation. If you've got any stake in CD-Recordable technology, the product that turned your head fastest at COMDEX 97 was Smart and Friendly's CD Rocket, the world's first eight-speed CD-Recordable drive.

On paper, the CD Rocket looks like the 8X Wonder of the World. Recording a CD at 8X is a tremendous accomplishment, and in the abstract it makes it hard to argue with Smart and Friendly CEO Perry Solomon's claim that the CD Rocket is "the most compelling offering in the history of CD-R technology," providing, of course, it does what it purports to do. After all, 8X means double the recording speed of the fastest recorders sold in retail channels today, even at a time when the installed base of 2X recorders still far exceeds that of its 4X counterparts. Only Kodak, with its 6X model, has ever exceeded 4X, and never at a price anywhere near the sub-$1,000 level Smart and Friendly has promised for the CD Rocket.

The most common CD recorders today write at A and read at 6X, which makes the 8X write/20X read CD Rocket seem really out there. Current projections still vary widely on the issue of when 4X recorders will become the industry norm; some see 2X recording mechanisms remaining the consumer-level standard while others expect to find 2X recording phased out by late 1998, and 4X write/2X rewrite/8X read drives emerging as the common desktop system. Quad speed drives, on the other hand, have for some time claimed the lion's share of the duplicator market, with most systems using the Yamaha, TEAC, or Matsushita models. So, write speed spectacle aside: Where does 8X fit?

Physically, the 8X CD Rocket in both the internal and external versions fits anywhere the typical two- or four-speed recorder does. The $999 price tag on its internal model isn't bad either, considering that its performance specs are double those of today's $600 4X drives. But when it comes to systems, networks, software, and media, how will A recording, with its 1200KB/sec data-burning rate, fit?

When Yamaha debuted its first 4X drive, the CDR100, in October 1995, the drive came with the caveat that its 512KB buffer didn't leave much room for error if the 486 PCs in use at the time couldn't muster a sustained data flow fast enough to prevent buffer underruns. Where such problems did arise, particularly when the drives were asked to write large filesets from poorly organized directory structures, the drives were reduced, for all practical purposes, to 2X units.

Times have changed, of course, and as 166Mhz Pentium and faster PCs have become commonplace, so have recorders with data buffers as large as 2MB, which Yamaha and others consider a size well-matched to 4X recording. CD-R users are also more likely today to have greater hard drive space available. Packet writing has also come along to simplify the recording process tremendously, and greatly reduce the likelihood of buffer underrun. But packet writing doesn't work for all applications, including some of the most common uses of CD-R such as premastering and audio recording. And as CD recording over networks grows in popularity, users are increasingly finding that sustaining the 600KB/sec data flow necessary for 4X recording in non-packet modes remains a challenging task, particularly on busy networks.

How realistic is the jump to 8X, enticing as it sounds? And how risky a proposition, on a retail level, will it prove for Smart and Friendly? Is the differentiating feature of 8X worth the $400-$500 premium if many customers won't even be able to use it?

There are other questions, too. How hot will 8X recorders get when powering up to high-speed writes? Current duplicator and tower cooling apparati often seem barely adequate for ventilating 4X-level heat generation. And what about media? For example, when the Yamaha 4X debuted, a morass of media conflicts quickly emerged, since all media types at the time weren't up to the challenge of 4X writing. Today's media renders such concerns irrelevant, and purely on a drive to disc level, buying and using media has become just about the cheapest and easiest aspect of CD recording. But the four steps forward in writing speed that 8X recorders offer will almost certainly mean one or more steps back in the consumer confidence that comes with an "any disc, any price, any drive" market environment.

All that said, eight-speed recording will eventually set the CD-R market on its ear--that is, if DVD-RAM doesn't beat it to the punch and turn users' attention to other unsettling technology adoptions. Laying down a cool thousand on the CD Rocket and taking the 8X recording plunge is a lot like doubling down in blackjack--a much better gamble if you know the risks.