NEWS •APRIL 2, 2001
Sony Ships Battery-Operated Portable CD-RW
USB-based Digital Relay weighs in at 11.9 ounces

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

Sony has started shipping a portable CD-RW drive that's powered by batteries and can also act as a standalone CD and MP3 player. The new Digital Relay drive uses a USB interface to connect to Macs (and Windows machines) and weighs in at 11.9 ounces without battery, 15.2 ounces with.

The new drive is the first in Sony's Digital Relay line to offer AV capabilities. It has integrated hardware MP3 decoding capabilities for files encodes from 128 kilobits per second to 320 kilobits per second. It can be powered with an AC adapter or a battery that offers 2.5 hours of playback or two hours of recording time.

The Digital Relay offers write speeds of 4x, rewrite speeds of 4x and read speeds of 6x. Data transfer rates range from 300 KB per second in 2x write mode to 600 KB per second in 4x write mode to 900 KB per second in 6x read mode.

It has a wired remote control with LCD display and comes bundled with headphones. On the software side, it comes with two Mac titles: CharisMac Discribe and Dantz Retrospect Express.

The Digital Relay (CRX10U/A2) drive is now available for $399. For more information, visit http://www.sony.com/digitalrelay.

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