Read this: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-eve … drives.1118529/
On a side note Kenwood made great Vintage receivers and amps in the 70's. They were on par with Pioneer of that time and better than many Marantz of the time spec wise.
When Superscope Inc owned Marantz (a divison of Sony) they were great ! But in 1980 when they sold off to Phillips their quality went to shite and Marantz sales fell drastically.
The limited sales and legacy of Saul Marantz who started the Marantz company makes them very desirable today as collectors of old vintage audio of equipment prior to 1980.
Kenwood and Pioneer also fell into similar about 1980 and when Kenwood branched out to other devices used tech from a third party like the TrueX that went out of business those drives dies with them.
It may seem odd that an item from 1990's has anything to do with old audio gear but when the audio companies branched out in the 80's and the 'black plastic" era started it led to companies cutting costs and corners on everything and branching out to areas like computer equipment that they were not familiar in so relied on other contracted companies to fill the voids. This often led to failures which Kenwood saw when it entered the CDROM markets.
All that is from memory so may not be all that accurate but have a small collection of vintage hi-fi gear and have been a partial active member of HiFiengine for years and had to learn some history.
Sorry to run amuck but figured a little background was in order...

To put in perspective: I have a Yamaha SCSI CDROM and Yamaha is known for many things but not their later computer parts. It still works but lucky was built by a good contractor of Yamaha
Sorry got long winded.

Horun wrote on 2021-08-29, 02:54:

Read this: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-eve … drives.1118529/ On a side note Kenwood made great Vintage receivers a […]
Show full quote

Read this: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-eve … drives.1118529/
On a side note Kenwood made great Vintage receivers and amps in the 70's. They were on par with Pioneer of that time and better than many Marantz of the time spec wise.
When Superscope Inc owned Marantz (a divison of Sony) they were great ! But in 1980 when they sold off to Phillips their quality went to shite and Marantz sales fell drastically.
The limited sales and legacy of Saul Marantz who started the Marantz company makes them very desirable today as collectors of old vintage audio of equipment prior to 1980.
Kenwood and Pioneer also fell into similar about 1980 and when Kenwood branched out to other devices used tech from a third party like the TrueX that went out of business those drives dies with them.
It may seem odd that an item from 1990's has anything to do with old audio gear but when the audio companies branched out in the 80's and the 'black plastic" era started it led to companies cutting costs and corners on everything and branching out to areas like computer equipment that they were not familiar in so relied on other contracted companies to fill the voids. This often led to failures which Kenwood saw when it entered the CDROM markets.
All that is from memory so may not be all that accurate but have a small collection of vintage hi-fi gear and have been a partial active member of HiFiengine for years and had to learn some history.
Sorry to run amuck but figured a little background was in order...

Cool! I was only mildly aware of Kenwood's other stuff. I also heard that when mounting the drives with vibration dampeners, they seemed to work better.

Yes Kenwood has a history of great old audio gear. Am sure someone will come along and mention the Yamaha OPL series developed during the 80's and early 90's but by 2000 Yamaha was mostly out of the computer biz focusing on other things.

I thought Kenwood made stickers for car windows?

I used to own one the Kenwood 72x true-x drives. It worked for just under a year and then the drive stopped detecting anything in it one day. Never did find a rhyme or reason and by then it was cheaper to purchase a replacement. I do remember that it ripped my CDs at the time like no other drive I've owned before and the tech behind it certainly seemed good.

But then, no other manufacturer that I'm aware of has ever tried to do something similar since.

Doornkaat wrote on 2021-08-29, 07:34:

I thought Kenwood made stickers for car windows?

The Civic and Jetta/Golf crowd around here obviously think Alpine and Bose make better stickers, but I know what you mean 🤣

I really liked how quiet and fast those drives were but they do tend to fail in fairly short order. I took one apart years ago and I was surprised at how much control circuitry is in there. Considering optical drives were racing towards the bottom to become $25 disc exploders, there probably wasn't a future for those complex & expensive TrueX drives.

I had one back in the day as well. Was finicky about certain types of media but it was really nice for what it was.

I don't remember what happened to the one I had. I don't think it failed. Probably ended up in a system I sold or gave away at some point.

swaaye wrote on 2021-08-31, 01:55:

I really liked how quiet and fast those drives were but they do tend to fail in fairly short order. I took one apart years ago and I was surprised at how much control circuitry is in there. Considering optical drives were racing towards the bottom to become $25 disc exploders, there probably wasn't a future for those complex & expensive TrueX drives.

Good point. I'm guessing that the technology was strong, but the implementation was poor (maybe due to overheating and/or excessive vibration). I guess no one cared to make use of this technology again. It would be really cool if someone (even if a small run), designed one of these drives, but made it more reliable.

Speaking of Audio companies branching into computers, I still have some Nakamichi slot changers that still work.