The one-floor office in the large building by the tracks, near JR Shin-Kawasaki Station and visible from the Shonan Shinjuku Liner and the Yokosuga Line, is where our experts on optical disk drives gather. The floor is a conglomerate of Pioneer’s many functions, and every element from marketing to technical is found on the floor. It is our incubator of development, powered by the heat of the communication that takes place there day and night. Previously, the development base was situated in Tokorozawa, Saitama, and the marketing and planning division was based in Meguro-ku, Tokyo. After the holiday week in May 2007, the two functions joined up in this new office building in Shinogura, Kawasaki (Kanagawa Prefecture). The travel time between the two offices was more than an hour and a half---now it’s a matter of seconds. The effects were not limited to reduced geographic distance. It also brought the development team closer to the market. New products are being created at the new Pioneer development base, infused with the engineers’ hope that customers will be happy with the creations.

The inaugural product from the Kawasaki Shinogura Office was the blu-ray combo drive BDC-202, but the development of this model was mostly undertaken at the former Tokorozawa Office. The DVD writers DVR-206, introduced in August 2008, and all subsequent series were fully designed at the Kawasaki Office. To give an example, the DVR-S16/DVR-206 series is equipped with the automatic write speed selection function, advanced “Pure Read” function, newly designed silent dustproof mechanism, and an eco-friendly front panel fully adopting plant-derived resin---all of which are new technologies originated at the Kawasaki Office.

Considering how heavily high-speed write drives are commercially promoted by various manufacturers, their claimed maximum speeds are generally available for surprisingly few media. Most brands only offer maximum speed for 2 or 3 media types with their DVD-R and DVD+R drives, respectively.

As one of our pursuits, in order to expand the customers’ range of choice, we provide drives that can offer maximum write speed for more than 10 media types for both DVD-R and DVD+R.

In the actual writing process, Pioneer's drives write data while inspecting the condition of the medium so that the playability of the burned disk is ensured. Even when a model is confirmed a write speed of 20x, if an individual medium is identified as having reduced play performance due to flawed mechanical properties, our drives drops the writing speed to ensure precise recording. High-speed recording is only meaningful when complete data recording is ensured. If any part of the outer tracks is left unplayable, customers will be dissatisfied, which is what we care about the most. Another less known benefit we provide through DVR-S16/DVR-206 is the support for a wider range of media. Even for CDs, this series has recording parameters that enable recording to media rarely used today. Most of our products officially support media that people may have kept tucked away for years.

Even in cases where the medium’s mechanical properties are problem-free, the actual playability may not be stable, lacking correlation with the tested values. Our amassed proprietary know-how effectively supports such cases as well.

Tray loading is a mechanism that has been used for a long time and is now possibly considered outdated by many manufacturers, but if you explore it in more depth, you can see that it leaves room for improvement.
We re-designed the whole tray loading mechanism from scratch, which enabled us to come back to thinking about what we can do as mechanical designers… and seriously ruminate over what the world wants… (everyone laughs).
Well, in short, we got our hands on the design with the goal to bring into being a mechanism that offers high-speed as well as quietness, while supporting reliability and high precision, and it also shouldn’t cost too much.

Not only did we look at tray loading, but we also elaborated on every possible aspect we could, which, as an example, resulted in improvements to the casing so that mounting it does not hurt the users’ hands.

Other improvements include reduced noise. We made a total revision to the structure around the front. Then we worked on improving the tray shape to minimize resistance to the flow with the aim to reduce sounds produced internally (wind noise from disk). Finally, in order to maximize the soundproofing and dust-proofing qualities, we made improvements to the details of the casing. Specifically, we increased the number of interlocking casing parts to hold the parts together.

And that’s just one element of our being particular with our creations. As a result, we succeeded in drastically improving dust-proofing and heat radiation performance as well as quietness.

This may not be widely known to the public, but music CDs are more easily subjected to read errors from scratches, fingerprints, warps, and eccentricity than CD-ROMs due to the low error correction capability. In actual use, with CD players, unreadable sound data is automatically filled in by using adjacent data, and people don’t usually notice the gap. However, if the gap is so big that it doesn’t allow for full interpolation, it will be heard as noise. Some people also mention that the part compensated for has an altered soundscape.

Since this is a problem affecting the core mechanics of how music CDs are handled, conventional music CDs playback does not provide for the best quality soundscape. What I want to say here is that, unless the CD is always appropriately read according to the condition of the disk, the actual sounds recorded on the music CD cannot be accurately played.

There was a time in my life when I was seriously considering a career as a pianist or composer, and I still continue musical activities as a hobby. For that reason, though I say so myself, I am quite particular about wanting to listen to the full, actual sounds on the music CD, and to be able to accurately read music CDs. So, I came up with the idea to read the CD correctly without compensating the data even when a read error occurs.

First, I made a couple different algorithms for the planning and marketing members around to here. Looking back, these were the prototypes for “Pure Read.” The members who listened to prototype of Pure Read suggested adopting this feature in our products, so we accelerated the pace of development, barely making it for the deadline for product implementation. I would say that was really physically demanding. Thereafter, we continued to upgrade performance through further development. The DVR-S16/DVR-206 series now utilizes the latest Pure Read function.

A part of the new technologies that were born at the Kawasaki Office are demonstrated at the Trade Show held annually at Japan and other exhibitions around the world. Please look forward to our future models originating from Shinogura, Kawasaki.