I suspect CD ROMs used CAV (in contrast to audio CDs which used CLV) because the processors (perhaps originally based off audio processors) could intially only

I suspect CD ROMs used CAV (in contrast to audio CDs which used CLV) because the processors (perhaps originally based off audio processors) could intially only deal with a fixed data rate, and with CLV + random access, the drive would have to spin up and down repeatedly according to where on the disk the laser had seeked to, which would have a large impact on random access times. As the speed of drives got faster and faster (up to 52x) that problem wouldve been exacerbated too.