Review: Best burners for reading/burning audio CDs, Bonus: CD-R media test Options

[CiTay]

In their previous issue, the noted german c't magazine had an interesting article about different drives and their usefulness for ripping and burning of audio CDs. So good in fact that i want to post some of the results here. I encourage any german reader to buy c't magazine, it's by far the best around. I don't want to spoil anything with these excerpts. Please order the mag and read the full article. Germans can also order the article for 0.80 Euro here.

So anyway, they had several DVD and CD burners for the roundup. The read tests were done with EAC (in secure mode). For the write tests, they sent the media to Audiodev in Sweden for detailed CATS analysis.

Keep in mind that these results are for (audio) CDs only, not for DVD ripping/burning.

Scores, worst to best: -- / - / o / + / ++

BenQ DW-1640
- Burn quality: +
- Read speed: +
- Read quality: +
- Reading copy-protected CDs: o (no CDS100/CDS200B/DocData2/Key2AudioB)

LG GSA-H20L
- Burn quality: o
- Read speed: -
- Read quality: o
- Reading copy-protected CDs: + (no CDS100)

LiteOn SHM-165P6S
- Burn quality: -
- Read speed: --
- Read quality: ++
- Reading copy-protected CDs: + (no CDS100)

NEC ND-4551A
- Burn quality: +
- Read speed: ++
- Read quality: --
- Reading copy-protected CDs: o (no CDS100/DocData1/DocData2)

Pioneer DVR-111
- Burn quality: ++
- Read speed: o
- Read quality: o
- Reading copy-protected CDs: o (no CDS100/DocData2/Key2AudioB)

Plextor PX-760A
- Burn quality: +
- Read speed: + (note: with Plextools, was slow with EAC)
- Read quality: +
- Reading copy-protected CDs: ++

Samsung SH-W163C
- Burn quality: o
- Read speed: +
- Read quality: o
- Reading copy-protected CDs: o (no CDS100/DocData1/DocData2/Key2AudioB)

ASUS CRW-5232A3
- Burn quality: +
- Read speed: o
- Read quality: -
- Reading copy-protected CDs: o (no CDS100/DocData2/Key2AudioA/Key2AudioB)

Plextor Plexwriter Premium 2
- Burn quality: +
- Read speed: +
- Read quality: -
- Reading copy-protected CDs: ++

Plextor PX-230A
- Burn quality: +
- Read speed: +
- Read quality: ++
- Reading copy-protected CDs: ++

They also tested different CD-R media as to which can offer the best burn quality. They were burned with the NEC ND-4551A and the Plextor PX-760A, sent to Audiodev, and the results were averaged. They were also subjected to 100 hours of 80°C and 85% humidity to simulate aging, for 20 discs of each brand ("durability").

Plextor CD-R 48x (Taiyo Yuden / cyanine dye / silver)
Quality: +
Durability: ++
Compatibility: ++

Primeon Gold CD-R 48x (C.S.I. MAM-E / phthalocyanine dye / gold)
Quality: --
Durability: o
Compatibility: +

Sony CD-R 48x (Sony / phthalocyanine dye / silver)
Quality: +
Durability: +
Compatibility: +

TDK CD-R 52x (CMC / phthalocyanine dye / silver)
Quality: -
Durability: +
Compatibility: -

Verbatim CD-R DLP 52x (Mitsubishi / azo dye / silver)
Quality: +
Durability: --
Compatibility: ++

Verbatim CD-R Audio 16x (Mitsubishi / azo dye / silver)
Quality: --
Durability: --
Compatibility: --

And to top it off, excerpts of a test on how burn speed affects burn quality:

Plextor CD-R 48x (TY) burned with Plexwriter Premium 2:

4x speed - burn quality: +
4x speed AMQR - burn quality: ++
16x speed - burn quality: +
48x speed - burn quality: o

Some more results are here (older drives).

[Martin H]

I have decided that i won't buy a Plextor drive ever again. The fact that Plextor want's to rip their customers off by trying to seel them an extra piece of software, which only use is to be able to use the features of the drives that we have allready paid a lot of money for, is just to much to stand. Also the attitude towards Open Source developers like Alex Noe with his PxScan/PxView tool, and the other one that ported it to Linux(can't remember his name, sorry). Also the drives are way to expensive compared to the compatition, and PlexTools 2.32a must be the most unstable app that i have ever used! When they then also treats their customers like i outlined above, then this just calls for a comunity boy-cot of the brand IMHO. When i first got my Plextor PX-755A, then i was pretty happy with it, but then it died on me about a week after i got it, and then when i got a new unit sent back to me, and was ripping a scratched CD, then it made an exploding kind of a sound twice, and when i then tried to rip it in my fathers cheap no name drive, then it ripped the CD fine with no problems whatsoever. Then there's that damn speed limit thing which now also the newer LiteOn's feature(for the LiteOn's it is called SMART-X technology). Whenever a CD is initialised, then the CD is checked at the outer region for jitter or the error count or something, and then a maximum ripping speed limit is set for the whole CD based on that. Of course when ripping a CD and errors occure, then the drive should slow down, but this system will eg. check a CD and find a single little error at the outer region of the CD, and then because of that, a speed limit will be set for the whole CD at 8x in burst mode, even though the rest of the CD is in perfect condition! This 8x burst speed limit is 3.6x in secure mode with C2 on, which is just to damn slow when ripping a bunch of CDs after each other. Also it dosen't even work right, as it speed limits(8x burst) nearly all the brand new CDs i have ripped and then sometimes it will give full speed to a really scratced CD. About 95% of the CDs i have ripped with this drive have been locked to 8x burst(about 100 CDs), and many where brand new. Also i must admit that it really didn't perform any better on scratched CDs than my older Cyberdrive CW058D CD-RW drive. I wanted to make the DAE Qality test to see how accurate it's returned C2 pointers was, but i couldn't, as the C2Extract.exe app continually said : No matching C2 read mode found!, so i also didn't know how much to trust the returned C2 pointers.

I then decided to buy another drive from another firm which dosen't try to rip their customers off, and i decided for a LG GSA-4167B. I would really like to buy the BenQ DW1655, but as it both caches audio and dosen't return C2 pointers + i didn't think it could do "HTOA", then i decided to look elsewhere, as i wanted a drive which performed efficiently in secure mode with C2 enabled. The reason i choose the LG GSA-4167b, was that it only cached under 64KB audio(so EAC dosen't need to flush the cache between reads), has good C2 pointer accuracy, is "HTOA" capable, has very good DVD+R writing quality and an amazingly fast 16x P-CAV writing strategy Also the 0 samples write offset is pretty nice too. I read a review of the LG in cdfreaks where it got a SAFE BUY award and featured very good DVD+R writing quality, and cdrinfo measured the drives C2 pointer accuracy to be 99.8% - 100% with two different ABEX test discs. I can't tell you guys what a relief it is to be able to rip in EAC's secure mode with a starting ripping speed of about 20x and continually rising

If anyone is looking for a very fast ripping drive for EAC, which also has very good DVD+R writing quality, then i can fully recommend this drive.