DAE Quality, views? Options

[spoon]

I am convinced the DAE Quality test might not represent a drives ability to read a pressed CD with scratches, rather to read a CD-R with artificial marker damage. When testing about a year ago I found CDs with marker damage did not seem to show the strong drives out from the weak drives (when using real cds with scratches). It should be a good test for c2 pointers, but there seem to be issues (a test on a 230a only got 50% for c2, where in real life c2 pointers are in the 99.99% range).

It is not my intention to take anything away from DAE Quality as there is nothing else that can test drives independantly.

[exec]

Sounds really interesting. But as bhoar already said, the whole project has to be planned very well first to get accurate and reliable results.

Some toughts:
- How the rips should be tested/verified? You probably need some reference file to do comparisons against.
- From making some DAE tests based on the EAC DAE quality project, I know that two drives of the same make and model sometimes can't generate the same results. So how to deal with wear and tear/dirt/whatever of drives - or generally speaking how to deal with conflicting results?
- what happens when the test CDs get damaged (in the mail, somebody unintentionally scratches the CDs even more while doing the tests, etc.).

I also would be interested in participating, but I don't have very much drives to test (Plextor PX-755A, Plextor PX-708A, Samsung SH-182D, Toshiba MD-1612, Toshiba SD-R5372 and some (no name/rebaged) drives in various notebooks).