I'm looking to replace a broken, plain old CD-ROM drive in my PC. Having two is always good, so I want to put another one in there... but it's hard to tell what's a quality CD drive these days. I don't need write or rewrite capabilities for CD or DVD (already have a Pioneer), but reading DVDs would be nice, since I see a lot of software going that way in the future.

In particular, I would be using this drive to rip audio CDs with Exact Audio Copy. Is there a recommended drive that works the best with EAC, or reads audio CD information better than others? Searching around just brings up a bunch of $19 drives from brands I've never heard of.

I'm sure you guys get asked this question a lot, so hopefully someone can help me out. Thanks!

I think Artec is the cheapest brand you can get!
Its accurate in ripping clean CDs
you can safely use burst mode on clean CD with this drive

http://www.epinions.com/content_91098156676

DVD-ROM
http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=212&a=42803&f=1

the cheapest is USD 18 (without shiping fee) its less than 19

or CD-ROM
http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=40&a=80360&f=1

There have been other posts on this. A search may bring more information.
A short answer is that the Lite-On drives rate very well for extraction and are quite inexpensive.
Inexpensive, but not junk.

I would definately have to agree with ddrawley, Lite-On produces a very solid drive, for a resonable price.

When price is not the main concern, I would suggest Plextor, IMHO they produce some of the best drives on the market. To my knowledge they do not make a non-writeable drive any longer (and when they did it was SCSI only), but they are well worth the price payed (not just paying for brand name). However, last time I looked they are roughly 2x the price of similiar speed Lite-On drive (and any other manufacturer for that matter).

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Domain

CyberDrive CW099D get's perfect C2 using 2 diffrent test CD's.

At these 2 web sites,

CDSpeed

cdrinfo

I think some firmware's also don't cache audio. This drive is still being sold in Australia.

If your going to use EAC's new secure mode I wouldn’t worry about how good the drive is at error correction because the difference is very little, when a bad drive gets a read error a good one will too. If your going to use one of CDex's secure modes you need to find a drive that doesn't cache audio & has accurate stream. If you are going to use a non secure mode & just would like to avoid clicks & pops look for a drive that scores high in the error correction tests.

I've had very good luck w/ LiteOn and Cyberdrive. I've only used a couple Cyberdrive models, but in both cases was very impressed with the reading of bad discs. When trying to make a few backups of Diablo II a couple years ago (the CDs were badly scratched, and wouldn't even queue up in some drives), the Cyberdrive (40x burner) was the oly one that could do it that I could get ahold of. I did just such a test for my new Litey (nothing better to do with the disc, now ), and it worked great.

I have also been doing very well ripping audio CDs with my LiteOn 812S, and I bought it for the same reason you're asking--and that Plextor is out of my wallet's range. I'm now down to around 250 CDs to rip. According to reviews (like CDFreaks) that use EAC, all the current LiteOn DVD burners are very good readers. While EAC secure mode pretty much takes care of errors, it is nice ripping ~5-13x (what I typically see) vs. generic drive at 1/2-2x.

Plextor still produce the PX-54TA CD-ROM and PX-116A DVD-ROM ATAPI drives, I bought the former about 6 months ago.

I say 'produce' rather than make as the PX-54TA definitely appears to be a re-badged Mitsumi. No bad thing itself, as Mitsumi's are supposed to be pretty good.

I'm quite happy with it, although having bought it it purely so I could use Plextools, (fast, secure 'single-read' ripping using C2 error-detection/correction, while running the drive at lower than max. RPM), I'm not convinced that it's 100%. Either mine's optics aren't quite right or the C2 isn't properly implemented. My Pioneer DVR-106 (which doesn't use C2) is better at dealing with damaged discs, in EAC or, ironically, Plextools.

So - good drive, but no "5-star" recommendation. In hindsight I would have bought one of their DVD-ROMS.

Plextor PX-54TA

Plextor PX-116A

Rainer.

(edit for clarity).

Greetings! I too have recently wondered what is the best DAE reader out there. I have a cd collection that for whatever reason (too long to explain) resulted in about 5% damaged cd's ( light scratches, deep scratches, damage to the top the cd etc._). I have utilized several drives and found my liteon's (LTD 166S DVD-ROM), and Liteon 48x12x48x CDRW ) pretty reliable in expeditiously extracting the digital audio. The CDRW is faster, with the DVD-ROM for whatever reason capable of extracting cactus data shield out of the box. However, I came across several cd's that more poor liteon's coudnt extract without having EAC spend many hours (often overnight) trying to recover. Often times, EAC would just slow to a grinding halt and possibly not even finish (I dont know because I couldt wait longer than 12 hours to find out). Anyway, I searched and searched on the Net and came across the following recommendations which i recently purchased: (1) TEAC W54E circa 2000 (do a search on froogle or ebay around $10- $30 depending if they are on ebay or not) where one poster stated that the W54E was one of the best DAE rippers ever introduced at the consumer level albeit very slow in DAE (8x max).
(2) Any Plextor drive. According to the Feurio database and some other forum, I saw tha the px-w1210A was a pretty good model to get too so I picked up a used one (although a rebadged IOMEGA) for around $20 bucks. This thing is awesome. the px-w1210A was able to rip some of my previously errored cd's error free. A feat that the Teac and Liteons could not accomplish.

So, in an answer to your question, I love my liteon's for their fast DAE and error extraction abilities (so long as the scratches arent too bad), in which case i would switch to the old plextor to do DAE. But for me, the best Cd-reader in my cd reader farm is the plextor px-w1210A.


If you are having problems ripping cd's, may I suggest investing in a plastic polish obtainable from an auto parts store used to remove scratches from plexigas and motorcycle visors and/or a skip doctor? Other people have been quite successful in reducing read errors from CD's also utilizing Brasso and other types of polishes, fine grit sand papers, toothpaste etc.

If a CD drive can rip cds in EAC without any sync errors, track quality @ say, 99% or better, does it really make sense to purchase a "better" drive? Will it yield any noticable quality improvement?

No, as the rip should already be pretty much perfect (no error = all could be corrected).

The reviews on the newer Plextors show they are not as good as the old ones for extraction. I have a Plextor 161040 that is great for extraction.
My Lite-On is faster and more accurate for most disks, but the Plextor gets those few the Lite-On chokes on.
I use the secure mode for all my rips.
The Lite-On CD-RW is nearly as cheap as the Lite-ON DVD.

(I hope I'm not telling too many details here...)

In general, Plextor drives are famous not only for fast and precise audio extraction (Andre Wiethoff, author of ExactAudioCopy, once collected many reports from lots of drives), they even don't get so easily confused by invalid TOCs and second sessions on not-so Red Book compatible audio CDs.

And only a drive with a tolerant firmware is able to process CDs with "mastering errors"; a firmware that gets confused will die on such a disk before EAC gets a chance to read only the first session.

Another brand with good drives at a fairly low price is "LG Electronics".

I'd recommend Lite-On too. I recently bought a LTR-52327s and I think it has one of the best error recovery corrections I've ever seen.
Of course, if I had have more money I'd probably invested Plextor

http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?r...age=Performance

Plextor drives are simply not very good at audio extraction anymore. For the last two years Plextors have had a lot of trouble with scratched or dirty discs.

At which point, or rather with which model, did Plextor loose their way? I'm keen to pick up a second hand drive off eBay for extracting quality CDs but there's bound to be a few CDs in my collection that will need some attension. Which is the fastest Plextor which can still do a decent job with lightly scratched CDs?

Check out the cdrlabs site.
They have a good history of older drive performance.
Don't misunderstand me, Plextor makes a great drive. Just the newer ones are not the best for ripping.

Why is that?

I've read through cdrlabs reviews but all the benchmarks and testing doesn't seem very "real world". Is it just the performance with damaged CDs which has dropped with recent Plextors? Also, I see the Plextors cache audio, which surely doesn't help with audio extraction. Is this true?

Well from the research I have done at the time of old Plextor drives such as the PX-40TS, cdrlabs, cdfreaks where not using error test CD's & I'm not even sure that error test CD's where available to the public. I saw a recent test at the EAC forum where a user tested his PX-40TS with DAE quality and so did Andre Wiethoff, thier results where very similar & showed the PX-40TS was no better at correcting errors than newer Plextor drives. The advantage of newer Plextor drives is that they work accurately with Plextool's advanced error recovery system which may use some advanced C2 information but to be honest I have no idea about how C2 info works all I can say is that with my PX-2410A I tried a lot of troublesome CD's & did combinations of wav compares with EAC & never got different samples when Plextools reported no errors occurred. Plextools is also way faster & superior at ripping damaged CD's than EAC.

You would have to ask Plextor, I do not know. I did notice that the old Plextors were not good at copying protected CDs. About the same time they brought out drives that would copy protected material, the DAE lost some ground. Maybe a coincidence, I don't know.
The Lite-On units have reviewed on several sites as havinge very good C2 performance.
My personal results have been consistent with this. I try the Lite-On first, then my old Plextor 161040 ( which has good DAE )

I believe the extraction still works properly, it simply takes longer.