Newbie poster here,

I recently purchased the PX 712 UF. I was planning on using this drive for DVD's (duh) and was also hoping to rip wave/mp3s with it too, using EAC.

I have heard, ahem, that a DVD drive of this sort would be unsuitable for ripping CDs. Is there any truth to this? I always thought Plextors were just great all around drives.

Thanks,

Z

EAC's secure mode depends very little on the quality of the drive used. If you are using secure mode without C2, EAC double checks everything the drive does.

But I would recommend you use Plextools.

Different Plextors handle certain copy-protected discs (i.e. CDS200) differently. It may not be able to rip these discs consistantly.

From my experience (I do own both, a Premium and a 712A), the Premium is the better overall ripper. It can read further into defective areas and defeats more copy protections.

But for normal-day-use-cd's, the 712A is just fine.

It is very handy to have both, as I found out. The PX-712A rips some CDs the Premium has difficulty with (EAC Secure mode); the Premium will often achieve full speed where the PX-712 limits itself to 8x CLV. Overall, they complement each other quite nicely.

As for the external drives being unsuitable for DAE, that apparently does not apply to the Plextors because they are reported to be exactly the same as the internal models and thus fully support the ATAPI command set.

I've never had any problems ripping on either my PX712A or my premium, although I didnt realy need to buy both i did and havent regretted that decision. I do tend to use my premium for ripping most of the time anyway but 712 is just as good as far as i'm concerned.

Dok Lorenz

A very happy Plextor customer

I'm not entirely agree. If the "secure" aspect of EAC is probably not dependent on the quality of the drive (if errors occur, EAC report it), the "reading" abilities are highly dependent on the hardware quality. For exemple, with my LiteOn, I was able to extract without error some CD-R; but there were millions (!) errors when I used a crap Samsung DVD player on the same CD-R.
A good drive is always needed for accurate extractions on problematic medium.

Since there is no software error correction at all (although most people believe there is), a good quality drive is always needed for accurate extraction ...

Agree
But even with a crap CD reader, you can expect accurate and secure ripping with clean CD when using a good ripping software (like EAC 'Secure'). The good drive is really appreciable on problematic (scratched CD, old CD-R...) medium.

My opinion is that software error recovery is more useful than slight differences in firmware or optics. I have had many drives (Plextor, Lite-on, Cyber Drive, Pioneer, LG) & when one fails on a track/position they all fail. The only times I was able to recover a CD which failed the first time was when I switched software, I used EAC & then tried Plextools which recovered all errors (which EAC couldn't) so this means that errors can be corrected outside of the drive & anytime you rip a CD with burst mode, it fails & then secure mode can rip it without errors, error correction has been performed outside of the drive.

If I am wrong please explain your vague statement JeanLuc



Define a good drive? so far the only drive that produced questionable results using EAC's secure mode for me has been LG drives & still it was rare. The REX ripping group has ripped 1000's of CD's with dozens of drives using secure mode with Test & Copy & CRC mismatches are rare as hell for them.

Of course a drive which doesn't cache audio, doesn't jitter, supports accurate C2 error reporting, & supports over-reading can be considered an excellent drive but speaking about the drive's error correction I don't think there is a very noticeable difference for extracting audio CD's with EAC's secure mode.

So as long as you are speaking of error detecting & correction using EAC's secure mode I think "a good drive" is pretty much anything on the market these days.

I made the same experience: scrateched CD => ripping artefacts whatever the drive used for extraction. But I also noticed than some drive produce more errors (and therefore stronger artifacts) than others. On small scratches, I could obtain more than decent rip (no audible glitch) with some drives but crap rip (annpying pop) with other drives.



The good drive is a drive which have less troubles to handle problems like dust, scratch, etc...
exemple of bad drive:
http://cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specif...d=6176&PageId=3



I fear that with a drive like the ASUS E616, software can't do any miracle for digital extraction. There are 100 millions error to correct (and 15000 "only" for the LiteOn & Pioneer drives on the same problematic medium)!!! For me it's a bad drive

Did you use a Secure Mode or Burst?

As soon as I get a read error I exit the extraction & attempt cleaning the disc.

Both. But Secure mode offers generally the best results, even with the bad drive I had (Samsung, can't remember the exact reference).
Cleaning doesn't really help when CD is damaged.

Error correction in terms of audio CD ripping means using CIRC circuitry ... nothing more, nothing less. Any software method you use will not perform "real" additional error correction - EAC's and PTP's success on ripping scratched CD's IMO mostly results from drive slowdown (so the drive itself will do a better job at the error correction stage).

Plextools Pro come close to "software error correction" with the extensive use of CU (or C2-uncorrectable) flags but in the end, PTP do rely on similar procedures as EAC which means: slow down the drive and read the CU-flagged parts again according to the user settings..

I also discovered that there are CD's that might be recovered with PTP and a Plextor drive when EAC's secure mode fails to retrieve 8 matching results out of 80 re-reads - but always keep in mind that you should validate PTP's results by ripping twice (I use two different Plextor drives for that which renders the ripping process even more secure), too (you might be surprised that PTP can fail, too).

I cannot agree with your statement about different CD drives either ... on a real badly scratched CD like the ones used by CDR-Info.com (ABEX TCD-721R IIRC) you will see significant differences between the different drive's error correction abilities ... the tested drive's results with the ABEX TCD-726R as a test disc (which does not include that much errors as the 721R and thus may be a more realistic test) range from 1) unable to rip to 2) rip without errors at all.



A good drive shows the following features (order like my personal importance)

• The drive is tolerant towards out-of-spec jitter and low disc reflexivity
  
  
• The drive is tolerant towards scratches (within the limits of CIRC specs)
  
  
• The drive can report CU flags to the ripping program
  
  
• The drive will overread its read offset into lead-in/out
  
  
• The drive is fast (ripping should start at 8x min.)
  
  
• The drive is still fast during EAC's re-reading
  
  
• The drive works with different DAE programs
  
  
• The drive can "defeat" copy protections
  
  
• The drive doesn't produce too much noise during operation
  
  
• The drive should work well with unbalanced discs
  
  

Just a few points I consider when searching for a good drive ... Accurate streaming (it's the same as "non-jitter-reading" or "constant read offsets") is present with any of today's drives and caching isn't the issue since nearly every burner uses its internal buffer for DAE (and there exists the FUA command or EAC's flushing trick which should take care of that).



From my personal experience with some 30+ optical drives during the last 5 years (with all of them being capable of delivering an "accurate stream") is that there are significant differences between drives using EAC's secure mode if you have to rip "problematic discs".

Your staement is perfectly valid for pristine discs, though ...

Completely agree. I have this ASUS drive... My TEAC CD-W548E even in burst mode outperforms ASUS in secure mode (it have much less errors)... But ASUS probably have bug in firmware which causes wery bad perfomance at speeds unequal to 12x. It rips pretty decent if i forbid speed reduction and set it to 12x