Hi,

Going to buy a new PC soon. I'm considering buying a Plextor CD/DVD-ROM drive to rip my entire CD collection to FLAC. It doesn't necessarily have to be a CD or DVD-RW drive, as I am planning to buy a separate drive for burning.

Which Plextor drive would you folks recommend ?

A PX-712A.

Why not PX-716A? which support writing Double-layer DVD+R

I've read some bad reviews about the PX-716A which stopped me from buying one. Supposedly has some burning quality issues that plextor is aware of and maybe some other things. For CD ripping I think the PX-712A is one of the better drive Plextor has produced recently. Check on cdrlabs.com for some good reviews on cd and & dvd+/-rw drives.

The PX716A seems to have quite a lot of problems at the moment. Seems like neither the hardware nor firmware is mature enough. There are loads of threads over at CD Freaks about it.

I have a PX712A and it is a superb CD ripper and writer, but as a DVD writer it is *extremely* picky about media. To give an idea, genuine Verbatim 8x DVD+R (code MCC003, made by Mitsubishi) works very well, while OEM MCC003 (which is typically made by Prodisc under licence from Mitsubishi) is hit-and-miss. I've pretty much given up on media experiments and buy only Taiyo Yuden media for it now.

From what I've read, the Plextor Premium still seems to be the gold standard for CD ripping, although I've never used one.

For CD ripping, Lite-on drives are cheap and fast. If you're picky, find a drive that are in EAC's database for correct offset settings. Plextor CD-RW drives are good rippers too.

Don't get plextor DVD writers. They're too expensive for your purpose. Even the Plextor premium is cheaper (which is expensive on its own for a CD-RW drive).

and all this plextors are perfectly compatible with plextools (all included?)

I have the PX-708A. Whilst I've had to return it to Plextor once (quick and painless process) I'm extremely happy with it with regards to ripping (CDs, hundreds from my collection in various states) and burning (to DVD - Verbatim Datalife Plus 4x DVD-r ).

If CD audio ripping is your primary purpose, there is *only* one choice: Plextor Premium. Fast, reliable, sails through any copy protection and is great with dirty & scratched discs. The DVD models aren't as good with audio CD's.

As Duble0Syx and cliveb mentioned, PX-716 has been a flop. True, the problems everybody complains about are related to DVDR writing quality; but do you really want to buy a $150+ drive just for ripping and burning CDs?
The best 16X/dual layer burners right now are BenQ 1620 and NEC 3500.



All the Plextors mentioned in the thread work with PlexTools Pro, though only PX-712 and PX-716 are bundled with it here in the US. These two drives also support DVD error scanning, PX-708 does not. All four support C1/C2/CU error scanning.



My experience was different . Out of over two hundred CDs I ripped with my Premium and PX-712A, I found three or four scratched ones that the Premium could not rip some tracks off but the PX-712A managed just fine. That is with EAC in secure mode, though; both drives can rip just about anything with PlexTools Pro.

In fact, a couple of weeks ago a friend asked me to make a copy of a viciously abused audio CD, and I was pretty sceptical at first. You see, I'd never heard of anyone using a CD as a sanding block, but that's just what he must have done apparently - the data side was riddled with countless tiny scratches. So I insert the CD, fire up PlexTools Pro v2.12 and start writing a PXI image to the HD. PTP breezes through the first few tracks, then gradually reduces the speed to 4X, then apparently freezes. I shake my head and let it be. All the new posts at HA and CD Freaks and a couple of hours later it is still only at track 6. I go shopping, return to find it made little progress. I leave it running overnight, check back in the morning - not done yet. The errors reported for some tracks are in thousands! Having gotten that far, I stubbornly refuse to kill it, and go to work instead. To my surprise, I find a working PXI complete upon return. 14 hours and change, I should have saved the log for the world to behold, heheh. Well, I'm not into salsa, but my buddy reported that he could find no glitches or skips with the copy.

Truly a formidable testament to the power of Plextor. =)

Thanks everyone for your input !

As I said, I'm not interested in burning with this drive, just ripping. Best bet seems to be the Premium.

Does the plex premium do over and underreading?

Yes.

Does anyone know if Firmware 1.03 fpr the PX-716 managed to fix all known problems related to DVD burning?

Please define "underreading" !???????

I guess overreading = reading lead-out and underreading = reading lead-in.

In general, I can back up that experience with my own.

I do own a 712A and a Premium ... and the Premium does indeed perform better on most defective CD's. There are some rare occasions where the 712A excels the Premium at the same extraction speed (the Premium then will have to slow down to 8x due to out-of-spec disc jitter, I guess).

I guess overreading means both !
In your terminology, overreading into the lead-out would be "abovereading".

Hi

Why is is so rarely mentioned, that overreading into lead I/O is esseantial for perfect copies? It's nearly never mentioned! Does anyone know the reason?

wbr Fabian Stöckl

If a drive can overread at least it's read offset from the Lead-In or Lead-Out (depends on whether the offset is negative or positive), you can be sure to get every bit of information from a red-book-compatible audio CD, even if it doesn't start or end with silence (like most CD's do anyway).

The bad thing is, to get a 100% burned CD backup, your write device would have to be able to overwrite it's write offset into Lead-In/Out ... and only very few devices are capable of this.

So don't get too excited on read offsets ... if you have a drive with a huge offset (like Asus CDS500 with 1858 audio samples), you definitely should use offset correction but with average read offsets well below 1000 (most drives well below 100) audio samples there is a big chance you'll never hear it anyway.

preferred combinations are:
negative actual read offset and capability to overread into lead-out
positive actual read offset and capability to overread into lead-in

My experience with Pelxtor DVD/CD burners have been great since their SCSI only days, my fav was the PX-708A (switched to NEC DL burnes now), in general they all produced extremely good quality rips with a correctly configured EAC but tend to have problems with scratched CD's and are a bit picky with writable media (firmware supported ones are a must).

Quick question...

Is the "Plextor Premium" you're referring to the same drive as the "Plextor PlexWriter Premium"?

Just double checking.

Thanks!

~esa

According to the latest c't, the PX-716A still has some problems.

Yes, it is ...

Any drive in that review has its problems with burning at high speeds ... but the 716A is better for DAE than the 712A due to higher CD error correction capabilities ... see the CDR-Info review for more info.

The only problem is that the 716A isn't fully supported by the actual EAC version ...

Thanks, JeanLuc!

I went throught the review and do not see how you arrived to that conclusion. Could you elaborate?

Sure ... compare these two links

PX-712A CD Error Correction Assessment (CDR-Info Review)

PX-716A CD Error Correction Assessment (CDR-Info Review)

Don't be fooled that the 716A does not support C2 ... in fact, EAC's DAE Quality program dioes not recognize the 716A correctly.

The plots obtained with the 712 are obviously wrong and therefore
meaningless. Anyone with a clue about testing would immediately
see it and restart his test, but not these guys (why am I not surprised?).

I also find it hard to believe that the PX-716A scored 100% (zero errors) on the Abex TCD-726.

If the PX-716A doesn’t support C2 error pointers then it wouldn’t be compatible with PlexTools error detection/recovery & this would also have me question if it’s a true Plextor & not just a rebagged Pioneer.

This is slowly getting annoying - people don't seem to care reading before posting. It's something I discover on more and more forums...

I see what you mean ... the ABEX 721R does not contain damaged areas during the first 100 MB

Nevertheless, the 716A managed to score a better error correction (compared to its predecessor) during the latest 'ct review as well so the 716A would definitely be my choice over the 712A.

As an owner of a 712A, I can additionally state that the Premium does a much better job of error correction than the 712A (when using Plextools Pro)

Correctomundo ! The end of the disc is clean too, as you can
clearly see from their highly professional test...

Can you give more details about C't tests of the 716 ?
Did their testing methods/results look convincing ?

I recently got my hands on a Plextor PX-W4012A and I am quite pleased with it. My Lite-On drive does better with scratched discs, but the plextor supports overreading and the things needed to make nice cd backups. Also it only cost me about $30, so for the price I'd recommend it as a great drive for backing up cd's if you can find one.

EDIT: Also I don't use plextools, I use EAC with it.

They did send the written discs to Audiodev for measurements and the results weren't that promising (at the highest possible speed, that is).

Positive:

Good (first place in the review on that point) quality with DVD+R DL from Verbatim (MKM001) and Ricoh (RICOHJPND00 Inverse-Stack type) at 4x

Good overall (first place again) CD/DVD reader with high speed and good error correction scores of 86% (CD), 88% (DVD/R) and 79% (DVD-9)

2nd place in access times and first place in noise

Reads every audio protection

Negative:

No DVD could be written at 16x with acceptable quality (actually, no DVD writer in the review could do so). They did test with FW 1.02 ... 1.03 might have lead to better results.

Their conclusion is that DVD writing at 16x is still more of a gamble and far from being reliable.

My opinion is that the 716A (it is small-sized, too) is the most versatile drive that has been tested in this particular review ... if you want to install only one drive and can wait some extra minutes to burn your DVD's at 4x or 6x CLV (maybe 8x P-CAV too) instead of 12/16x, the 716A is a great piece of (twice as expensive, though) hardware.

I will get one once the price for the retail version is below 100€ in my country.

The second opinion certainly lends more weight to cdrinfo's findings. Esp. as c't must run more than two tests, right?


My experience is the opposite: the 712A does better on more CDs in my collection than the Premium. But there were a couple that the Premium did better with, so overall it is nice to have both :).

edit: fixed quotes