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 / + / ++





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").




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




Some more results are here (older drives).

These results make me feel less crazy for ripping and burning audio CDs at 8x my Plextor Premium. Although it makes me happy that I only buy Taiyo Yuden media, because it's cheap, easy to find and I've yet to have a problem with any disc burned.

On a side note, I wish there were an excellent magazine in the United States like c't magazine. I always hear about excellent articles and coverage from this magazine.

Good info CiTay.

Very interesting, and I apprecitate the information. Thank you CiTay.

You aren't the only one wishing there was an equivelent here in the U.S., but even better if the original c't was just translated to English and sold here as well.

Glad you find it useful. About the translation, i don't think it's feasible. Substracting the ads, you're looking at roughly 150-200 pages of pretty technical text every 2 weeks. It would take an armada of tech-savvy translators to cope with that amount of text within a week or so. They do have an english section, but honestly, it's not worth a look.

It's a pity, because there certainly aren't any better mags i know of and not that many website reviews can be trusted (sponsorship & impartiality issues, testing practices, etc. Another good read for germans: reading product tests the right way) But don't despair, i will try to inform you about any groundbreaking results concerning audio topics. I obviously can't post complete articles or results, but you can expect summaries of the most important points like in this thread.

Another vote of thanks for that information Citay.

I was also going to ask if anyone knew of a publication like this in the UK. c't really seems like a quality magazine.

As far as websites are concerned, http://www.cdrlabs.com is a pretty good source for drive and media testing.

Yep...I can attest for the "-" quality and compat. rating of CMC media

my Toshiba dvd player won't even read them anymore, but the Sony works fine...*sigh*

Thank you, CiTay. Really appreciated.

looks interesting, how many drives have been tested? Are they cd-only or dvd-drives too?

Ten (as you can see), the last three are CD writers, the other ones DVD/CD writers.

I thought the ones you have postet are just a few of the tested, thanks anyway

No, those were all, but the review and the results were a lot more detailed. I only posted the most important bits.

Plextor Plexwriter Premium 2
- Read quality: -

That is not a result Plextor will want to see, although the Plextor PX-230A comes top for reading alone.

Does it go into detail about the copy protections? (I suspect 95% are false 2nd sessions, where the other 5% might be intentional uncorrectable noise).

There was a previous article that elaborated on the most popular copy protections. Let me give you an example, the CP called Key2Audio.

CDs protected with this CP are multisession CDs, which in itself is already a violation of the Red Book standard.

- First session: Contains the audio tracks. Several violations of Red Book audio CD standard: The Pre-gap is 10 seconds long (standard: 2-3 seconds). In the main-channel of the first pause, there's ROM-data in Mode-1-format (specified in Yellow Book), in all frames from 00:00:00 (MM:SS:FF) till 00:02:00, but the Control-Nibble has the value 00, which would be 2-channel audio. The frames all contain the same ROM-data 0x00. EFM-coded and interpreted as audio data, the frames 00, 86 and 97 of each subcode frame contain non-null audio samples, and the frames from 01 to 85 contain null-samples (digital silence).

These audio samples can contain a 24-bit sequence which is inserted in illegal places, to prevent the detection of the beginning of each frame by a PC drive. They can also contain certain bit patterns which prevent a clock retrieval from the data stream. This doesn't affect a stand-alone CD player, since it normally skips the pre-gap.

- In the gap before the first track, the subcode-Q data 'Amin', 'Asec' and 'Aframe' (also called 'Atime') is faulty. Atime is sometimes a constant 00:00:00, while it should increase continuously. This can mean that the drive can't find the first track.

- The copy bit of the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) alternates every 6 frames, signaling that no digital copies are allowed.

- Second session: Mode 2 data session, all data bytes '0x00'. The subcode-Q-data is in the invalid mode 6, and doesn't repeat three times, as stated in the spec. This can lead to an abortion of the read process.

- Third session: Mode 2 data session, all data bytes '0x00'. The Program Area (PMA) is truncated, and the lead-out is missing. The TOC has entries of tracks which are already referenced in the TOC of the 1st and 2nd session. These tracks are now assigned different start times on the CD. Those start times are completely wrong and all point to the single data track of the third session. According to the multisession-CD standard, each start time must be different, there can't be several tracks with the same start time. If a CD drive tries to read an audio track, it receives the wrong start time and jumps to the data track of this third session. The TOC contains a recursive pointer which can lead to an infinite loop.



The other CPs work with similar tricks. They are all multisession-CDs. Some of their tricks are:

- invalid Lead-Ins
- invalid subcode data
- missing frames during pre-gap
- wrong start times of the tracks
- symbol errors in the audio data of the lead-out
- wrong P-Bits
- wrong TOC (Table of Contents)
- uncorrectable C2-errors
- shifted Sync-positions
- faulty ZERO-field
- missing post-gap
- Lead-out containing a mix of data and audio
- Lead-out containing only audio
- Index switching from 00 to 01
- symbol errors in the main channel of the lead-out

How nice that the Pioneer drive has excellent burn quality. I have a DVR-110D, and I've recommended it and the 111D to a lot of people.

Thanks for the info, it is a shame I dont speak german, CT seems a good resource...

Pretty much any CD drive should be able to read the first session TOC (with the right calls) - it is then upto the drive. I think this article is showing is that modern drives will see though these copy protections without the need for special programs, which is good (although I am suspect of the Plextors needing Plextools - this test should (perhaps they did) have used one program for reading).

To complete what Citay said, in the last versions of CDS200, the sectors are 99 blocks long instead of 98.
The CD player is supposed to read all of them, while the computer drives stops at the 98th block of the last sector of the burst read command. Then it restarts at the first block of the next sector, missing the 99th.

Actually, my hi-fi CD player also skips the 99th block sometimes And it's a pure hifi stereo player from 1991 !

That's pretty involved from them to CP a disc like that.

Being sarcastic:
An easier solution- they could use the crappiest CMC discs ever made.

Lookes like they used EAC for everthing except where noted. I would have been happier if they had used the best software for each drive, which would be plextools for plextor, EAC for everthing else.

If you can point me to the issue of c't, I'll try to translate the article. I have too much free time on my hands nevertheless.

Edit: Is it the article titled "Konservatorium digitale"?

I don't think that's a good idea. I'm already stretching the limits with those small excerpts of the results here, not having a written consent from c't. For a full translated article you definitely have to get an approval from c't first (and please don't mention this thread ). I'm sure some c't people have seen this thread already, they definitely keep track of the stuff on HA. But so far it has been a deal of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours". They also get some nice stories from here.

IMHO, there wasn't too much new in the article about ripping - the only interesting part were the tests. Most of us here already know about accuraterip, accurate stream, lossless formats etc.

Man, I'm bored. Just finished my Abitur and now I've got nothing to do...

Hehe.. there's always the World Cup.

Guys! I did my own independent test and I reached a very same conclusion about the Premium. The old version, that I bought half a year ago. Read this.

I sold my Premium shortly after my tests. The fame of Plextor is one of the biggest myths on the internet. I owned the Premium and also the PX-716A and I am not planning to buy any more Plextor product. The ridiculous thing is that cost was never a consideration.

Triza

PS: Just another anecdote: Last week my new Plextor PX-716A, which was RMA-ed before not being able to read 10% of my pressed CD-s, failed to even recognize a spanking new CD that has zero (nada!!!!!) scratches. Despite the fact that it is a new HW model (TLA#03xx). I admit that the CD had some pressing errors because even my Liteon CD-RW did not read it with the lightning speed it used to, but it could not just recognize it, but read it. I read it twice with it and I got identical copies. So it is likely that the rip was bit perfect. Again Plextor "The King of Quality" could not even recognized it. I got those stupid blinking error codes.

The record labels should be forced to clearly verbose on the cover artwork what they are doing ...

I read this article, too.
A slight drawback in significance of the "read quality" and "read speed" results is that I doubt that they disabled c2 when measuring reading speed and quality with any other than plextor drives, although they do know about this issue.
Unless they used accuraterip for those tests too (which I don't know) these results aren't worth a cent.

But is AccurateRip a cure all?

I usually do a Test and Copy, I get matched CRCs for all the tracks. But then AccurateRip may say that most of the tracks were ripped accurately, but one or two weren't.

Does that just mean that there is some unreliable data being sent to AccurateRip?

> unreliable data being sent to AccurateRip?

If the CD is popular, ie the confidences are > 2 then it is likely your rip had the error.

Unfortunately I rarely rip popular CDs, the discs are only in the database less than 40% of the time... well, the particular pressing I happen to own.

What I'm confused about is that I get say 8 or 9 tracks that say accurately ripped, but 1 or 2 say not accurately ripped. Even though I'm ripping usually from brand new CDs, and Test & Copy isn't showing any errors.

What would you say about track 9 of this rip?


PlexTools Pro rips this track exactly the same way and a C1/C2 test indicates that the track has no CU errors at any selectable speed.

With a confidence of 2 it is not really high enough to be sure where the problem exists. If you have a different cd drive then rip that cd if the crcs are the same then it is right.

Is the PX-230A able to overread into the lead-in or lead-out? Something makes me think it's a BenQ and therefore cannot do so.

I was about to ask the same question...My Premium is dying and I need a new reading drive. Going to import the PX-230A is thats the case. I only do my rips in burst mode, with T and C
Cheers

This seems like a bizarre amount of concern over 17 ms of audio that should be silence.

Edit: Why isn't the same question posed about whether a drive can overwrite its offset samples?
Sure a (edit: real) Plextor can correctly read the last samples of a disc but the irony is that it can't burn them.

should be silence is the question...Anyway, instead of critisizeing, why comment if you cannot answer the question?

At the end of the disc???

I should certainly hope it isn't audible. If it is, are you really going to miss those 738 pairs of samples?

Pardon me for sounding overly-critical but I have to laugh at basing a purchase on something as trivial as 17 ms of data at the end of a disc.

Then why bother coming here? or commenting? Many people are interested in preserving 100% of the original disc..Get over yourself and move on!

And what value have you brought to this discussion other than a ditto to what Sebastian said?

Look, I'm really not interested in getting into a flame war with you.

I'm here to let people know that overreading is a feature not to be taken anywhere near as seriously as the ability to read a disc accurately.

Whether you see it or not, my suggesting such a sanity check is beneficial for those who might think that not being able to overread is some mysterious and horrible thing after reading some of the earlier posts.

If people are interested in preserving 100% of a disc here are some other factors that are necessary besides overreading (and this is not a complete list):
Ability to retrieve HTOA
Ability to overwrite
Ability to securely extract subcode data

Why bother commenting? I stated I am also looking for a new drive and wanted to know the same thing..You had to go on about how not to worrt about offsets. Many people wish to..Your the one that needs a sanity check!

I am listening to music on my PC anyways, so a drive which can overwrite its offset isn't important for me. If I need to recreate an audio CD, I can burn using an older LG drive I got from eBay which has a 0 samples write offset.

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.

Who says it has a 0 samples write offset? Last time I checked, it had a -30 samples write offset and -102 samples read offset.

On the DAE Drive Features Database, then Duble0Syx and jh has both reported the drive as having a +667 samples read offset correction and a 0 samples write offset. Additionally on AccurateRip's Drive list, there are 79 persons that have reported the drive to have a +667 samples read offset correction, just as all the other LG DVDRAM drives. Have you tested it with EAC's test discs, and have you gotten at least two identical matches for the read offset correction ? I can see that you haven't used AccurateRip to find your read offset correction, as else the drive would have been purged from the list.

@Sebastian Mares

I said LG GSA-4167B, not LG GSA-2166D

does the c't review contain any info on the px-230 concerning htoa and overreading? (ps: sebastian cdrlabs forum aparently the folks at cdrlabs have already been throug the is it a real plextor or not discution and seem to agree its an original plextor

If I have a drive that reads every last bit off an audio CD, I can edit the ripped image file and add the write offset manually ... using my Premium that has a -30 sample write offset, I just add 30 silent samples to the end of the image and everything is fine.

And if those 30 samples aren't silent on the original CD?

Plextors cannot recreate the last 30 samples of a CD if they are not silent because Plextors will burn them as silence.

I admit this is minutia, but it is nonetheless true!

What are you talking about? If the Plextor has a write offset of -30 samples, the 30 samples JeanLuc added to the end are going to be dumped and the resulting CD will be a perfect copy of the original.

No because the last track will be padded by a blank frame and will be longer than the original.

4166B is identical with 2166D, except that 2166D is external. Not 100% sure about the 4167B, but I thought if the previous model 4166B has a new hardware, LG might continued using it in the 4167B.



Sorry, but I fail to see any major discussion there whether or not it's a real Plextor. The OP only posted something that looks like a Plextor press release and the rest only asked if it should be seen as update to Plextor Premium or not and some mentioned the price still being high compared to NEC DVD burners.