I am looking to (potentially) buy a new CD drive, because my current NEC drive is taking an abysmally long time to read CD's via EAC. I am looking for a CD drive that is excellent at reading audio CD's and error correction.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustratingRe...N82E16827106045

I saw this CD drive from Lite-On on newegg, and I decided that you guys are probably the best people to come to with questions about quality of audio extraction. If anyone could give me insight on how this drive performs on audio CDs, your input would be greatly appreciated (I would also appreciate any non-high end drives on newegg.com if you feel others would perform better. Thanks all!)

Lite-on drives tend to be quite fast rippers, but their writing quality (especially for their DVD-writers) tend to be not so good. I personally use lite-on combo drives, and they perform fine for reading/ripping.

Since you want fast extraction also, besides good error correction capabilities, then keep in mind that all newer lite-on's have SMART-X technology incorporated. This is an extremely annoying feature which will lock the speed to some value when extracting, based on some quality checks done at the outer region of the disc. Some people say that it goes away if using burst mode, and so if this is true, and if you don't rip to images but track files, then i suppose that it doesen't matter, since you can use test & copy together with burst mode to get a secure extraction, but still, secure mode is a very nice feature for problem discs, which needs additionally rereads to extract propperly and without errors, or if you have a drive that dosen't cache audio, and hence, will be very fast an effecient also in secure mode and not only in burst mode. I personally use a LG GSA-4167B which is lightning fast at extractions i.e. starts at 20x in secure mode and ends at 30x or more, since cache-flushing can be disabled and C2 pointers enabled safely in EAC, but as you wanted to have a drive with also very good error correction capabilities, then i can't recommend this drive to you, since it's error correction capabilities is not the best and only about average or maybe slightly lower(but with discs that aren't scratched to death, then the drive is perfect, though and has accurate C2 pointer detection, so it atleast will tell you that the disc can't be read without errors instead of just saying Copy OK on a bad rip, which to me personally makes up for the average error correction capabilities).

Slightly off-topic, I see that that drive only supports lead-in reading - does the quoted +667 offset require it to read into lead-in or lead-out? Hopefully it reads into the required area to compensate for its offset; it does look very good otherwise!

A negative read offset i.e. a possitive read offset correction value, will require overreading capabilities into what the drive thinks is lead-out and the LG GSA-4167B dosen't support that feature. Personally, then this dosen't concern me at all, since for the wast majority of cases, then the missed samples will be null samples anyway, and which EAC padds into the extracted bitstream anyway also, so the result will be bit-identical in the wast majority of cases. Then in the very rare occasions that those missed samples will be non-null samples, then they will simply be background noise and not any real music, and this only happens rarely on some rare old AAD discs, and getting about a milisecond or two of background noise exchanged with null samples by EAC's padding mechanism, personally dosen't concern me one bit either I'm personally not one of those bit-identical ripping maniacs, and i'm just happy if my rips will give no errors reported in secure mode, which means that there only rarely will be missed errors and that if errors do occure, then they will most propperly be in-audible anyways. On the other hand, then the drive features a 0 samples write offset value, so that i can use my favorite audio burning app - Burrrn, to do offset corrected burns, which in my drive's case, means no offset correction used at all for writing Of course, burning without offset correction is fine also, but it is a nice thing though nonetheless, as it avoids generation-loss if making copies of copies and can be used to compare copies burned from different drives, by just checking their CRC values.

Thanks for your reply. I was just wondering, since the drive has quite an impressive/complete feature set otherwise. You're right: those neglible periods at the end of discs are not too important, but while I acknowledge that, I prefer to retain them anyway. Don't ask me why!

I don't actually worry about offsets any more since I bought a PX-760A, and according to the new reference offset, it is calibrated correctly "out-of-the-box".

Anyway, what drives offer comparable features, i.e. no caching, "good" C2, HTOA, such as your LG, possibly with overreading?

To the OP: I'm not intending to hijack your thread

I don't think anyone have that complete feature set of the LG + supports overreading into the right direction. Atleast none that i'm aware off. The closest to that feature-set is the Plextors, but they do cache audio though, and have that annoying speed-lock. On a side-note, then i have just tried to rip a disc as single tracks with my LG GSA-4167B in secure mode. I have never done this before, as i only rip to images and from that encode Vorbis track files, but then i saw that my drive actually goes up to 38.5x speed in secure mode, which i find just amazing personally When i rip as images, then the speed "only" goes up to about 30x speed and starts at about 20x.

That is pretty incredible!

Oh well, if anybody knows of comparable drives, I'd be interested to hear about them, while not necessarily having the money to buy another one just yet.

Thanks for the replies, guys. Can anyone confirm that the drive in my parent post at least has good error handling (I will probably disable C2)? I don't need my rips to go lightning fast, I am mostly concerned with being able to read CDs accurately and handle scratches (read/sync errors) well. And burning faster than 0.0x on scratched CDs would be nice too. Thanks all.

And if you wouldn't recommend this drive, please suggest a better option from newegg.com for me, if you wouldn't mind (I have a gift certificate, so this purchase is almost free for me).

Does ripping speed matter in error detection?

Not really, I just need it to handle errors well and at higher than 0.0x. So it does, but I am not looking for anything like 10x speeds, and would be content with 3-5x speeds or so.

daefeatures.co.uk throws up search results for an Actima A40T and a selection of Plextors (probably most notably the PX-40TS). Good luck to any of us trying to find those, though!

To the OP - are many of your CDs in bad condition? I would imagine that good conditioned CDs would give you higher read speeds than that with a good modern drive, although it depends on your drives specific features.

I had a Lite-On LTR-52327S; audio reading quality and speed were usually good for a caching drive (with C2 disabled for added "security"). Judging by the Lite-On drive features lsited on the above site, the biggest stumbling blocks will be the inability to read HTOA (Hidden Track One Audio) and, depending on your chosen offset, overread into certain areas.

Well, in this case, could anyone recommend a drive from newegg.com that they would buy if they were buying a new cd drive today? There are so many damn tradeoffs in this purchase, that I no longer have any idea as to what I should get here : -) Thanks for all the posts so far!

Well, the Samsung 16x DVD w/ LightScribe has worked very well for me - thousands of rips and counting.

The latest version is now 18x

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16827151136

Can anyone confirm or deny UrbanVoyeur's suggestion for that Samsung drive (or suggest a better one from Newegg, otherwise?) Thanks in advance.

As an owner of a Samsung SH-S182D i can confirm that the drive is a very fast ripper (13x in secure mode without C2) and it's also excelent on scratched cd's.
I haven't ripped many discs with it, but i just did a testing with a cd that has a visible hole in the reflective layer and all my previous drives failed on it. I tried to rip the track that's affected with the damage. The result was an average 4x speed and no audible glitch in the file.

Just a little warning: some people on cdfreaks reported that the Samsung drives have very variable quality and their actual performance widely depends on many factors (like PSU, MB chipset, IDE channel and cable).
So at the end you may not be as happy as me and UrbanVoyeur.

Using EAC, my Plextor PX-716A gets upwards to 40X in secure mode with C2 and FUA which is about the same speed as using burst mode.

With cache flushing and C2 it gets about 16X.

With FUA and without C2 it gets about 8X.

With cache flushing and without C2 it gets just over 4X.

C2 performance with this drive is pretty trustworthy and FUA works correctly on my system.

YMMV.

I am not pleased with my PX-230A

Yes, it rips some of my cds without errors, even some that wouldn't even rip on my old drives, but the gobs of cds I have that do have a lot of errors that it needs to reread, it takes forver.

The cache flushing in EAC doesn't seem to work right with it, it doesn't support FUA, and with dMC R12 I have to flush 1352kb which makes the ripping process take days on just one cd.

I wish I would have gotten a PX-760A instead, that way I could use Plextools, or at least FUA

Another one of the reasons for ditching my Plextor PX-755A, was that i wanted to rip with C2 enabled and i got it mainly as i thought that it supported C2 perfect with EAC, but when ripping with C2 enabled, then there would very rarely illuminate errors in EAC's red boxes, even on very scratched CDs, and also when i tested Andre's DAE Quality app with the Plextor, then it would report "No matching C2 read mode supported". Besides this, then it didn't make it better to read posts like this from our own Pio2001 : http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=12...amp;postcount=4. Also, some people have said that there's a possibility of maybe Plextools is using propriotary commands to retrieve the C2 pointers from the Plextor drives, instead of using the standard SCSI-3/MMCx(=1/2/3/4) way of setting the error field to 01B in READ CD's Command Descriptor Block.

greynol - that is a very interesting post. I will have to try these various combinations out for myself!

Is that one of the "features" I read about that you can remove with special firmware versions?

Lite-Ons are famous for their good "community support", so usually those riplocks are removed in custom firmwares. Recently i read a lot of DVDRW drive reviews and the new 18x and 20x liteys seem to be the best on the current market. Also it seems that every future Plextor drive will be a LiteOn OEM.

Maybe it has changed, but last i checked, there weren't firmware awailable that bypasses SMART-X. Yes, the lite-on has a big support community, but it's mostly interested in DVD ripping/writing and not CD-DA extraction, or atleast that's the case for the firmware patchers of that community.

I think that I am going to go ahead and buy that Samsung, unless anyone would recommend against doing so. If anyone finds a better option on newegg that they would recommend over it, please let me know! Thanks for your input guys!

Buying a PX-760A . . . what have I done?


Is this so? How the mighty have fallen . . . If this is true, I would see such rebranding on the whole range of new drives as quite pointless, not much better than halting consumer production altogether. On the other hand, it gives me a good idea of which manufacturer to consider next.

I must admit that my LTR-52327S didn't give me many problems during common usage. I mainly bought the PX-760A for Plextor's reputation, good offset/HTOA support - and the big bonus of DVD reading and writing!

For the price of that Plextor you can buy three LiteOns... If a Plextor is let's say 50% better than a LiteOn but 200% more expensive than in overall it's not better IMHO


http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Plextor-order...Lite-On-IT.html
I'm curoius how they price policy will look like... they will sell a 30$ drive for 100$ ?

It will be pretty pointless/foolish to buy the Plextor-branded drives in that case - and surely equally so for Plextor to do that in the first place.

As CDFreaks themselves say, "What would make you to continue to buy Plextor drives?"

Edit: Actually, one user put it quite well, if not the most eloguently :

Can anyone comment on the new lh-20a1 drives from Liteon? (Because those are the latest and greatest from liteon, right?) Would that be a better or worse drive than that Samsung for reading? I can't find anything online about error correction. Or would it be safer to just get that Samsung. Thanks everyone, almost have this all sorted out.