I've noticed that on many of my CDs (not all, but many) my Plextor Premium 2 (and also my PX-760A) was ripping them at max 8x speed.

So I did the famous trick of holding down the eject button. The LED flashed 3 times yellow, then pause, then 3 times orange.

I released the button, put my CD in, closed the tray, and attempted to rip the CD.

When I did this, the device started acting strange; Windows said the device couldn't be accessed because of an I/O error. PlexTools stopped displaying the node for that drive (it just disappeared from the list of Plextor devices). If that drive was already selected when I did this, PlexTools complained that it couldn't read the given drive.

Has anyone ever seen this behavior before, where turning off riplock via this method actually makes the drive unusable?

When I eject the disk and then reload it, everything's fine, but I'm still stuck at 8x max ripping.

Very odd behavior.

- Tim

If you are talking about Plextor's 'SpeedRead' function, then it dosen't work on audio CDs. Newer real Plextor's will upon initialization of an audio CD do a quality check and set a max reading speed based on that. When the drive finds an audio CD to be in a bad condition, then it's set to max 8x burst mode.

Yes, I had enabled SpeedRead. But I had also done the trick of holding down the eject button, as mentioned. I was trying to figure out what the drive's firmware was doing when it was making the disk unreadable when I did that on CDs that had been limited by it to 8x.

Is there any way you can FORCE a Plextor drive to enable SpeedRead despite it having determined that the disc wasn't good enough for it? I find that this happens with certain runs of discs (eg. all the discs in a series), and it's hard to believe that they are actually bad quality, since they're all new, and the same behavior occurs with all of them (in this case, a series of 30 audiobook discs I was ripping). I have read that the Plextor only reads a single track to determine the speed for the entire disc.

- Tim

Short of modifying the firmware, the answer is NO.

The Plextor 'eject button' trick you're talking about, is actually for enabling SpeedRead.

From Plextor's FAQ :

Source : http://www.plextor.com/ENGLISH/support/faqs/HW00012.htm

Well, checking "SpeedRead" in Plextools, versus holding down the eject button, seem to have different effects. With "SpeedRead" checked in Plextools, the disc can still be read. If I do the trick with the eject button, the disc becomes unreadable (Windows gets I/O errors, Plextools says it can't read the disc). That seems kind of odd, if they're supposed to be doing the same thing, don't you think? And as this happens on both drives, I'm wondering what's going on there.

Thanks for the info from the Plextor FAQ -- it still seems to be causing artificially slow reads, since I find it hard to believe that *all* of these 30 brand new discs from a reputable company would be capped at 8x max speed according to Plextor's tests. Someone here once said that there are some discs that are manufactured in some way that makes this happen, possibly some low-level flag on the disc itself. Ever heard of such a thing?

- Tim



That's what I was afraid of - I don't know why this seems to happen with almost all audiobooks and classical CDs I rip; popular music and other things rip faster... I don't know what those classical and audiobook companies could be doing with their CDs that makes this happen.

I've often used alternate NEC firmwares, but haven't found much for Plextors... do you know of any?

- Tim

Same here with Plextor 760A.


I have completely broken my PX-760A by playing with various options in Plextools XL. The difference is that it didn't came back to life until I reflashed another (deprotected) firmware. The second time this happened the drive could not be returned to a operating condidition.

All problems, namely the low CD-DA speed and Windows I/O errors happened with original firmware (v1.06 IIRC). I hate to make a massive conspiracy theory, but it seems likely the plextor could have disabled itself because the XL toolset I used was pirated.

One never knows -- nobody's going to complain to the company if they're using pirated software, huh? ;-)

And yes, I'm using the latest version of the official firmwares in both drives, and using the version of Plextools that came with the drives, so I'm doing everything by the book. It'd be nice if someone created a firmware out there that allowed the user to make the drive rip faster whatever the drive's initial tests say.

- Tim