I have just read the PleXWriter PX-W4012A review. And I am having trouble understanding the VariRec technologie. It is my understanding that Audio CD's store digital data (numbers), and that CD players use a Digital to Analog converter(D/A) to produce sound. I know that some D/A's are better than others, but if you send the same numbers to the same D/A you will get the same sound. Therefore if different media or different recording techniques produce different sounds there must be corruption of the data stream somewhere. Most probably caused by the laser pickup. So it is my guess that that Varirec optimizes the recording approach to reduce these errors. Or did I miss something?

The differences in sound result produced by corrupted data stream are definately worth to mention, but I think that in case of VariREC there is not such a issue to be solved. As Plextor says, VariREC reduces the jitter (noisy, slightly out of phase signal) the recording signal, as you adjust the VariREC settings through the recording software, before writing. The settings are expected to vary according to the media used. I agree with you that for specific A/D and D/A circuits, the results will depend on the quality of the data stream. So, VariREC produce more accurate data? Theoritically it could, but the question is whether those improvements are noticable when you have the output from your speakers...

(in reply to Rollerball)

Basically, jitter is when the pits are not exactly the correct length, and it causes minute timing errors when the music is converted to analogue. As I understand it VariRec increases the length of every pit and raise and so the error in size is a smaller percentage of the pit, so jitter, or timing errors, are reduced slightly.

I may have got this wrong but that's how I understood it.

(in reply to Rollerball)

@Kawasaki

That's Yamaha's Audiomaster you just described. This one sounds obvious to me, but I fail to understand VariTec. They way I understood it was that you can adjust the laser beam power to a certain degree

http://www.plextor.be/english/technical/varirec.html

(in reply to Rollerball)

OK I dunno then.

(in reply to Rollerball)