..wrote long, detailed response... lost due to no membership... went back... all input gone... so here is short version.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/forum/register.asp?actkey=4m712kscn7054941174q75j10vg04550

Totally smoked the Lite-on 52x regarding ability to read dirty/scratched CDs. (test cd was over 60% unreadable)

I think this is a really big deal.

I was ready to get this drive but now, unless someone can explain why it is just as good as the LG 8520B which read the same CD and only four 0.43% unreadable.

The other criteria for me is "best" clone Cd drive characteristics which limits drives quite a bit.

Tom

(in reply to goden99)

oops, the Lite-on found disk over 69.18% damaged, not unreadable. However, it did find "a few sectors" unreadable. They didn't include the customary table comparing all the drives because it couldn't finish the test.

(in reply to goden99)

You do know that the Lite On has 100% C2 accuracy. So it does report all errors it finds. Most others drives C2 accuracy isn't that good.
So you can have errors which weren't recognized by the drive.

Still this only indicates the accuracy of finding errors. Not the quality of reading.
Infact the TEAC 52x is a very good reader for damaged cd's but it's c2 accuracy is low.

Second point is that Lite On normally doesn't drop there read speed much and doesn't do as many retries as the the LG, TEAC and older Plextor drives. I wonder how it reads when the speed is put arround the 0,1x if this is possible with some help.

Just for the facts here are the postive/negative points compared to each other.


LG
+ pretty good for protected audio (still not as good as plex/yamaha)
+ master of overburning (102 minutes is possible with the right media)
+ overall writing quality.
- No error meassure software except C2 in Nero CD SPEED.
- Not 100 procent accurate with error measureing software.


Lite On
+ Works with CD Docter/WSES/Kprobe so it can meassure the quality of the disc's.
+ 100% C2 accuracy
+ Writing quality with TY disc's.(Lite On in combination with TY is excellent quality)
+ very good firmware support for improving writing quality/speed for media.
- Bad normal support.
+/- Burns more media faster but this also gives more problems.

Let me say you this if you want the best reader I would say buy the LG
however if you want to know at least something about the quality of disc's you burn/have then buy the Lite On.

(in reply to goden99)

Thanks rjw for the insight.

Regarding Plextor. I was always under the impression that this was a top shelf produce, however, according to the CloneCD hardware list, there is not a single Plextor model that will write "Correct EFM-Encoding."

The highest rating is "Drive writes regular bit patterns correctly" for which there is no Plextor model associated.

The best Plextor capability is "Drive writes regular bit patterns almost correctly."

Now don't get me wrong, I have no idea of what importance EFM-Encoding is, but I think I would like to have this feature.

Why Plextors would not have this, I do not understand.

Thanks
Tom

(in reply to goden99)

I think it's a combination of a newer protection coming out and Plextor simply caving in to the industry.
Supposedly they even downgraded the firmware on some earlier drives that did work so they wouldn't anymore.
I could be wrong but that's my take on it and what I've gathered from friends and poking around.
I had a Plex 12x4x32 and it was great at the time but it got superceded fast and it took me a while to find a good do it all drive.
I ended up with a 32 Lite On and have been upgrading with them ever since. Most of their drives however will not rip protected audio cd's so no drive is perfect,the 166s dvd reader they make does most though ;)
Their latest 52x drive has very low error rates with TY media and their reading seems to get better too with each new firmware.
If you want to copy games you'll need the full efm capability. If you just want to do data and audio maybe a nice yamaha f1 would be the ticket, especially for audio.

(in reply to goden99)

Interesting points Dartman about Plextor degrading their drives(!)

However, now I'm really confused. So you can have all the Clone CD best attributes and still you may not be able to "rip" protected audio CD's? (I'm assuming "rip" means copy.)

So are there any criteria/specs that can be used to evaluate drives based on the ability to copy protected audio?

Confusion Building!
Tom

PS. I saw another thread at this site about how to identify the TY CD-R's and the main feature was a spindle cover that had this big threaded wheel nut.

I was a Best Buy and NO data CDR's had this. This style spindle was only present with the Audio CDR's. I'm assuming that the TY's discussed were for data? Or have I got that one wrong(?)

(in reply to goden99)

About plextor selling there soul to the devil(to the media compannies) is not completely true.

While the EFM story has different sides. Most people still think that Plextor made a deal with Macrovision. However this thing can't be confirmed. However there are some facts that are not very positive about Plextor. However the real link fact could never be established and Plextor's explanation does make scense.

What is true is that when the audio compannies started to use protections there was one companny on the cd-r market that said this won't stop or drives from reading these disc's. And so plextor released for allmost all drives a firmware which solved the problem to read/rip cds-100. With this firmware in combination with Plextools most plextor drives can read allmost all audioprotections. There are the following exceptions . Only the 32x and 40x CD-ROM drives can rip Mediacloq correct(only other drives able to this is a old SCSI TEAC drive and the YAMAHA F1) and the new Plextor 48x seems to need differnt firmware for protections. (However it is true that the latest firmware is the most succesfull in most cases only under some cases the firmware 1.00 performs better with one protection.)

The Lite On drives can allmost only read CDS-200/key2audio old disc's.

So as you can see the clone cd attributes say nothing about protected audio capabilities. I will post the small list which was published in ct' of 5 protections and some devices on this board. This thing might be interresting. And if your lucky I might even update that list with some other drives and there capabilities.

Also the clone cd attributes do not say anything about the capability of copying the newest securom protection and for reading these copies.

(in reply to goden99)

I think the Lite On 166s does most audio protections but I only have More Fast and Furious to test with so I haven't tried others. I do know my others except for my 40 wide Plex could not, and the Plex needed extra help also.
I think the early LiteOn products also were purposely limited from reading those protections in the firmware, they don't even see the contents and if you get lucky and one does it only gets dead space afterwards.
As far as TY media look for made in Japan on the label somewhere. Fuji should always be TY, Memorex can be one of about 4 makers including TY and they're others also that might be. They stopped using the screw tops in the latest packaging. Also the center of the disk is opuaque looking with straight across numbers on TY media. Their isn't one drive out that does everything, My Sony 500a dvd drive can't do EFM at all and it doesn't overburn either on cdr's. I should try it with that protected cd I have I guess but knowing Sony it won't work. They purosely limited DVD ripping speed to 2x just so you don't use it for movies.

OK I've done some testing here and it's interesting anyways. The Sony 500a dvdrw drive works in EAC with the latest firmware in burst mode supposedly with no erros according to the one track I did a quick test on. The 166s dvd will work with clone cd with the dsof firmware but not in EAC. With the first firmware it works in EAC but was getting a error that might be because the disk is a little scratched and I didn't try burst mode or any thing other then defaults. It wont work with clone or EAC with the newest firmware....HMMMM....
Thought you might want to know.
I'll do some more playing and see if anything changes.

(in reply to goden99)

...don't know if this makes any sense, but is it possible that older cdrw's might be able to copy audioprotected schemes since the newer schemes might be aimed at newer cdrws? (I only mention this when Macrovision came upon the VCR arena. Us Betaphiles made copies and copies and copies and never noticed anything! Macro was aimed at VHS!)

Of course, now I'm at square one... what cdrw drive to get?

I must say I'd like a DVD combo drive for convenience and from what I can see, there is only one model the LG GCC-4480B that has all CloneCD attribs.

QUESTION: Why can't you write assembler that will simply take control of the hardware (cdrw drive) and command it to retrieve the raw bit pattern stored on the drive? and then write it? Perhaps this would involve writing a "firmware." At the hardware level, shouldn't it be about equivalent to I/Oing an RS-232 port?

(in reply to goden99)

Yes writing a new firmware could solve problems but its not easy task

(in reply to goden99)

maybe if quality is wat you want the new Plextor Premium is accept his price of €139 something for you.

The drive is fast and i did make a good backup from Operation Flashpoint Resistance (safedisk 2.6)

The burning quality of this drive is verry, verry good.

PentiumIII 600
Abit BE6-II 512ram
Leadtek Ti200TDH 128mb
2x Maxtor 40G 9ms
Iiyama 19"
Plextor Premium
Liteon 52x24x52
liteon dvd 165h
Toshiba SD-M1612
Windows XP Pro

(in reply to goden99)

From what I've seen I would call the Premium drive "fast" it rates slower then average speeds for similarily rated drives. Not that it makes a huge difference, but technically that makes it a little slow.

(in reply to goden99)

The Yamaha drive is the best for ripping "audio" protected CD's.

(in reply to goden99)

quote:

---

Originally posted by tomatinfo

Thanks rjw for the insight.

Regarding Plextor. I was always under the impression that this was a top shelf produce, however, according to the CloneCD hardware list, there is not a single Plextor model that will write "Correct EFM-Encoding."

The highest rating is "Drive writes regular bit patterns correctly" for which there is no Plextor model associated.

The best Plextor capability is "Drive writes regular bit patterns almost correctly."

Now don't get me wrong, I have no idea of what importance EFM-Encoding is, but I think I would like to have this feature.

Why Plextors would not have this, I do not understand.

Thanks
Tom

---

I wrote a small article that is probably a little outdated now on why Plextor's (bar the PREMIUM, since it writes regular bit patterns correcly) couldn't cope with SD2 and weak sectors.

(in reply to goden99)

quote:

---

Originally posted by tomatinfo


QUESTION: Why can't you write assembler that will simply take control of the hardware (cdrw drive) and command it to retrieve the raw bit pattern stored on the drive? and then write it? Perhaps this would involve writing a "firmware." At the hardware level, shouldn't it be about equivalent to I/Oing an RS-232 port?

---

That would be known as firmware programming, and would require advanced knowledge of the drive. It would be also hard to hack already released revisions.

@ Correct EFM encoding:
The fact that only the PREMIUM drive supports this is down to the hardware level. The PREMIUM has a Plextor chipset, the others are based apon Sanyo. Sanyo chipsets 'choke' on high DSV's. A firmware would have already been revised for the W2410TA ~ W4824TA if implementation on a software level was possible...

(in reply to goden99)

I wouldn't be so shure if PLextor have there complete own firmware in there new drive. There is lot's of info which seem to point out that the chipset in the premium is a custom chipset orriginally made by SANYO for Plextor.
By the way I've seen some information that shows that the Plextor Premium might be just as good as the Yamaha F1 for protected audio.
And since it is faster , supports plextools (C2 at bit level rocks!)

2nd point is that Yamaha drives are really insane priced today.
If you think a Plextor premium drive is expensive then try to get a YAMAHA cd-rw F1.
The only stores I know that have them are asking prices allmost as high as for a NEC N1300 DVD+R/-R(W) writer.

(in reply to goden99)