52X IDE CD-RW Recorder Roundup - Page 3

- Teac CD-W552E

The third drive in this 52X roundup comes from Teac. The CD-W552E supports 52X CAV CD-R reading/writing and 24X US-RW writing speed. Below are the official specifications:

The drive supports Buffer Underun protection and the data buffer size is 2MB. The maximum audio extraction speed is set to 52X, and Mount Rainier format is included. The firmware version installed in the Teac drive is v1.05:

The drive also supports all the usual writing /reading modes and can also retrieve C2 error information. The following pictures show the available reading/writing speeds:

The TEAC CD-W552E lowers its maximum writing speed according to the inserted media as the following pictures show:

- Recording Technology

The drive supports the 52X recording speed with the use of CAV recording technology. As Nero CD Speed graph shows, the drive starts writing at 24.30X and accelerates to 554.63X by the end of the disc. That gives an average theoretical writing speed of 41.39X with 80min CD-R media. The performance is the highest we had for the 52X CAV writing but we will make safer conclusions in the writing tests.

- NeroCDSpeed writing test at 48X

- NeroCDSpeed writing test at 40X

As you can see from the graphs, the Teac CD-W552E supports the P-CAV technology for the 48X and 40X writing.

- The package

The European retail package contains the CD-W552E, a Teac CD-ROM with manuals, drives and photos of various Teac products, Roxio’s Easy CD Creator 5 for audio and data recording, MusicMatch Jukebox for MP3 ripping and burning and PhotoImpression for digital image editing. The package does not include any CD-R or US-RW media. The drive is priced around 100 Euro and has a 2-year warranty.

- Looking at the drive

On the front panel of the drive there are the built-in headphone jack, the volume control knob, the power eject/load button and the LED indicators. the "Teac" and 52X writer" logos are stamped on the disc tray.

On the rear panel of the drive you will find the IDE connector, the configuration jumpers, the analogue and the digital audio output connectors and of course the power connector.

- Inside the drive

After removing the bottom screws we can see the internal of the drive. Note that by doing this the warranty becomes invalid. The drive uses Mediatek chipsets as well as the Mitsumi drive we saw previously, with however a different board design.

- Installation

The Teac drive was installed as a Master device in the secondary IDE channel of our test PC, and worked at Ultra DMA mode. After booting, it identified itself as a "TEAC CD-W552E". Again Nero doesn't report the correct Buffer underrun protection (BURN-Proof is a trademark of SANYO) and the correct would be "SuperLink".