52x CDRW Roundup - Page 7

DAE Tests

- Pressed AudioCD results

In this test we examine the DAE speed of the drives. Both drives ripped the audio files at 36.8x average. Plextor Premium was slightly slower with the CD-R disc, where it read the disc at 34.2x.

- EAC Secure Extract Ripping mode

EAC "secure extract" ripping-mode ensures maximum quality produced WAV's. The software reports that Plextor Premium supports "Accurate Stream", "caching" and retrieves C2 error information.

Optorite CW5201 does not support "caching" and does not retrieve C2 information. Accurate stream is included in the drive's capabilities.

Under the EAC Secure Ripping Mode, Plextor Premium is slow due to the supported "caching" we mentioned above. The Optorite is faster with 14x for the pressed and 15.2x for the CD-R disc.

- Advanced DAE Quality

Below you can see the CDSpeed Advanced DAE test result for Plextor Premium. The average reading speed is 36.73x, and the quality score is 100 (perfect). I addition, the drive is able to read CD-Text, leadin and leadout information and Subchannel data:

On the other hand, the Optorite drive was faster with 37.34x average ripping speed. CDSpeed reports that the drive reads CD text, subchannel data and leadout information.

- Ripping of 99mins AudioCD's

- Reading/Ripping Protected AudioCD's

For the test procedure we used 2 protected Audio discs, which we tested in both recognition and ripping (with the latest EAC) processes:

• Pressed Audio disc with Sony Key2Audio (Celine Dion - New Day Has Come), and
• Pressed Audio disc with Cactus Data Shield 200 (Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island).

Both drives can handle "Key2Audio" and "Cactus Data Shield 200" protected titles. The Plextor drive ripped the CDS200 disc contents almost accurately, since some tracks had slight audible errors. Optorite CW5201 did not have any problems reading the discs.