Pioneer DVR-A03 DVD-R

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. Installation
3. CD Data Tests
4. RW reading tests
5. DAE Tests
6. CDR Tests
7. DVD-R Tests - Page 1
8. DVD-R Tests - Page 2
9. DVD-R Tests - Page 3
10. DVD-R Tests - Page 4
11. RW Writing Tests
12. Conclusion

Pioneer DVR-A03 IDE DVD-R/RW - Page 5

DAE Tests

- Test Method
We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 software in order to check the DAE performance of Pioneer DVR-A03 with various AudioCDs (both pressed and CDR). The posted DAE results are the average of both applications, but the CPU usage was only taken from CD DAE 99, since EAC occupies the system a lot more. As a last note, we used the "BURST" reading mode of EAC. We made a full CD Rip starting from the first to the last track of the CD. The Average DAE reported speed along with the CPU Usage is displayed in the test graphs.

- DAE features:
As the EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 reported, the Pioneer DVR-A03 does "Caching" data, supports "Accurate Stream" and doesn't support "C2 error info".

- Pressed AudioCD results: (Click to see CDSpeed Graph)
The Pioneer supports up to 10X DAE speed. Its average performance was around 7X, which makes the drive a bit slow for the current standards:

- CDR AudioCD Results: (Click to see CD Speed graph)
The Pioneer drive has the same performance with CDR media as with pressed CDs:

- EAC Secure Extract Ripping mode

After many requests from numerous visitors we have added the EAC's secure extract ripping mode results, which ensures maximum produced WAV quality. Note that for each drive we used the build-in detection function:

Tested Drives	Average DAE Speed (X)
Tested Drives	Pressed	CDR
Pioneer DVR-A03	1.6	1.6

- Advanced DAE Quality

All drives performed excellently in the Nero CD Speed Advanced DAE quality test. The Pioneer DVR-A03 produced 0 data/sync errors and got a perfect score (100). As the Nero CD Speed Advanced DAE test showed, the drive can read "CD-Text" and "SubChannel Data":

- Bad CDR Media results

Despite the fact that Nero CD Speed Advanced DAE test stretches a drive's mechanism to the max, we decided to do real life tests with a scratched disc. The disc was dirty, and with some light scratches, enough to cause problems to most of the tested drives. We used CD DAE 99 software to rip the whole disc (756539616 sectors) and the results were very interesting:

	Average Speed (X)	Errors	Errors Of Total Disc (%)
Pioneer DVR-A03	7.0	68804154	9.09

As the tests proved, the Pioneer doesn't perform well with scratched CDs. The drive managed to produce many reading errors and 9.09% of the read data were corrupt.

- Ripping 90 and 99min CDs

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