Sony CRX200E DDCD-RW

5. DAE Tests

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. Installation
3. Data Tests
4. RW reading tests
5. DAE Tests
6. CDR Tests
7. RW Writing Tests
8. Conclusion

Sony CRX200E IDE DDCDR-W - Page 5

DAE Tests

- Test Method:
We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 software in order to check the DAE performance of the Sony CRX200E 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:
We used EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 to examine the drive's features. As the program reported, the drive does "Caching" data, supports "Accurate Stream" and can't utilise "C2" error info.

- Pressed AudioCD results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
The Sony CRX200E has its DAE speed locked at 12x (max). That gives the drive a slight disadvantage over the competition from other drives, since they support 32x DAE (max) according to their specifications. The Sony CRX200E didn't like our test disc with the CD Speed 99 and refused to finish the test. We then tried it with other pressed CDs and didn't have any problem with them:

- CDR AudioCD results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
The Sony drive continues to have its DAE speed locked at 12x with CDR media. The drive's average ripping speed was 11.9x which is somewhat slow compared to the competition:

- Advanced DAE Quality

The CD-Speed 99 Advanced DAE Quality test revieled a possible problem in Sony's CRX200E DAE capability. The drive produced 1 sync and 99 data errors, which costed the perfect 100 score, and finally achieved a 99.2 quality score... The test also reported that the drive cannot read CD-Text, something that was confirmed with Feurio's build-in CD-Text player, and can read SubChannel data:

- Ripping 90 and 95mins AudioCDs
The Sony CRX200E recognized the 90min AudioCD without any problems but failed entirely with 99min CDs. Also, as CD Speed 99 reported, the drive stops reading at around 88minutes :