Teac CD-552E IDE CD-ROM - Page 6

Conclusion

The basic requirements of a candidate user from a CD-ROM drive are generally the reading reliability and of course a reasonable reading speed. TEAC CD-552E is a competitive reader among the other CD-ROM drives in the market, at least in terms of speed. The drive reads an inserted CD-ROM/CD-R disc at 40X average, provides low seek times and rips an audio CD to the hard disk fast enough for its category, at a speed of 29X (average). This result is expected when the inserted audio CD is in a good physical condition, with no scratches or defects.

Otherwise, Teac CD-552E will slow down the ripping speed in order to maintain quality reading and extraction. However, with heavily scratched/defected discs such as the Abex test discs we used in the DAE error correction test, besides the increased duration of the test, the drive did not give the most accurate results. The test reported many uncorrectable read errors among with sync errors, resulting to a low overall score in the test. In the same test, we examined the reliability of the retrieving of C2 error information of the drive, which turned out to be not very high.

The drive will read written HS-RW media, but at a low speed (10-24X), while it will read protected discs very slowly. It will partially read Cactus Data Shield 200 audio protected discs, but cannot handle the Key2Audio ones. Audiophiles will be satisfied with the support of CD-Text reading, the reading of 99min Audio discs and may find the high C2 % accuracy useful, when the disc doesn't contain many errors.

To sum up, we could say that the overall performance of TEAC CD-552E was higher than an average CD-ROM drive. Future firmware may also improve the performance at specific areas to give the ultimate performance. Of course now days where DVD became a must have, the TEAC DV-516E could be a more balanced solution than the CD-552E. As always the choice is yours. TEAC offers a 2-year warranty for the drive and its price is expected to be around Euro 30~50.