Teac DV-W58G-A - Page 13

Conclusion

The drive had a good performance in the CD reading tests, with high speed and good seek times. However we would like the full seek time mode to be lower. For the same format the error correction is rather good. The performance with the Abex test disc was very good. However the CD-Check Audio Test Disc seemed to be a little difficult for the Teac drive where only the three first tracks were played without problems.

In the DVD tests the Teac drive had, once again, good reading speed and very good seek times for all modes. The DVD ripping speed was the higher and the DVD error correction, with both single and dual layer test discs, was also very good.

The DV-W58G-A drive managed to make working backups of all the protected games we tried, while the ripping speed was high for all the protections we tested.

In the audio part the drive had a high DAE speed, while supports Leadin and Leadout, CD text and Subchannel data. The drive also supports 90min and 99min discs. Here we must also refer the ability of the Teac drive regarding the protected AudioCDs. Both of our test pressed media were playbacked and ripped successfully.

The maximum allowed CD writing speed is 40x, which is high. In the writing quality part there were no C2 errors reported and the C1 levels were low in all cases, except with Mam and Intenso media. From the jitter measurements we estimate that the maximum values were increased while the average levels were acceptable. Also we would avoid writing at 8x and 16x. Maybe a firmware upgrade will improve this.

For the DVD writing part, the drive managed to burn both formats at 8x, -R and +R, and at 4x the RW formats. As far as it concerns the writing quality there were some cases that it was very good, but at most the PI/PO levels were extremely increased. Here too a firmware upgrade would be highly anticipated.

The price for the DV-W58G-A is 129 euro.