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| Posted by | Robin van Lieshout |
| Posted on | 21/05/02 11:47 |
| Number of views | 7740 |
Music reading tests:
On the top of the box there is written DAE MAX 40X. Lets see if the drive could really live up to this statement. The programs we use for testing is Nero CD-Speed and Exact audio Copy.
Nero CD-Speed:
The test disc we used was an original audio disc with a length of 77 minutes and 56 seconds.
Here is the graph that CD-speed gave us:
Both the read speed and seek times were very good. As we could see the quality was also perfect.
But lets compare the results with other similar featured drives:
|
Original Audio disc. |
 Average |
Start |
End |
Seek |
Seek |
Seek |
Quality/ Accurate Stream |
|
Lite-On LXR-24101A |
31,15X |
18,42X |
41,07X |
91ms |
114ms |
178ms |
10 Yes |
|
Mitsumi |
30,98X |
18,32X |
40,84X |
106ms |
112ms |
161ms |
10 Yes |
|
Lite-On |
31,41X |
18,56X |
41,46X |
86ms |
99ms |
169ms |
10 Yes |
|
Lite-On |
31,91X |
18,87X |
42,09X |
90ms |
107ms |
179ms |
10 Yes |
|
The grey
area's indicate the highest speed / best time |
|||||||
As we could see there is not a big difference between the drives, to bad we did not have more drives available for this test so it looks a bit to much Lite-On.
Let us now run the same test from a CD-R disc. The disc was just a copy of the original music disc that we just used. The CD-R disc was a 16X certified Memorex 80 minute CD-R disc (written at 16X using an Lite-On LTR-24102B CD-Writer) with this manufacturer information:
- ATIP: 97m 15s 17f
- Disc Manufacturer: Ritek Co.
- Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine)
- Media type: CD-Recordable
- Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
- Nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)
The green line indicates the read speed. The yellow line indicates the rotation speed (rpm) that the disc have.
Compared to the original disc read times bit lower and seek times was about the same, but in practical use the difference is not noticeable. Let's again compare the results with some other drives:|
Original Audio disc. |
 Average |
Start |
End |
Seek |
Seek |
Seek |
Quality/ Accurate Stream |
|
Lite-On LXR-24101A |
30,81X |
18,41X |
40,47X |
93ms |
108ms |
172ms |
10 Yes |
|
Mitsumi |
30,21X |
18,07X |
39,66X |
112ms |
117ms |
167ms |
10 Yes |
|
Lite-On |
30,91X |
18,49X |
40,60X |
90ms |
108ms |
178ms |
10 Yes |
|
Lite-On |
31,77X |
19,00X |
41,75X |
93ms |
106ms |
184ms |
10 Yes |
|
The grey
area's indicate the highest speed / best time |
|||||||
The Lite-On LTR-32123S had a speed advantage in this test, but again the difference was not large.
Nero CD-Speed advanced DAE test:
For this test we created a test disc using the Lite-On LXR-24101A CD-Writer, the disc we used was a Kodak Gold 74 min 8X certified, the disc was created at 8X. We picked the Kodak gold disc since it's known for it's outstanding quality, the Kodak gold discs are not produced anymore but thankfully we was able to get a few more from a very kind person. You know who you are, and if you are reading this we can't say more than thank you very much, we really appreciate your help and support. Here is the manufacturer information from the disc:
- ATIP: 97m 27s 45f
- Disc Manufacturer: Kodak Japan Ltd.
- Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine)
- Media type: CD-Recordable
- Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
- Nominal Capacity: 650.83MB (74m 05s 01f / LBA: 333226)
The drive was not able to read data from the lead-out and lead-in, but beside this we can't complain about anything.
But let us compare the drive with other drives:
|
Advanced DAE test |
 Average |
OTF 12X |
OTF 16X |
Read SC Data |
Read CD-Text |
Read Lead-in |
Read Lead out |
|
Lite-On LXR-24101A |
28,74X |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Mitsumi |
29,32X |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Lite-On |
29,42X |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Lite-On |
29,74X |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Waitec Megalus |
28,34X |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
|
Plextor PX-W2410A |
30,19X |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
|
Mitsumi CR-480ATE |
28,61X |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
The grey
area's indicate the best result |
|||||||
All drives got a quality score of 100.0
We don't have anything to add, the table speaks for itself and all drives performed very well. So let us continue with EAC tests…
Exact Audio Copy tests:
Here we got a surprise, EAC was unable to detect the USB 2.0 drive. After some serious thinking and some searches on the Internet we came to a conclusion: EAC needs an ASPI layer to work, and then again the ASPI layer must support USB devices. But which ASPI layer supports USB devices? The Adaptec ASPI layer does not support USB devices. But what about the Nero ASPI layer ? We headed over to Ahead and downloaded wnaspi32.dll from their download page. Then we put the wnaspi32.dll in the same directory as EAC was installed, fired up EAC and Woila! it Worked
But onto the testing, let us first see what features the drive supports:
The supported 'Caching' feature isn't really a 'good' thing while the supported 'C2 Error Info' feature is a 'good' thing. Below some more information on these terms:- 'Caching':
If your drive caches the audio that was just read, it would be a problem to read this data again in order to compare both extractions to find out if they match. - 'Accurate Stream':
This means the drive won't jitter, thus no jitter correction has to be done anymore. - 'C2 Error Info':
Some newer drives are able to return C2 error information beside the actual audio data. In that case EAC doesn't need to read all data twice anymore, which will result in a big speedup.
For the Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) tests we started Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and simply extracted the files in uncompressed WAV format to our harddisk. The disc had 25 tracks and a total playing time of 77 minutes and 56 seconds. We used both the 'Burst' mode and the 'Secure' mode:
- 'Burst Mode':
Burst mode is the fastest mode available. The audio sectors are just read without any error-detection and error-correction. - 'Secure Mode':
The extracted audio is checked for correctness and if errors occur, EAC will try to recover them.
Burst mode reading.
Secure mode.
The drive did very well in this test by reaching close to 40X at the end and average 28,3X. Also the secure mode reading was nothing to complain about with 9,4X at the end and 8,6X average. But let us compare the result with other drives:
|
EAC DAE |
Burst |
Burst |
Secure |
Secure |
|
Waitec |
27,8X |
38,8X |
8,0X |
6,7X |
|
Lite-On |
29,2X |
41,7X |
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