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On the previous page we concluded that the LiteOn LTR-52246S is a fast reader for data now's it's time to see how fast the drive can read audio. In order to find out we used CDSpeed, Exact Audio Copy and cdda2wav to examine the drives capabilities in reading normal (unprotected) audio discs.

In order to get results which can be compared to former reviews, I've created a test disc of 77 minutes. To avoid any glitches caused by bad media, I've used a Taiyo Yuden manufactured CD-R.

Digital Audio Extraction - Nero CD Speed

As you can see, the drive cannot read audio at 52x speed, but only 48x, with an average of 37x (while 52x reading would result in 39x). Remember that the difference would be not more than a few seconds.

Digital Audio Extraction - Advanced DAE Test

If you want to, you can look at the logfile created by the advanced DAE test. As you can see in the screenshot, there is no problem at all. Even the complete leadout can be read, which is necessary in order to read some protected audio discs.

Digital Audio Extraction - Exact Audio Copy

For this test, the test disc, which contains 77 minutes of music, is extracted to the hard disc without compression and without normalization. Exact Audio Copy offers different read modes, two of which are important to know:

• burst mode
  
  Burst mode is the fastest mode available. The audio sectors are just read without any additional error-detection and error-correction, besides what the hardware does on its own.

• secure mode
  
  The extracted audio is checked for correctness and if errors occur, EAC will try to recover them. This is useful when reading scratched discs, low quality discs, and discs which contain errors intentionally (such as discs which are protected by Cactus DataShield)

The paranoia mode of cdda2wav is very similar to secure mode and is used under the same circumstances. At first, here's the result using the burst mode:

Exact Audio Copy: burst mode

When using secure mode, the results were weird:

Exact Audio Copy: secure mode

In this first test, the disc was read pretty fast. The maximum speed was about 20x, however, the speed dropped to 16x after the last track had been extracted. The average of 12x is not a bad value. But with the same disc, the drive ripped only the first track at high speed, then spinned down and continued to rip at low speed:

Exact Audio Copy: secure mode

>This issue occured rather often! In order to find out if this is a hardware issue or software issue, I have ripped the test disc again with cdda2wav -paranoia. This is very similar to the secure mode used by EAC. The output of this program is nothing to be presented as a screenshot, but I can give you the times:

This issue with spinning down in secure/paranoia mode did not occur in cdda2wav, so I suppose it is a software issue. It did not even occur on another system with the same drive and EAC.

Now that we've concluded our data and audio reading part, let's see how well the LiteOn drive can read a (heavily) scratched disc and a low quality disc.

Data Read Tests

Scratched/Low Quality Disc