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The specifications of the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA state that the drive is able to write CD-R discs at 32x. Let us find out how the drive really performs in speed and quality.

Writing Data CD-R discs:

Let us first take a look at the CD-R write technology used by the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA:

As we could see the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA uses Zone-CLV (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 32x, this gives an average speed of 24.94x. This of course makes it a lot slower than many other new drives, let's compare it with two of the fastest writers below.

As we could see the Plextor PX-708A uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writing strategy to reach it rated speed of 40X. This gives an average speed of 33.38x.

As we could see the Plextor PX-712A uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) writing strategy to reach it rated speed of 48X. This gives an average speed of 36.43x.

And as a last test we wrote a disc containing 700Mb using Nero Burning ROM software. Writing method used is DAO (Disc At Once), and the disc is set up as a non-multisession disc with 'finalize disc" enabled.

The Pioneer DVR-A08XLA used 4 minutes and 15 second to write the disc at 32x. Let us see how this compares to other drives;

As we could see it's over a minute slower than the fastest drives due to the low writing speed of only 32x Z-CLV. But the writing quality may make up for the lack of speed, head on and find out.

Write Quality:

We will test CD-R discs from a total of 7 different CD-R manufacturers. To really measure the write speed, we used the 'create data CD" function in Nero CD-Speed. The discs were written at the maximum speed that the drive supports. For the quality test, we used K-Probe 2 which is a tool developed by a Lite-On Employee. It runs under Windows and works with drives made by Lite-On. Also note that different drives and different reading speeds may affect the results obtained when scanning the discs. We used a Lite-On LTR-52246S drive with firmware 6S0F and scanned the discs at 48X speed.

A written CD-R disc will always have some C1 errors; C1 errors are easily corrected by the drive's error correction capabilities. The next level of errors is C2, while C2 errors could also be corrected by most drive's error correction capabilities; they are not wanted on a good quality disc. A good disc should not contain any C2 errors, and preferably have an average C1 error amount of below 2.0 for the best discs, or at least below 10.0 average for good quality discs. After C2 errors there are only un-correctable errors that will make a disc unusable.

Why wait any longer? Below are the obtained results:

CMC Magnetics is not known for making the best CD-R discs and as we could see the error level is a bit high, especially the area written at 32x.

The best results we got, ironically enough it's still worse than the worst result we got with the BenQ DW1620A…

Acceptable, but not perfect.

Not good, the disc has a lot of C2 errors near the end, the LTR-52246S slowed down the reading speed near the end as we could see on the result.

Acceptable, but still far from the best we have seen with TY.

For a reason or another it would only write these prodisc CD-R's at 10x, and the quality is nothing to shout hurray for either.