detail information

On the previous page where we showed you the PlexTools screenshot with the listed supported read speeds we could see that audio was listed as 40X instead of 48X. Let's check if this latest external Plextor drive is also limited when it comes to DAE (Digital Audio Extraction). For the audio read tests we used our usual 'tools', Exact Audio Copy (EAC), Nero CD Speed and PlexTools.

In order for EAC to use USB devices we copied Nero's 'WNASPI32.DLL' file to the EAC folder. Else this program will not recognize the USB recorder!

Features:

First we checked the features the Plextor PX-W4824TU supports using EAC:

As you can see from the screenshot on the left the Plextor PX-W4824TU drive supports all features. 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.

Digital Audio Extraction - Exact Audio Copy:

For the Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) tests we started Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and simply extracted the separate audio tracks in uncompressed WAV format to our hard disk. Our test disc (DJ Promo - Last Men Standing) had 16 tracks and a total playing time of 77 minutes and 3 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.

Below the screenshots of the speeds the Plextor PX-W4824TU drive reached in both extraction modes. We also included a screenshot of the Plextor drive doing DAE of the same disc using the PlexTools software:

Plextor PX-W4824TU DAE speed - EAC - Burst Mode

Plextor PX-W4824TU DAE speed - EAC - Secure Mode

Plextor PX-W4824TU DAE speed - PlexTools

As expected and as you can see from the achieved results the external Plextor drive is indeed limited to about 40X when doing DAE. The DAE speeds in Burst Mode were a little slower than we saw with the internal 48X Plextor drive but with the PlexTools software we got a better result. The DAE speeds in Secure Mode using EAC were a little higher than we saw with the internal model using firmware 1.00:

Digital Audio Extraction - Nero CD Speed:

Now let's check our results we got with Exact Audio Copy using Nero CD Speed. You can see a screenshot of the tests below:

The tests done with Nero CD Speed are again similar (I hope this isn't getting too boring ) to the internal model and the drive reaches a top speed of 41.82X. The drive (of course) has an accurate stream and gets a quality score of 10 which is the highest score. Finally the CPU usage was pretty low although 28% for 1X reading seems a bit high and is not correct. The burst rate of the drive was 9MB/s:

Advanced DAE Quality Test:

To conclude our DAE test we did the 'Advanced DAE Quality Test' with Nero CD Speed. This test is a very hard and intense test for any reader.

We created a new test disc using a Plextor PX-W4012TU recorder. We used some high quality 'Hi-Space' media which are also available from our online shop (for our Dutch and Belgian visitors only). These Hi-Space discs have a 24 carats gold reflective cover and can be written up to 24x. Here are the results from the Advanced DAE Quality Test:

The average DAE speed of the Plextor PX-W4824TU drive is pretty good when you compare it to other 40X readers but the drive can't keep up with other 48X readers. The external Plextor performed a little better than the internal model but not by much. We ejected the test disc during reading of the lead-out data since else the Plextor drive will keep reading for hours and hours as we experienced during our previous review.

As a final test we of course also tested if the Plextor drive could indeed read CD-Text. We played an audio disc with CD-Text using NeroMediaPlayer and the PX-W4824TU could indeed read it without problems as we expected. Writing CD-Text with Nero Burning Rom was also no problem.

Now that we've concluded our data and audio reading part, let's see how well the Plextor drive can write discs. The scratched and low quality disc tests are skipped because the drive performs about the same as the internal model.