Sony DRX-S70U detail information

Writing Quality with CD-R discs:

Now we are going to test CD-R discs from different CD-R manufacturers.  To measure the write speed we will use the “Create Data CD” function from within Nero DiscSpeed.  We wrote these discs at the maximum speed that the drive supports.  For the quality test, we also used Nero DiscSpeed.  DiscSpeed runs under Windows and supports several drives.  Also note that different drives and different reading speeds may affect the results obtained when scanning the discs.  We used a BenQ DVD DW1650 with firmware BCDC and scanned these discs at 48X speed.

Disc Quality Scanning - C1/C2 (and CU); here is an explanation in more detail:

CDs use an error detection and correction system (CIRC) which is for the most part not seen by the user when reading the disc.  We can get a working idea of the quality of the media in question by performing Disc Quality Scanning that will show us the amount of errors the drive is detecting and correcting while reading the media.

There is more than one way to handle C1 and C2 error detection/correction, but a simple and common way is to detect and correct up to two errors per frame in each stage and detect three or more errors:

• E11: 1 error detected and corrected by C1 layer
• E21: 2 errors detected and corrected by C1 layer
• E31: 3 or more errors detected but not corrected by C1 layer

The sum of these (per second) is called the Block Error Rate: BLER=E11+E21+E31

• E12: 1 error detected and corrected by C2 layer
• E22: 2 errors detected and corrected by C2 layer
• E32: 3 or more errors detected but not corrected by C2 layer

Any E31 is un-correctable by the C1 layer and will result in the bytes in that frame being redistributed into multiple frames which are passed to the C2 layer.

Any E32 is un-correctable by the C2 layer and will result in interpolation being used for Audio CDs or will result in third layer error correction being use for Data CDs.

Different drives have different ways of reporting these errors in a Disc Quality scan.  For example the following drives will report C1 and C2 errors this way:

BenQ DW1650 Disc Quality:

• C1=BLER=E11+E21+E31
• C2=E32

BenQ DW1650 Advanced Disc Quality:

• All errors are reported separately as well as BLER=E11+E21+E31

Lite-On SOHR-5239V:

• C1=BLER=E11+E21+E31
• C2=E32

Here is a little easier way to look at Disc Quality Scanning:

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; multiple C2 errors in the same frame are not wanted on a good quality disc.  A good disc should not contain any C2 errors of the E22 or E32 kind, and preferably have an average C1 error amount of below 2.0 for the best quality discs, or at least below 10.0 averages for good quality discs.  After C2 errors, there are only un-correctable errors that will make a disc unusable.

So, in short, our analysis will be based on these guidelines to determine the quality of the burned discs which will be Quality Scanned on our BenQ DW1650:

CD-R/RW quality scan guideline

And below are the obtained results:

The Sony DRX-S70U burned this media with C1 average error of 0.49 and no C2 errors; this media will go into the “Best” category.

The Sony DRX-S70U burned the Maxell CD-Pro media with C1 average error of 0.06 and no C2 errors; this media will go into the “Best” category.

The SonyDRX-S70U burns this Memorex LightScribe media with C1 error average of .080 and no C2 errors.  This media will go into the “Best” category.

Here again the Sony DRX-S70U does an excellent job with this FujiFilm media burning with a mere 0.09 C1 error average and no C2 errors.  This FujiFilm media will also go into the “Best” category.

Here we finish up our tests on CD-R media with another good burn; the Sony DRX-S70U burns this Verbatim LightScribe media with 0.81 C1 error average and here again no C2 errors.

Writing Quality with Re-Writable discs:

The Sony DRX-S70U burns our CD-RW test disc with 6.59 averages of C1 errors and no C2 errors; this puts this media in the “Good” category.

Summary:

CD-R writing quality is excellent with C1 averages all below 1 and no C2 errors. The Sony DRX-S70U remained steady when burning our CD-RW disc; although the C1 error average was higher it still performs nicely with no C2 errors.

Reading performance

DVD+R/RW writing performance