detail information

We've already mentioned that the TEAC CD-W540E claims to have a DAE speed of 40x and in this step we'll test if it can indeed reach these speeds. Besides that we'll do some more advanced tests using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and Nero CD Speed.

Features:

First we checked the features the TEAC CD-W540E supports with EAC:

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.

Digital Audio Extraction:

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 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 TEAC reached in both modes:

TEAC CD-W540E DAE speed - Burst Mode

TEAC CD-W540E DAE speed - Secure Mode

So the TEAC can indeed reach a DAE speed 0f 40x in burst mode. When we compare the achieved results with some of the drives we've previously reviewed we see that the TEAC has the fastest average speed in burst mode but is closely followed by the Mitsumi CR-480ATE. The Mitsumi is, however, faster in secure mode:

So overall a pretty good result but when you consider that the TEAC CD-W540E is the only 48x drive we think it should have been a little bit faster. Let's continue with our 'Advanced DAE Quality Tests':

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. Here are the results:

The average DAE speed of the TEAC CD-W540E is a lot better (read: faster) here. It outperforms all drives we've previously tested. Only one problem though: the TEAC drive failed to read CD-Text from the disc while all other drives could read it. We tried several times but got the same result every time:

Of course we tested if the TEAC CD-W540E indeed couldn't read CD-text. Therefore we created an audio disc with Nero Burning Rom containing CD-text. We played back the disc with the TEAC and a CD-Text capable player (delivered with the TEAC 'For Your Information' disc):

As you can see the TEAC CD-W540E now did read (and write) CD-text without problems. We wonder why the 'Nero CD speed Advanced DAE Quality Test' reported otherwise...

In the next step we'll see how well the TEAC CD-W540E can read a (heavily) scratched disc.