detail information

The TEAC CD-W540E can write discs at a maximum of 40x meaning a whopping 6000kb/s. What does this mean in real terms? To answer this question we set up a basic write process using the latest Nero Burning Rom version (v5.5.8.0). We used the DAO (Disc At Once) method for writing the disc. In the screenshot below you can see the result:

Nope your eyes are working correctly... The TEAC CD-W540E only needs 3 minutes and 16 seconds to write the entire disc! We have seen some other reviews of the Plextor 40x drive and the Lite-On 40x drive on various sites but they all needed more time to finish the job. The TEAC drive is clearly the fastest writer we've see so far!

When we compare the TEAC CD-W540E to other 32x recorders such as the Mitsumi CR-480ATE and the Lite-On LTR32123S the time difference is about 30 to 35 seconds.

We also did a 650MB test write with the latest CloneCD beta (v4.0.0.0 BETA 4) and below a screenshot. Notice the neat new feature of displaying the current data transfer and, in this case, writing speed:

The average speeds are now also mentioned in the CloneCD log window:

Quality:

When writing as such high speeds it's important that the disc is written correctly. So therefore we did a check with Nero CD Speed to verify the written data. In the screenshot below you can see that the TEAC CD-W540E can read the disc without problems at full speed:

And on the left you can see the actual speeds the TEAC CD-W540E reached. For the 40x write and quality test with Nero we used the disc that was provided with the writer. Here's the ATIP information:

• ATIP: 97m 27s 57f
  
• Disc Manufacturer: Mitsui Toatsu Chemicals, Inc.
  
• Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine)
  
• Media type: CD-Recordable
  
• Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
  
• Nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)

Comparing:

Next we did some more tests comparing the TEAC CD-W540E to some of our previous reviews. Please note that some reviews were done on different machines so the achieved writing times can be a little off. You can see the achieved results in the table below:

As mentioned before the TEAC CD-W540E is an extremely fast writer and in the table you can clearly see that the writer produces an excellent result and achieves the best time with every used write speed. The differences aren't even minimal but can be up to 30 seconds! These differences can be explained by looking at the way the TEAC writes the discs. Like mentioned before all drives use Z-CLV recording but the TEAC is the only drive to start writing at 20x while other drives start writing at 16x.

Writing Audio:

The next and final step was to check how fast the TEAC CD-W540E could write audio. Therefore we created a WAVE image and CUE-sheet of an audio disc with Exact Audio Copy and then loaded the CUE-sheet into Nero. We started the write process at 32x and checked if the write process would begin. The latest Nero version now luckily also has an option to check the actual write speed of the disc being written. Note that Nero calls this 'Read Speed': the speed in which the data is read from your harddisk:

We, of course, listened to the created disc for errors but the disc played perfectly. A surprise even since the disc we used was actually certified up to 16x writing (so therefore the disc didn't write at 40x) but Nero reported that the disc could be written at 32x. Strange since when we used the same discs with our Mitsumi CR-480ATE the maximum speed would be 16x as you can see in the screenshot below:

Conclusion:

So what can we conclude from all of the achieved results? Well simply that the TEAC CD-W540E is a great writer. Not only is it very fast, it can also write a lot of media (certified for a lower speed) at high speeds. In our tests we were surprised to see that the TEAC could write certified 16x discs ('That's Write', manufactured by Digital Storage Technology Co., Ltd.) at 32x. To verify this we even did another test and tried other 16x certified 'Traxdata' (manufactured by Prodisc Technology Inc.) discs. These could even be written at full (40x) speed! An excellent result indeed. A final conclusion we made is that, unlike the Plextor PX-W4012A, the TEAC CD-W540E isn't limited to 24x when writing audio. We could write audio at 40x without problems using proper media.