detail information

Of course a writer can be used for writing various types of discs but it can and will also be used to read them. First we'll start with the reading of audio discs like overall reading capabilities, audio extraction (DAE) and some advanced tests.

Audio
• Intro
• Digital Audio Extraction (DAE)
• Advanced (e.g. protected discs)
• Conclusion

Audio - Intro:

For the audio tests we used Exact Audio Copy (EAC) version 0.9 prebeta 11. EAC is a great (almost free!) program to do various audio tests with the drive. You can find EAC on www.exactaudiocopy.de. Besides EAC we also used Feurio!® version 1.63, another great audio program which you can download from www.feurio.com.

For the tests we used both original pressed discs and CD-R back-ups. We also did some tests with a Key2Audio copy-protected disc.

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

For the Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) tests we started Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and simply extracted the files in WAV format to our harddisk. The disc had 18 tracks and a total playing time of 73 minutes and 34 seconds. We used both the 'Burst' mode and the 'Secure' mode. Here's a picture of the speeds the Waitec reached:

Waitec MEGALUS DAE speed - Burst Mode

Waitec MEGALUS DAE speed - Secure Mode

You can see the results compared to our previous Plextor/Lite-On reviews in the graph below:

As you can see the MEGALUS performs very well in Burst mode compared to the Plextor/Lite-On reviews done by StevieB. We do think however that the Plextor and Lite-On should have been a lot faster... The MEGALUS is a little slower than the Plextor in Secure mode but a lot faster than the Lite-On.

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 MEGALUS performs well and is again faster than the Lite-On 24102B. The drive can read the SubChannel Data and CD-Text and since it has a high DAE speed it can be used on-the-fly up copying to 12x. This drive can also read the Lead-Out Data of a CD-R. We did get 4 data errors on the test CD-R but overall the quality was still 100. In the graph below you can see the drive compared to both the Plextor and the Lite-On again:

Overall we can say that the MEGALUS is a little slower than the Plextor PX-W2410A but faster than the Lite-On 24102B.

Advanced:

To conclude our audio reading tests we'll take a look at some of the advanced options this drive does or doesn't support. We'll also test the reading of a protected (Key2Audio) disc.

First we used EAC to detect some of the more advanced options the MEGALUS supports:

As you can see the MEGALUS doesn't support 'Caching' and 'C2 Error Info'.

The 'Caching' feature that's unsupported is a good thing while the unsupported 'C2 Error Info' feature is a bad thing..

The drive does produce an 'Accurate Stream'.

To conclude our tests we tried to extract the audio from a Key2Audio protected disc:

We inserted the audio disc in the MEGALUS but Windows didn't see any tracks (like the protection is supposed to do). For the tests we used Feurio! and when inserting the disc again with Feurio! it saw 14 audio tracks and 1 data track. The 14 audio tracks could be extracted at full speed without problems. Please do note that this is not a special feature of the MEGALUS but a special read feature of Feurio! which we just wanted to test... It passed with flying colours

Conclusion:

The Waitec performs very well with audio. It can easily keep up with the Plextor and even outperforms the Lite-On. It's too bad the drive doesn't support 'C2 Error Info' because this could have really speeded things up.

Now we'll start testing the reading of data discs...

Write Tests

Read Tests - Unprotected Data