detail information

On the box of the Yamaha website we can read that its DAE speed is also 44X ("44x high-fidelity audio ripping"). On this page we'll test just that. For the audio read tests we used our usual 'tools', Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and Nero CD Speed .

Features:

First we checked the features the Yamaha CRW-F1 supports using EAC:

As you can see from the screenshot on the left the Yamaha drive supports caching and has an accurate stream. The drive cannot retrieve the C2 error information from the disc. 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 (Thunderdome XXII - CD1) had 20 tracks and a total playing time of 77 minutes and 45 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 Yamaha CRW-F1 drive reached in both extraction modes:

Yamaha CRW-F1 DAE speed - Burst Mode

Yamaha CRW-F1 DAE speed - Secure Mode

The Yamaha CRW-F1 drive again couldn't reach 44X but comes very close in Burst Mode. The top DAE speed was 43.0X and when we compare it to the 40X readers we see it beats the Plextor PX-W4012A but not by much. The Yamaha CRW-F1 drive performs better than the CRW3200E drive as you can see from the table below:

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 confirm our previous test and the Yamaha again reaches a top DAE speed of about 43X. The seek times were however quite high and thus not that good. The CRW-F1 does have an accurate stream and gets a quality score of 10 which is the highest score. Finally the CPU usage was low which is good:

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 Yamaha CRW-F1 drive is pretty high but it's only a little faster than the 40X readers and it's thus again a little disappointing. Luckily the drive has no problems reading the CD-Text and SubChannel Data from the disc but it can't read any data from the lead-out of the disc:

We of course also tested if the Yamaha drive could indeed read CD-Text. We played an audio disc with CD-Text using NeroMediaPlayer and the CRW-F1 could indeed read it without problems as you can see in the screenshot below (Artist and Song Title are displayed):

Now that we've concluded our data and audio reading part, let's see how well the Yamaha drive can read a (heavily) scratched disc and a low quality disc.

Data Read Tests

Scratched/Low Quality Disc