Nero CD-DVD Speed: Advanced DAE Quality Test

Advanced DAE Quality Test helps estimate the drive’s skills in high-quality extraction of audio tracks from Audio CDs. This test can make use of certain hardware capabilities of the drive relevant to music extraction. We carried out our tests using two Audio CDs prepared by the test utility itself. They were two CD-R blanks, one normal and another with scratches on the surface.

Let’s first see what hardware properties of the drives the test utility could reveal. From the purely formalistic point of view, the Sony DW-U18A and TEAC DV-W58G look advantageous, since they have the lowest offset which reflects the drive’s ability to position its laser accurately and they both support all three types of servo information out of four possible.

The Quality Score is the maximum possible for all the drives as they process the normal Audio CD. The four models with the highest specified CD read speeds turn to be the fastest in practice, too.

The results differ greatly with the scratched CD. The Sony DW-U18A couldn’t pass the test, reporting a non-recoverable error. The TEAC DV-W58G was the best among the other drives, getting the maximum Quality Score, although at a rather average speed. The remaining models got too many errors and thus got a lower score.

Nero CD-DVD Speed: Advanced DAE Error Correction Test

Nearly all modern optical drives feature a hardware error-correction mechanism, but of a varying degree of efficiency. We used the Advanced DAE Error Correction Test to find the best error-processing drive.

We had a special Audio CD prepared by Nero CD-DVD Speed. The disc had scratches on the surface – it was the same as in the previous test. The program identifies how many C2 errors should be overall found by the drive and how many of them the drive does find. Besides that, the test controls the number of sync errors. Then, the Quality Score and C2 Accuracy are calculated basing on the results. You may know that C2 errors pose the biggest problem for optical drives.

• ASUS DRW-0402P/D (Graph)
• ASUS DRW-0804P (Graph)
• Pioneer DVR-107D (Graph)
• Sony DW-U14A (Graph)
• Sony DW-U18A (Graph)
• TEAC DV-W58G (Graph)

We took the results into the above table. The TEAC DV-W58G achieved the highest Quality Score; it is followed by the two slowest drives, the Sony DW-U14A and ASUS DRW-0402P/D. The drives from ASUS, the Pioneer DVR-107D and the Sony DW-U14A prove to be much more watchful working with C2 errors – they are much faster than the remaining two models. Considering this situation under a different point of view, we may note that the Sony DW-U18A and the TEAC DV-W58G committed fewer errors in the absolute calculus than their opponents. So it’s a question what’s better in practice.