X-bit labs

Six DVD Burners Roundup (page 8)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 06/24/2004 | 08:22 AM ]

Nero CD-DVD: CD Quality Check

CD Quality Check is a tool for checking the drive’s ability to process bad-quality media. We used a printed data CD with a physically-damaged surface. The results are listed below:

• 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)

According to the numbers, the ASUS DRW-0804P and the Pioneer DVR-107D win this test. They have no C2 errors and get the maximum quality score. On the other hand, this is only true if the two drives really can process such errors – this ability was questioned in other tests. The drives from Sony and the TEAC DV-W58G got the most errors and zeroes in the “Quality Score” column.

Nero CD DAE

The special-purpose Nero CD DAE utility allows checking the drive’s speed at ripping audio tracks and saving them in the WAV format. This utility doesn’t use any specific hardware capabilities of the drives and its algorithm is similar to many other programs of this kind that the users employ for music digitization.

The drives were extracting eighteen audio tracks from an Audio CD at the maximum possible speed.

As you see, there are no errors committed. As for speed, the ASUS DRW-0804P and the Pioneer DVR-107D were the fastest, but closely followed by the Sony DW-U18A and TEAC DV-W58G. As we might have expected, the models with the smallest declared CD-processing speed, the ASUS DRW-0402P/D and the Sony DW-U14A, are the slowest.