X-bit labs

AOpen DUW1608/ARR DVD±RW Dual Layer Burner Review (page 4)

Category: Storage

by Vasily Melnik

[ 09/21/2005 | 11:49 PM ]

CD-R Discs Burning Quality at 24x

CD-R disc burning at 24x

This time a 3-zone Z-CLV algorithm is employed. Why not a P-CAV or, at least, a 2-zone Z-CLV, like in a majority of modern optical drives? The manufacturer should know better, so I will just check the quality of the resulting disc.

Quality of the CD-R disc burned at 24x speed

The AOpen drive performs worse at the reduced speed, like many modern models do. The total of C1 errors is bigger than on the disc recorded at 40x, even though the BLER is almost the same. A more serious problem is that there are quite a lot of C2 errors which are obviously not due to a defect of the medium. The drive is to bear all blame for them. The Beta graph is still perfect – a straight horizontal line going at the zero mark, but the uniformity of the Jitter rate has degenerated. So, the burn quality is lower at the lower burn speed, even though the disc is not downright bad. Let’s see what we have at the minimal speed.

CD-R Discs Burning Quality at 16x

CD-R disc burning at 16x

The burn session ended successfully at 16x speed, and the employed algorithm – classic CLV – isn’t surprising. We could hardly expect anything else at 16x, though.

Quality of the CD-R disc burned at 16x speed

The quality doesn’t degenerate further at the lowest burn speed. On the contrary, it improves! The resulting disc is even better than the one recorded at 40x: a small total number of C1 errors, no C2 errors, and a low BLER. The excellent Beta graph and the uniform Jitter rate additionally testify the excellent quality of the disc. So, those minor problems at 24x burn speed must have been due to some errors in the burn strategy, but considering the current situation with AOpen’s optical drives, we can hardly hope the manufacturer will correct them with firmware updates.

Here’s a brief summary of the CD-R section of the tests: the drive produces excellent quality discs at the maximum (40x) and minimum (16x) speeds, but you should avoid 24x speed as the disc recorded at 24x proved to be worse than the other two. The drive didn’t reach the maximum declared burn speed of 48x, but this is hardly a serious drawback. You won’t want to compromise the quality of the disc by saving a few seconds, will you?