Now let’s see how good the Plextor PX-716A is at burning CD-R media.

 
Plextor PX-716A burning/reading a CD-R disc at 48x speed

No problems occurred during the burn session – the speed doesn’t go down anywhere, and the graph is straight and clear. The previous model also had no difficulties at burning discs at this speed, though. Judging by the errorless read graph, we can expect the resulting disc to be of a highest quality. I’m going to check this out right now:

 
Quality of the CD-R disc burning by Plextor PX-716A at 48x speed

The result doesn’t disappoint me – the quality of the disc is excellent. The average BLER is less than 10, and there are few first encoder errors (6,850 in total), while second-encoder errors are missing altogether. The jitter rate is very low; there are some fluctuations of the Beta parameter, but they are negligible and fit within the norm. You can also see that the asymmetry is growing up somewhat towards the end of the disc which is the consequence of the increase of the laser power the disc speed grows. In other words, this is an illustration of the operation of PoweRec technology.

That’s a fine start. Let’s see what we have at lower burn speeds.

 
Plextor PX-716A burning/reading a CD-R disc at 16x speed

The burning and the subsequent reading of the disc were performed without any problems: no slumps of speed, no irregularities in the graphs. What about the quality of the disc?

 
Quality of CD-R disc burning by Plextor PX-716A at 16x speed

There are 30% more first encoder errors here than on the disc recorded at 48x speed, but the total of C1 errors remains small anyway. There are still no second-encoder errors at all. The jitter rate has become higher, while the asymmetry has improved – there’s no need to increase the laser power here due to the use of the CLV burn algorithm. Thus, the Beta graph is almost a perfectly flat horizontal line.

Summarizing this, CD-R-related section of the review, I should note that the Plextor PX-716A produces excellent-quality CD-R discs at its maximum as well as reduced burn speeds. The new model is in fact among the best devices in its category as concerns CD-R burning. Yes, the quality of the disc written at the reduced speed is lower than at the maximum speed, but the difference is not very big at all. Moreover, a worse burning of CD-Rs at the minimal speed has become a common problem with almost all modern optical drives. I also wonder why Plextor ignores 24x burn speed. I should suppose they think modern media should be written either at the maximum speed (and the Plextor PX-716A does this job very well) or at the minimal one, using CLV algorithms. The in-between speeds are abandoned as non-optimal?