X-bit labs

Plextor PX-760A Dual-Layer DVD Burner Review (page 8)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 12/20/2006 | 12:35 PM ]

Nero CD DAE

I used two programs to measure the drive’s speed at extracting audio tracks. The first one is Nero CD DAE, which was developed quite a long time ago, but is still up to users’ requirements. This program’s algorithm is simple and doesn’t make wide use of some of hardware characteristics of the drive – this is the algorithm many other programs of this class stick to. I used the Nero CD DAE utility to estimate the speed it took the drive to extract audio tracks from the audio disc I had used earlier and to convert them into WAV-files. I enabled the option of double reading of each track to look for errors.

The drive worked at its highest speed (for this type of the medium) and didn’t make a single error.

Exact Audio Copy

The second audio extraction utility, Exact Audio Copy, differs from Nero CD DAE as it is capable of making use of the hardware characteristics of optical drives to achieve the maximum quality of the resulting files. I used the EAC utility to determine the hardware properties of the drive (using the Drive Options menu) and then to extract audio tracks (in the Secure Mode) from the same disc as in the previous test; the tracks were saved as WAV-files.

To check out the support of C2 errors, a special “bad” audio disc was used, prepared by Nero CD-DVD Speed.

So, the drive supports the data caching and Accurate Stream features and can process C2 errors. The data caching isn’t good for creating accurate copies of Audio CDs. The drive spent more time for this test than for the previous one, but there are no errors again.