Acer CRW2010A IDE CDR-W - Page 4

DAE Tests

Test Method:
We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 software in order to check the DAE performance of the Acer 2010 with various AudioCDs (both pressed and CDR). The posted DAE results are the average of both applications, but the CPU usage is only taken from CD DAE 99, since EAC occupies the system a lot more. As a last note, we used the "BURST" reading mode of EAC. We made a full CD Rip starting from the first to the last track of the CD. The Average DAE reported speed along with the CPU Usage is displayed in the test graphs.

- DAE features:
We used EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 to examine the drive's features. As the program reported, the drive doesn't support data "Caching" and C2 error info and supports "Accurate Stream"

- Pressed AudioCD results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
The DAE ripping speed of Acer 2010 is limited and it reaches 17.3X (average). The drive cannot take on the competition, since the Ricoh MP7200/9200 are able to reach 30X DAE ripping speed (average):

- CDR AudioCD Results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
The Acer 2010 gave the exact same results with CDR media. The drive reaches only 17.1X average DAE ripping speed and the competition is simply way ahead:

- Advanced DAE Quality:

The Acer 2010 completed the CD Speed 99 "Advanced DAE test" successfully, but the results weren't perfect. The drive produced 6 Sync Errors, which costed it the 100 (perfect) quality score.

The average reading speed was 17.23X and Nero CD Speed reports that it can read "CD-Text" enabled AudioCDs and the "Lead-In/out" areas. Also it reports that the drive cannot read SubChannel data from Audio tracks, which is false.

- Bad CDR Media results

Despite the fact that CD Speed 99 Advanced DAE test stretches drive's mechanism to the max, we decided to do real life tests with a scratched disc. The disc was dirty, and with some light scratches, enough in order cause problems to most of the tested drives. We used CD DAE 99 software to rip the whole disc (756539616 sectors) and the results are interesting:

As the tests showed, the Acer 2010 denied reading our test disc and returned a reading error code. The rest of the drives have no problems reading the dirty disc, even if they produce some errors. Both Ricoh MP7200/9200 drives return almost 70% of the reading data as inaccurate. The Yamaha 2200E seems a quite good performer, since the reading errors are only 0.14% of the total disc capacity.

- Ripping 90 and 99min CDs:

As we can see from the above graphs, the Acer 2010 has no problem reading 90min CDs. However it denied reading 99min CDs.