Aopen CRW5232 - Page 10

Conclusion

The AOpen CRW5232 drive is a competent CD recorder without providing anything extraordinary. It does anything you would expect of a CD recorder, with possibly the only major blemish being its poor fairing when it comes to error correction. It is not very often that a drive will fail to read up to at least the 3rd check level of the CD-Check Test Disc. And in general the ABEX test discs showed that the drive is not one for handling major defects on a disc's surface. The majority of drives can easily playback at least the fourth level.

While it is a 52x reader, in our reading tests, it seemed to fall just short of the mark, although it's random seek times and transfer rates were quite respectable.

When it comes to backups of games and audio ripping, the drive is something of a mixed bag. It easily handled the SafeDisc protection scheme, up to v2.8. Failing with SafeDisc v2.9 however is not uncommon as virtually all drives have problems with this newer version. With audio discs, it managed to rip the CDS200 protected disc but failed to recognize at all, the Key2Audio protected disc.With digital audio extraction, the drive faired well, being able to read Leadin, LeadOut, Cd Text and Subchannel Data.

Another small downfall was the high pit and land jitter values, especially when recording was done at high speeds. These particular tests also showed that the drive is not very tolerant with a wide variety of manufacturers discs, Taiyo Yuden, EMTEC and SKC being the only manufacturers discs that performed satisfactorily.

At around $40, generally speaking the AOpen drive is a good purchase for anyone wanting a cheap CD recorder.