LiteOn combo SOHC 5232K - Page 12

Conclusion

The drive's performance met our expectations for a LiteOn product. Judging by the tests, we can conclude that the drive has many power points. One is the ability to backup protected audio disks, which is not the case with many other drives. The reading speeds for CD/DVD were good and the seek times were acceptable for CD and DVD media, meeting the requirements of the home user.

On the other hand, the behavior with our Audio CD during the error correction tests was quite bad. Although the "Check Audio Test Disc" CD was played flawlessly reading up to the 4th level (like most drives do), the TCD-721R test disc produced some of the lowest levels and data errors we have seen (see page 3). The other TCD-726, which is a much easier test disc to read, while giving a good score, was not indicative for a top drive. In plain words, the drive is able to read defected discs but faces difficulties with heavilly scratched ones.

As for the DVD error correction tests, the LiteOn drive found it difficult to read the Dual layer scratched DVD VIDEO disc (see page 5). This was not the case with the DVD Video/S-2 scratched disc, which was read flawlessly. Apart from that, reading of DVD-ROM, DVD-Video and DVD±R/RW is fast and accurate.

With protected disc backups, the drive made flawlessly SafeDisc v2.9 working backups (most recorders have problems with this version). In addition, Fifa2004 title (SafeDisc v3.1) was also valid and readable. The drive's speed while ripping the game titles was quite fast, except with PSX games.

DAE was also a bit of a disappointment, where we had expected the drive to be more qualitative. Although LiteOn drive managed to play/rip the CDS200 and Key2Audio protected Audio CDs, it gave a bad quality score (50 out of 100) in the Advanced DAE CDspeed test (see page 7). In adittion we experienced a few lapses during the playback of the discs.

From the writing tests we did, we generally witnessed good performance, with low recording times and the tests confirmed the manufacturers specifications. And while only achieving 94min overburning, this is quite acceptable.

Regarding the CD writing quality, from the scrutinizing tests we did with the various media brands, it can be generally said that it is good, with low jitter values, although it did go over the limits especially with Creation media. The C1 levels were good with most media, but we faced some important C2 errors with MAM and Creation media (see page 10). Maybe with a new firmware the drive will bear down this defect. Until then, it would be better to avoid recording on high speeds with the media encoutered C2 errors.

The drive's price on the market is around $39.