- CD Format

The max supported reading speed for Pressed CD media with the 4571 is 48X while with CD-RW media is set at 40X. what follows is a graphic representation of the reading speed of the review drive and two comparison drives regarding these media. The tests were made with the CD-Speed utility and a two media, once pressed, one RW.

Not much to say, as all three drives achieve maximum readig speed with both formats. the speed differeces are marginal.

- AudioCD

For these tests we used a pressed AudioCD and the Advanced DAE CDSpeed feature.

DAE speed is a bit slower with the 4571 always in comparison to the other two drives. As reported by Nero CDSpeed advanced DAE quality, the quality score is a perfect 100 while the average speed goes all the way up to 29.14X. Note here that the test could not be completed, so we failed to verify the Leadin and Leadout as well as the cdtext reading capabilities of the drive...

- 90mins Audio disc

- 99mins Audio disc

Unfortunatelly the drive cannot read either the 90 or the 99mins audio discs.

- DVD Format

We repeated the reading tests, this time using a collection of pressed SL and DL DVD media to test the drives reading capabilities with DVD media and we posted the results in the form of the graphs below.

All three drives support up to 16X reading speed with Pressed SL media, hence the speed differences can be considered as negligible.

The two layers of a PTP DVD-ROM disc are read sequentially with the drive starting reading from the inner part of the disc, which is the beginning of each layer, progressing towards the outer range, for each layer. Max supported speed with the review drive is 12X as well as with the other two comparison drives.

The graph shown above indicates the reading performance of the drive with OTP dual layer media. The first layer of an OTP dual layer DVD-ROM is read exactly the same way as the first layer of the PTP disc we tested previously. The difference here is the reading strategy of the second layer of the disc. The beginning of the second layer is located in the outer part of the disc, so the drive starts reading from the outer tracks towards the inner part of the disc. Same results in this case too, due to the 12X max reading speed with all three drives.

The NEC and BENQ drives managed to read the write once media (both formats) with a max speed of 16X, while the Plextor got all the way up to 12X. With Re-Writable media, the drive managed to achieve a max reading speed of 12X with 9.78X average speed in both cases.

The NEC 4571A proved to be quite a ripper with 13.130 Kb/s, outmatching the Plextor and BenQ drives.

Overall good reading capabilities with all inserted test media.

- Appendix

Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

• CD Pressed / US-RW
• DVD Pressed SL / DVD Pressed PTP DL / DVD Pressed OTP DL / DVD-R / DVD-RW / DVD+R / DVD+RW