One of the greatest features of the Pioneer BDR-S06 XLB Blu-ray disc burner that it will burn a wide range of BD-R SL/DL discs faster than many competitive burners, as the drive will burn the discs at speeds higher than their nominal speed. For example, you may see some 4x BD-R SL to be burned at 10X and even 12X. That's very convenient as you may low burning times using more affordable and commonly met at the stores BD media. However, the obvious trade-off is the quality of some of these recordings. Although the read-out of these discs was possible, the transfer rate graphs during reading were not smooth and the drive had to adjust the reading speed to maintain accurate reading. This was furhter confirmed by the "writing quality" measurements we took with these discs, which indicated high rates of parity errors on both Long Distance Code ( LDC) and Burst Indication Subcode (BIS). We believe that Pioneer's engineers could furher optimize the writing strategy of the drive in order to produce higher-quality Blu-ray disc recordings.

Keeping up with Pioneer's tradition, the Pioneer BDR-S06 XLB is a great CD and DVD burner. The CD and DVD writing quality for both media types was very good, so you can be rest assured that your discs will be accurately burned even at the highest supported speeds of 40x and 16x, respectively. An exception could be the behavior of the drive with DVD+R DL discs, which returned some high PISum8 errors.

Regarding the reading capabilities of the drive, all CD/DVD/CD media reading tests were completed without any read errors. The drive was slow in the DAE test with EAC, as it does not report C2 pointer information and it supports caching. With BD-R SL and BD-RE discs, the drive reaches the maximum 8X reading speed (P-CAV) faster than competitive drives and as such, it has an edge over a typical 8X CAV reader. In addition, the drive easily passed our reading tests with defected DVDs and had an average performance in the corresponding test with defected CDs.

Last but not least, we tried to evaluate the drive's PureRead function, which has been designed to accurately reproduce the original sound data of a damaged Audio CD. Although we expected a more sophisticated approach from Pioneer rather than slowing down or stopping reading as soon as the drive finds it difficult to recover audio data from a defected area of a disc, furher testing with the CD-Check test disc showed that PureRead could be helpful in cases where the defects on the surface of your AudioCDs are not larger than approximately 0.750mm. After that point, enabling PureRead seems to have no sense as it could not allow you to playback your disc at all.

Compatible with a wide range of blank BD media and its fast burning speeds, the Pioneer BDR-S06 XLB hs the potential to become the No 1 BD burning solution for your PC. However, provided that you are buying a 12x BD burner in order to tale advantage of its fast 12x burning speed, the S06 XLB needs some additional firmware optimizations in order to reach the top.

Other than that, it is more stylish than Pioneer's bulk version (BDR-206 DBK), the supported PureRead function is definitely a plus and it is undoubtedly a reliable CD/DVD burner.