Pioneer DVR-111DBK

Review Pages

- CD Format

For our CD transfer rate tests, we used the Nero CD-Speed utility and a set of Pressed CDs. Let's take a look at how the drive performed and in comparison with the other two drives.

Both the Plextor and LiteOn support 48X CD reading speed. The Pioneer however supports only 40X, so it is not the fastest CD reader on the market.

With USRW media, the max supported speed is 32X for the Pioneer and LiteOn drives, while the Plextor supports up to 40X.

- AudioCD

In the case of AudioCD extraction, the Pioneer and Plextor support 40X DAE speed, while the LiteON supports 48X. All drives produced a perfect DAE quality score.

- 90mins Audio disc

- 99mins Audio disc

The Pioneer DVR-111DBK can not read 90 or 99 min audio discs.

- DVD Format

Now let's have a look at how the drive performs with DVD media. This time, a set of DVD media was used, both SL and DL.

All three drives support up to 16X reading speed with DVD Single Layer media. The LiteOn was the fastest although speed differences between the three drives are 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 its outer range.
Here, the LiteOn drive reported lowest reading speed with DL media. The other two drives reached 12X maximum.

The above graph shows 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.
Once more, the DVR-111DBK drive was the fastest reader with DL media.

The supported reading speeds for DVD±R/RW media are very important since these are the most common formats. The Pioneer drive supports up to 12X for DVD±R and 8X for DVD±RW. So it was expected that it would be the slowest when reading DVD±RW media.

Quite fast ripping speed from the Pioneer while only average from the LiteOn.

- DVD-RAM

The drive can read read DVD-RAM at 5X CLV. For our test, we used a 5X DVD-RAM disc from Maxell, burned with the LG GSA-4120B. The disc was read without any problems.