DAE Tests

- Test Method:
We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 software in order to check the DAE performance of TDK Vortex 121032 with various AudioCDs. We brought EAC back to the testing arena since many of you requested it. Note that the posted DAE results are the average of both applications, but the CPU usage is only taken from CD DAE 99. EAC seems to occupy the system much more. As a last note, we used the "BURST" reading mode of EAC. We made a full CD Rip starting from the first to the last track of the CD. The Average DAE reported speed along with the CPU Usage is displayed in the test graphs.

- DAE features:
We used EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 to examine the drive's features. As the program reported, the drive isn't "Caching" data and supports "Accurate Stream" and "C2" error info.

- Pressed AudioCD results: (click here to see the graph)
All tested drives supports 32x DAE (max) according to their specifications. Our tests showed that the PX-W1210A still holds the fastest DAE performance in this category with 24x average ripping speed. TDK Vortex 121032 comes second with 23.4x. You should also consider the fact that TDK occupied the highest CPU utilization (33%) among the other drives had done.

- CDR AudioCD results:
As it seems theTDK Vortex 121032 works slightly better with CDR media and gave faster ripping speed (23.5x) reducing the gap with the first PX-W1210A:

- Advanced DAE Quality:

We can see that all drives got 100 (perfect) score in the Advanced DAE Quality tests. The TDK Vortex 121032 gave a good performance almost equal to the PlexWriter's. The Advanced test confirmed that the drive supports reading of CD-Text and SubChannel data:

- Ripping 90 and 95mins AudioCDs
The Ricoh MP7125A doesn't seem to like reading anything further than 86minutes.. From our tests with both 90 and 99minutes CDs the drive stopped reading at around 86minutes and returned an error message.. :(

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