Having been disappointed by this result I decided to play around with the Autostrategy function.

The first disc was done with the automatic quick AS before the burn. Result is ot too impressive.
Then I deleted the Autostrategy entry for that MID and spend an empty disc just for the Autostrategy full check (where the disc becomes unuseable after it is done).
The whole AS check took about 8 minutes, I couldn't believe that myself. Once it was done I did another write transfer test and check that disc (with the 'new' strategy) again for PI/PO errors.

Now if you compare those results you will see a noticable improvement in burn quality, especially for the POE results.


So I ask you to test this out for yourself. If you have some 'average' media, try creating a full autostrategy disc first and burn a new disc.
I would like to see if the improvements in quality can be reproduced or if this has just been a batch/disc variation for me.

I have tried just the same. Unfortunately, it seems that some are already written into the drive's firmware or something, so it doesn't make much of a difference.

As someone else wrote - "it's only for unknown disks". And that's a shame - even within the same producer of any disk, differences will occur over time, so wasting 1 CD every time I order a case with 100, would be a small price to get better quality.

If I use my TDK media, I get near perfect quality. If I use some Alpha (MCC-004-0), even after using the full autostrategy which renders a disk useless, the result isn't nice at all. So a future wish to Plextor would be to allow a user to override the settings in the Plextor firmware...

Px-755 and PX-760:
AutoStrategy On Mode (Forced): a new write strategy entry will be created, even if there is already one in the firmware available.
AutoStrategy On Mode: an AS writing strategy from the database is used. If there is no entry for the media available, the related strategy from the firmware will be used.

Thanks for clearing that up. I'm already running with the forced setting, but there's still plenty of room for improvement on the Alpha disks...(got a bunch of them for free with my last purchase of TDKs).