Realizing that most people are leaning toward dvd burners these days, I've given this a lot of thought. However, I still burn strictly audio. I can get the Plextor Premium for $66 at Amazon because I have a $30 coupon. I've used Lite-on as well.

My reason for starting over is that I bought a new Dell and the burner is a Sony crx-216, and I don't like it.

If you were buying a new burner today(not dvd), which would you buy?? Thanks to all!!

Liteon or Plexi.

The fact that you burn strictly audio, leaves no doubt in my mind.
Go for the Premium

Why:
It is a very stable burner.
It handles copy protected audio cd's easyly.
The Gigarec feature.

The Yamaha CRW-F1 is a great recorder, but hard to get meanwhile.

The DISCT@2™- feature is pretty cool, but the Audio Master function is completely unnecessary in my opinion.

Maybe the BLER, HF, etc. values are becoming better when recording in this mode. This could increase durability.
But as long as the data can be recovered to the PCM data level, there's no difference.

And I don't believe in the 'jitter affects audio quality before reaching the DAC' - myths either.

Spath is welcome to give a comment here ...

Sure, but there's not much development/ support for the CRW-F1.
At least thats what i've heard.

For audio there are only two brands

Yamaha and Plextor (as some have stated)

They are the only units with the extra circuitry that DAE requires.

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm leaning toward the Plextor premium. Santa is waiting for me to let her know which one I want. I'm blessed to have a wife who doesn't mind my need for new "toys"(computer stuff, digital cameras, etc).

Congratulations, I'll hope santa pick a good drive for you. .

Better keep yourself to the hardware. Perhaps the wife ain't that tolerant with the software

The DISCT@2™ is just a pretty toy, which I've only used it once or twice.

Ahh, pretty much like gigarec.

All depends on what you mean by "good".

If you mean that defeats copy protection = Plex Premium or Yamaha F1.

SCSI units actually function better if you have the money.

@Audiocopy if you refer to my previs post:

My Px-40Tsi (SCSI) sure is a killer, in any way. Also my PX-R412C (SCSI) and my (Kind of *) Px-20Ts (SCSI)
is working flawsless. So you got a point. But ,still SCSI is on retreate.


* unfortunately with some weirdo IBM firmware.

@BoSkin

Thanks's for quoting Yamaha's explanation.

As far as I know, a higher jitter can increase the BLER.
But as long as the final data can be recovered (in this case 2352 bytes/sector), the audio quality should be the same.

You can try this by yourself:

Record a wave file as audio CD (one time with this Audio Master feature and the other time without).
Then re-extract your CD(s) with EAC.
Compare the original wave with the ones you've got.

Any differences? I suppose not.

I am wondering. Is there a way to test how "accurate" or how many errors a burner has? I have Nero, EAC, and Feurio. I used nero speed, but there must be a way of really testing a drive???

No problem. Stupid me, I thought you seemed to miss it, lol.

Generally speaking, all the drives are the same
as long as the data is being written correctly and then recovered correctly, right ?

Or vice versa, if thinking of who came up with that kind of idea first.
Besides, the directions are opposite.

Not really if you use gigarec at less than 1x... I have never tried to check the jitter rate for a CD burned with gigarec less than 1x... I will do it, it could be interesting. What you are saying about the Yamaha F1 and Audio Master is quite interesting... in a shop I saw an external USB2 version of that (unfortunately discontinued) writer, and I was tempted to buy it...

Regards,

ET

Yes, not really, but all I mean is that the main motto of Gigarec is the ability to compress up to 1120 MB of audio onto a common 80' CDR.

As for YF1 & AMM, you may find these articles and graphs handy :


Jitter Tests

"We burned the same amount of data, with the same drive (YAMAHA CRW-F1E, firmware v1.0f); from the same media batch (spindle 50 pieces). Under normal recording mode (DAO), the data was 80:07:43mins, while under AudioMASTER mode 67:07:42mins."




"Comparing the three technologies with the normal 4X writing speed, we notice that with the RITEK JS Type media, the YAMAHA's AudioMASTER 4X speed produced the best results (22.91ns). The CRW-F1E 4X and TEAC's "4X Boost" speeds sharing the second place (24ns). The AudioMASTER at 8X produced higher Jitter (24.88ns) than TEAC's CD-W540E 4X writing speed (24.98ns). Lastly, Plextor's VariREC +0 function does seem to affect negative the 3T Pit Jitter since the average Jitter is 27.39ns vs. 26.88ns of the normal 4X writing speed."




"Comparing the three technologies with the normal 4X writing speed, we notice that again YAMAHA's AudioMASTER 4X speed produced the best results (24.91ns). The AudioMASTER 8X speed gets the second place with 26.79ns, while the CRW-F1E's 4X normal speed had the same 3T Land Jitter as with TEAC's CD-W540E "4X Boost" (28.98ns). The TEAC CD-W540E 4X normal writing produced higher Jitter than the "4X Boost" and again, Plextor's VariRec +0 produced worst results than the PX-W4824A 4X writing speed."


AudioMASTER in depth



"The above graph shows the average 3T Pit Jitter from the special and normal recording modes. The best results come from the AudioMASTER at 4X recording speed. The AudioMASTER 8X come second, while the 1X normal speed third. The AudioMASTER 1X recording speed won't produce very well results as someone may expect."

I guess i owe Boskin an apolgee, you've got it.
Seems like Plextor has a job to do with their
Gigarec function. Especially with the lower gigarec
rates. I can accept the values for the 'tormentet' gigarec
1.3 disc and the 'standard' disc. But the rest is just a real bad joke.


All scans made with Plextool's Q-Check C1/C2 Test.

Gigarec Rate: 1.3 + overburn
Media:Taiyo Yuden
Software: Plextools Pro 2.08
Burning speed. 8x
Length: 106.16.40 Min.
C1:
Avg/Sec 19,9
Max/Sec 67
Total 126710.0
C2:
Avg/Sec 0.0
Max/Sec 0.0
Total 0.0
CU:
Avg/Sec 0.0
Max/Sec 0.0
Total 0.0



Gigarec Rate: No gigarec (standard disc)
Media:Taiyo Yuden
Software: Plextools Pro 2.08
Burning speed. 32X
Length: 70.40.19 Min.
C1:
Avg/Sec 2.7
Max/Sec 28
Total 11649.0
C2:
Avg/Sec 0.0
Max/Sec 0.0
Total 0.0
CU:
Avg/Sec 0.0
Max/Sec 0.0
Total 0.0



Gigarec Rate: 0.6
Media: Taiyo Yuden
Software: Plextools Pro 2.08
Burning speed. 4x
Length: 42.08.33 Min.
C1:
Avg/Sec 7.5
Max/Sec 208
Total 19266.0
C2:
Avg/Sec 2.4
Max/Sec 128.0
Total 6267.0
CU:
Avg/Sec 2.4
Max/Sec 380.0
Total 6260.0

The disc goes bananas, from 37 min. and to the end ?




Gigarec Rate: 0.6
Media: Taiyo Yuden
Software: Nero 6.0028 (Plextools running transperant)
Burning speed. 8x
Length: 42.08.33 Min.
C1:
Avg/Sec 23.1
Max/Sec 551.0
Total 54441.0
C2:
Avg/Sec 5.4
Max/Sec 141.0
Total 13757.0
CU:
Avg/Sec 24.6
Max/Sec 781.0
Total 62228.0

The disc goes totally bananas, from 35 min. and to about 40 min. ?

I know this isen't the media forum and I woun't post any more
scans, but I thought this info was of relevance to this topic.

Hi BeeR_Dog,

good tests! I started a thread some time ago about Gigarec "less than 1x" (say LT1x) quality some time ago, but I had only a few significative answers.
I made just one cd with LT1x and I was not satisfied too: audio extraction from the resulting CD was slow and also compatibility with some car players wasnt very good, but I did not perform the C1/C2 tests with the plextor.
At this point I am seriously thinking about buying an external USB Yamaha F1 (I now a place where they still have a small number of them) and to perform an extensive set of tests. In this case, I will post the results too.

Thanks for your efforts!

ET

P.S. In my opinion, this is the right forum for this topics, since it is not stricly a media-related question, but essentially an hardware-related question. Or am I wrong?

Hi Boskin, thanks for the additional info
about AudioMaster...

Well, about that: Yamaha main motto for the F1 was the Disk T@2 functionality which is nice but not very important for me, so I don't care about what someone say to sell his product, but what the product really does.

Regards, ET

Yep, kinda hard to disagree w that.

jreed

No, normally you need special equipment for such tests.
The German magazine c't for example has AudioDev
in Malmö / Sweden doing the CD / DVD - media and writers tests with their CATS-SA300 analysers.

The PlexWriter Premium has some testing festures, but according to c't, the results didn't always match Audiodev's (BLER, etc.).
So they recommend the Plexy for rough estimates only.
Most drives today will allow you to check for C2 errors, but that's not enough.
If C2 errors occur, it's already too late (except MODEx/2048).
Drive slow-downs while reading can indicate bad balanced / erroneous cds.


Yamaha's sales pitch

I agree - except the last part of this sentence.