Best CD-RW For Reading/Copying Scratched Music CDs?

[Websitefeedback]

Which drives are best at copying scratched music CDs?

I have three CD-RWs, An HP 9110, A HiVal 48/16 (BENQ), and A Plextor 48/24/48U. My experience with these drives is that the BENQ is horrible at extracting audio in general, and has great difficulty handling scratched discs. The HP and the Plextor are able to read the scratched audio discs at about the same quality level (number of pops and skips recorded), the Plextor may have a slight edge and is much faster at it. I'd like to get another drive to do CD to CD copies (to use with the Plextor), and hate to spend another $120. Is there a drive out there that can do the job as well as the Plextor at a reasonable read/write speed (faster than the HP's 8x speed)? I'd like to use it in conjunction with the Plextor.

[Dartman]

The Liteon 166s dvd drive rips audio disk very fast and does pretty good with most disks.
I have a older Plex 40 wide and I finally retired it becuase the 166 does almost as good at everything and is way faster at ripping audio, plus I can play movies They can be had for 69 or less depending on where you get it and the name on the box. Buslink DVD drives so far have always been Liteons when I buy one.

[Websitefeedback]

I've done more controlled testing on my three drives. First, the HP is a 9210 (SCSI 8x/8x?/32x), not a 9110 as stated in my first post. I flashed the firmware on all the drives to the latest available versions as follows:

HP 9200 1.0e
HiVal (BENQ) A.YZ
Plextor 48/24/48u 1.04

I took a purchased music cd (not a copy) and scratched it up pretty badly.

I played the CD back in each drive using MS Media Player 9 and got the following results for the two tracks that appeared to take the worst abuse:

The HiVal (BENQ) wouldn't play either track (and had trouble initializing and playing some of the other tracks on the CD as well).

The HP 9210 skipped to the previous and next track occasionally when playing one track back, and played the other track back without any problems.

The Plextor played both tracks back without any problems at all.

OK Plextor, I'm impressed!

I wish I had a Lite-On to test with this scratched disk.

I'd love to hear from the CDRLab's staff about their experience with various CD-RW drives and their ability to play and copy scratched music CDs.

[rdgrimes]

Most of the reviews include performance on damaged discs.

[motocoke]

Yamaha. Period.

I've played rental VCDs that no other CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or CDRW can play without skipping.

Unfortunately, it's hard to get your hands on a Yamaha these days.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Article ... W&Series=0

Asus drives are bad with scratched discs. Lite-Ons are average.

About these tests at CDRLabs, the MSI MS-8216M DVD-ROM was supposed to read scratched discs pretty well. But that drive doesn't. I had it for a few days, it couldn't handle my rental VCDs, so I sold it off within a week.

IMHO, the tests on a drive's error correction capabilities at CDRInfo seem to be accurate though.

[Websitefeedback]

I've looked at most of the reviews of 40x and faster CD-RWs. Here's what I've gathered from reading the scratched disc test portion of the reviews:

No drive manufacturer's product line has performed consistently well on this test (that is, no manufacturer has more than 2 drives that performed well on the test).

The 40x and above Plextors and Lite-ons didn't do very well in the test.

The following 40x and faster drives performed the best (in no particular order): Samsung SM-348B, Samsung SW-252B, LG GCE8520B, Sony CRX220A1, MSI CR52-A2, Asus CDW-4012A, Cendyne Arsion 40/12/40U and Cendyne Ligntning III.

It sounds like the Samsung SM-348B and SW-252B drives do pretty good. Does anyone that has one of the above Samsung models disagree?

[Halc]

I think a good drive for ripping scratched discs has the following performance characteristics:

1) Very good at tracking and reading scratched discs. Low "unreadable" and low "damaged" sector count in Nero CD Speed test. CDRLabs tests show comparative figures for this performance for most later generation drives

2) Very good error concealment algorithm capable of higher order interpolation. When that scratch induces an uncorrectable error, you want it to be as un-noticeable perceptually as possible. Sony DDU-1621 (BTC OEM) does a decent job in my experience.

Of course there's the speed issue as well, i.e. how fast does it rip scratched cds, but speed alone is useless if the drive only does well on undamaged CDs or if the speed is high with damaged cds, but accuracy is low.

What's the best under these criteria?

Wish I knew, I'd buy it myself to add to my ever-increasing CDRW-collection :)

regards,
Halcyon

[stupidass]

Plextor Premium.

[Halc]

Can you actually show some comparative data which proves that Plex Premium is superior in reading scratched CDs accurately?

I think Ian's tests here show that while the plextor does indeed read quite fast, it's accuracy is not the best in its class:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?reviewid=185&page=Performance

Not that I'm putting it down, as it's very useful drive and I'm getting one myself :)

regards,
Halcyon