Ripping Audio Cd's

The common consensus around here is that DVD drives have to perform the least amount of error correction when reading CDs. This is great when you want confidence in the integrity of the rip, but it's bad when you're scanning for C1 because you're not struggling to read the CD as much as you would be with a CD-only drive, or more importantly - a CD player. So the DVD drives don't know the full extent of how 'bad' the CDs are from a CD player's perspective. The Premiums perform a lot more error correction than the PX-760 or other DVD drives to get the same end results, but in cacheless C2 the error correction of the Premiums is insanely fast even though there is more of it going on.

I like to know from my ripping logs "This is how much the standard player would misunderstand everytime the disc is played", and I can't get that more critical perspective with a DVD drive, so the Premium is my primary ripping drive. If a disc is so bad that checksums don't match from cacheless C2 ripping an entire track twice - that's when I'll resort to a DVD drive. I've almost never had to do this for anything I own because I take very good care of my collection and I don't buy too many previously-used CDs, but I've had to employ a DVD drive a few times when ripping other peoples' CDs for them.

Most people who don't know anything about burning, are going to burn everything at max speed. You have to assume this is what previous owners of a drive have done with it, so if you intend to burn at anywhere near max speed, then buying a previously-used drive is probably a bad idea because you don't know how stable the drive motor is going to be at high speeds after all of the likely abuse in the past (with motor instability comes jitter).

If you are buying a previously-used drive mainly to employ it as a slow-burner (especially if it's a Plextor with VariRec), I don't think there is much harm you could experience from the previous ownership - even if they used it fast.

If you are buying a previously-used drive mainly to employ it as a reader, then I wouldn't care if the previous owner already burnt 10,000 discs with it (unless it's a PX-716 - because those break down more often than other true Plextors).

I have to disagree. If you are recording to CDs in realtime during a performance (I think this is a bad idea no matter which drive is involved), the lesser of many evils is a 1x burner. The Premium2 can only burn as slowly as 2x, and the Premium can only burn as slowly as 4x - so what we are talking about here is thousands of buffer underruns by the time the performance is over. Even with BURNproof - it's not going to be anywhere near the most respectable beta/jitter you ever saw.

What you want is a Yamaha CRW-F1 (which can perform 1x burns with an 8MB buffer), or you record to hard drive, and burn with the Premium at 20x for just a few minutes after the performance. Are people at the venue going to wait around for 30-40 minutes after the performance is over, for your Premium2's steady 2x burning to finish? Or suppose you were crafty enough to begin the burn halfway into the performance while the drive catches up at the very end - can you imagine how much more precise control you would get with the track points if you recorded the entire performance to hard drive first, before starting the burn?

As a professional, you can spend one minute after the show is over - making snappy decisions about defining the tracks. In another minute on a digital audio workstation with RAID or SSD(s) or RAMdrive, the edited performance is fully rendered with whatever cuts you wanted to make. Another 3-4 minutes after that, a fairly smooth beta and low jitter Taiyo Yuden CD-R is in somebody else's hand, and you've still got the audio mastering on-file. Would it kill someone to wait 5 minutes after the show, for a more proper CD than a 1x/realtime recording? If in that first 5 minutes you were supposed to be mass-burning CD copies from a master CD that was already available (self-contained "duplicator towers" are fail even when they are full of Premiums), you could have your own Windows tower PC full of Premiums burning off of your new render in Nero or multiple instances of EAC before a first disc even exists. So now in that first 5 minutes after the show, you've got 12 CD-Rs that play about as easily as the average pressed CD. If you've got a true 1000Mbps+ network and you've got RAMdrives on all the PCs involved, you could have multiple Windows tower PCs with 12 Premiums each, all with their own instantly-cached copies of the same render. In 5 minutes you've got 48 burnt copies without the need of a physical master/original disc, and each of those copies have much higher production values than if you had been burning in realtime.

I've plotted out these kind of "live scenarios" before, but I have neither the capital to set it up (especially not during this economic crisis), nor the social/business/religious connections to really put that kind of rig to great use. Right now I am mostly just.. surviving. I still have a lot of gear from when the economy was doing better, though.

One more thing: are "true plextors" (e.g. PX-760) still available in new condition anywhere? I looked around and didn't see any. Old premiums are still occasionally sold in new condition, but not too many DVD drives it seems...

Some brand new unit shows up now and then on ebay and the like. You'll have to look around. We even have a thread for sightings:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f43/problem...drives-222536/

Well, the Premium2 is still in production or so it seems. So there is no trouble finding one. The PX-760 went out of production in Sept/Oct. 2006 AFAIK.

As for the old Premium, if serial-numbers are any indication then at least 350'000 Premiums have been built (I've even seen a stray number in the 6xx'xxx). Compared to that less than 300'000 units (possibly around 260'000 units) of the PX-760 seem to have been produced (ATAPI Model only). So there are simply more drives around.

Thanks for the vote for EAC.

However: There are so many things to configure I believe most of us just BELIEVE to have perfect ripps but we don´t.

Should I use AccurateRip? Or the Sample-Offsett-Correction?
Should I select Overread into Lead In and Lead Out? Or should I leave it unmarked?

What about recognizing breakes? What are the best settings here? Method A, B, or C? exact or not so exact?

Thanks for hints!
WalterH

Check out #7.

As for Gap Detection, in my experiences Method A can be trusted in a variety of situations. On an internal Premium of mine, C always yields the same results as A while B matches A and C most of the time, yet on an external Premium, B will often cough out slightly different results everytime I try it (depending upon the disc), and C sometimes (but not always) matches A. The most constant factor in all of this, is that A on an internal always matches A on an external. That's why I don't trust anything else unless I'm going to keep separately-marked CUEsheets for each Method.

I'm not the biggest fan of AccurateRip, if that's really what you are asking about (as opposed to AccurateStream - which is a different discussion altogether). AccurateRip reports too many false positives and too many false negatives. AccurateRip gathers too many results from too many people who aren't using Offset Correction - or people are using Offset Correction and their drives can't fully Overread but yours can. AccurateRip doesn't index (or ask for) any information to distinguish among multiple pressings of the same album, so if you have an unpopular pressing of a popular album and your rip ends up being low confidence, there's nowhere in the system you can apply the bottom serial numbers on your disc so that you know for a fact your rip is low confidence from your disc being different rather than from your ripping setup being wrong. AccurateRip offers me little or no confidence for 99% of the the particular CDs I've ever ripped, and I abandoned the system years ago.

AccurateRip becomes extremely messy and unreliable when you consider that dBpowerAMP has been championing AccurateRip for years before dBpowerAMP's ripping methods became more secure, so you've got millions (maybe billions) of fingerprints in the system from individuals who didn't read the same sectors twice. The idea is that society collectively reads each sector at least twice, except when your rip is 'wrong', you don't know specifically where within the track you should be re-reading (and this is in an almost-perfect world where AccurateRip never reports false positives from other people making the exact same ripping mistake as you). If you do your own sector-by-sector re-reads locally (this is basically how Secure ripping works), then when something's not consistent, your Secure ripping process knows exactly which sectors it should be concentrating on the most. You don't get this advantage with a society-dependent system with fingerprints for each overall track. AccurateRip is nowhere near as robust as torrenting where you can break one file up into many smaller zones with their own fingerprints, and be able to narrow down an inconsistency to just a fraction of a track (and concentrate on redoing that portion) rather than redoing the whole track in one more sweep and possibly getting it wrong in a slightly different way than you got it wrong the first time.

The worst basis for AccurateRip's existence is that your drive has C2 correction which isn't as good as the Premium's, or you aren't doing AccurateStream with a DVD drive (which will triumph over some of the most commercially screwed up CDs you can find). This basis would be valid for most people, except, you know, some of us like to invest in better drives, or trust our own re-reads more than a gathering of people with no usernames to associate a reputation with and no statements to back up their individual claims.

I am purchasing my first Plextor Premium II shortly. Does anyone have any advice as to which brand CD-r's yield the best results with this burner.

TY, what else

there are several 760 drives on ebay, all used and some quite cheap. i may bite the bullet and see what i end up with when i buy a used/"refurb" drive.

i read something about TLA #s of the drives. for 716 drives apparently it's recommended to get a higher TLA # as the later models were improved over the earlier models.

can anyone explain what is a TLA # exactly and are there special considerations regarding the TLA number when buying a PX-760A?

TLA# is a lot less important than some people think. It kind of went out of hand with the 716. But let's begin with the basics:

TLA# has for digits "xxyy". According to an information from Plextor support concerning the Premium, the first two digits "xx" are hardware related (AFAIR: "... indicates a change in the PCB-layout, but no change in functionality ...") whereas the second two digits "yy" indicate the version of Firmware installed at production time (when it comes to the TLA# printed on the label). TLA# is also stored in the drive itself and when read with PXInfo or RMA-Info, it will reflect the current state of the drive (i.e. the current firmware loaded). So a drive whose sticker reads "TLA# 0000" will identify istself as "TLA# 0001) after a FW update to version 1.01.

So a drive with "TLA#0000" is the original design with FW 1.00 installed. A drive with "TLA#0309" has seen several hardware changes and originally came with a later firmware.

Notice that only Plextor knows what hardware change actually happend. It might be a different PCB-layout, a differently sourced part otherwise or a change in paint... In case of the PX-2410 CDRW, early versions had a built-in fan, while later ones didn't.

Now, is TLA#, especially the hardware part of it, important? I dare say no. Let's look at what happend with the 716:

Several people had trouble with their 716. Especially US-people where "TLA#0000" and "TLA#0101" drives had been sold. The rest of the world only got the 716 in its "TLA#0202" version. In my observation the "TLA#0000" and "TLA#0101" were not physically worse than later versions. It was simply that FW 1.00 and 1.01 were offering >=12x writing quality that was so bad, people assumed their drives were broken! This is well shown with available scan-results of TLA#0000 drives that have been updated to later firmware and then showed identical writing quality to later TLA#02xx and TLA#03xx models. Just check the 716 scan results thread.

However the 716 generally suffered from a higher failure rate than other Plextor drives due (IMHO) to inferior packaging (slim cardboard box contained the drive in bubble-wrap (!) with no space around to absorb bumps). Several people reported failures that could clearly be backtraced to rough handling (for example: dislodged connection to pickup-sled motor -> rattling sound in drive). Plextor seems to have realised this. The Box of the 755/760 is twice as thick, no more bubble-wrap, but a foam cage for distance plus extra soft foam pads to absorb bumps ( ).

Personally I have two "00xx" and two "01xx" 760 drives. The 01 models seem to report slightly higher error rates when scanning the same disc, otherwise I've found no difference.

wow - thanks.

OS X has native support for AAMQR and DiscT@2 on the Yamaha CRW-F1, so it may at least support AMQR on the Premium II, but I haven't verified it.