Hi! (my first post) and my bad luck with NEC 3540A

vbimport
#1

Hi!
My English is so bad, so my excuses.

I already read this forum for some time and I decided to buy the NEC 3520A, but in that time the NEC 3540A and Benq 1640 appeared, so after some reading I decided that Benq would be a better choice, but as I don’t find it in Portugal :frowning: I bought the NEC 3540A.

I knew that NEC was a bad reader, but I never thought it was so bad, I tried several DVDs that my (very old)Toshiba SD-M1502 (J816) reads without problems and NEC can’t do anything :Z

I recorded some DVDs and the drive not even read them :Z , I went to a store and bought several DVDs of different brands (some had good MIDs) and the result was the same, so the drive was defective :a
The stranger was that the drive record the DVD+RW(RICOHJPN W11) well!

I returned the drive and one week later had a new one, my current drive.

The strange is that the 1st NEC had a firmware of 23/05/2205 (DD/MM/YY) and the 2nd of 17/05/2005, so I flashed the new NEC with the most recent Firmware.

This new drive records much better than the first, but it is still far from recording with good quality :confused:

Analyzing the recorded DVDs, I also noted that in some DVDs, even in the Verbatim DVDs, they have some big spikes where NEC changes the recording speed, I think that this cannot be admitted :a

For example:
PI Errors – Maximum: 3084
PI Failures – Maximum: 94

I have been seeing very good results in this forum, for that I probably had bad luck with my NECs!

Thanks very much for all the people that make this excellent forum and that it continues like this in the future :wink:

BxS

#2

I have noticed the same thing you describe. At the point the drive changes the speed, there are high pif spikes. I discount those as glitches.

#3

:iagree: Same here. These spikes don’t appear on all scans, if you re-scan the same disc several times you’ll see that sometimes they’re here, sometimes not. If you use 12X scanning, most of the time you won’t get the spikes.

5X has been chosen as “standard” for the 3540A here (more a consensus than a standard) but personally I prefer 12X as it puts more stress on the reading process and, with my discs, reveals more potential problems (my good discs give similar results @5X and 12X scanning, when marginal discs show much more errors @12X than @5X…)

8X scanning seems to be the worse setting with this drive (pretty erratic results!), and 16X drops too many samples.

Oh and don’t panic with these G05 scans, the problem is the media, NOT the drive. There are two threads in the “blank media” section about RITEK G05 discs, better read them before buying more of these… http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=145871

Good luck :slight_smile:

#4

The problem is that most of 90% of the times I have the spikes, and some of them 100% of the times…

another example:

_NEC____DVD_RW_ND-3540A_1.01_20-August-2005_00_43.png641x532 36.4 KB

#5

Ok the media are far from be the best, but what I’m trying to say is that the NEC have some problem when it changes the recording speed, for example, look at this scan of a G05 but burnned in pure CLV, I think that ist’s a good burn :slight_smile:

_NEC____DVD_RW_ND-3540A_1.01_30-August-2005_21_47_.png641x532 12.2 KB

#6

hmm my scans look terrible too…i mean really bad!..but on the latest version of nero cd speed there is no 5x option only 1x 4x 7x 11x 15x…what am i missing here?

#7

@Bsx: I get your point. Spikes at each speed change, no spike on CLV burns. :doh: Indeed something looks like being wrong… I don’t think I can help on this one, sorry…

@Rivi:

  1. Regedit>HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE>Ahead>Nero Toolkit>CD Speed
  2. Delete the folder “_NEC DVD_RW ND-3540A”
  3. Restart CD Speed

Does it solve the problem? Please report :slight_smile:

#8

nope same speeds and the folder reappears in reg after you start nero cd speed

#9

Ignore the spikes, NEC drives seem to have that problem with CDspeed. I have a 3500 and all have the spike at 4x, but not at 2x or 12x. I posted a thread about that several months ago and everyone said to ignore them. Other than that, the scans look OK. And I’ve never had a coaster with good media and I a have burned hundreds.

#10

That’s normal. :iagree:

That’s NOT normal. :disagree:

You could try to manually set the speed values… here’s a screenshot of “standard” values. Not sure this will work, though. If it doesn’t, you should uninstall Nero, delete this folder again (if it’s left behind by the uninstall program), and reinstall Nero… :confused:


#11

Not all 3540A do this. Mine doesn’t. Yes, I get spikes, but they’re ERRATIC spikes, their location change with each new scan of the same disc, and don’t appear specifically at speed change areas… :disagree:

#12

This is a nero problem. I get the same B-A-D results on the test, using three different 16x dvd media. The “quality” scores are something really low, like 5 or 20. I burned four huge (1 GB) zip files and unzipped-tested them. result: A-OK. I did another test or two and it also came out okay, even viewing a burned movie. Nothing wrong from the looks, and certainly not the massive failure you’d expect given the nero results.

Nero, fix your mess! Only, don’t make it worse somewhere else!

#13

it has been said before and it will be said many times more… it is not the software. the software only reports what the drive tells it. it does not add, infer, spindle, fold or multilate it only REPORTS what the drive is “seeing”

spend some time in the cd/dvd speed thread in media testing and you will understand

#14

Yeah, but it is Nero, and Nero always messes something up, bad.

I understand that Nero makes some flaky software. If you don’t find this to be the truth, consider yourself blessed by someone special.

#15

if you check the media testing forum you will find that the spikes are seen in all scanning software. i use kprobe as well as cdspeed and both show it. both are reporting the data presented to them by the drives. you can say what you want but honestly unless you go and read the threads you will not be able to understand. i believe eric D has implemented an auto remove for spikes since so many people bitch about it. read the last page of the thread.

#16

If it is the 3540 drive, why don’t the reviews show this? It is Nero, at least the Nero I have, that some others have, that these reviewers, it would seem then, don’t have. Which is the good nero, which is bad nero? It’s a trick question. With Nero software, there’s never an answer but there’s never a good version. There’s always something bad.

#17

How many times is necessary to tell you that it’s not Nero CD/DVD Speed fault what the drive reports? It’s the drives fault if it is… some of them report the spikes some of them don’t… this is also why this can’t be covered in the reviews because maybe the reviewers didn’t get such a drive.

#18

Nero is like that. Some versions work in some areas, and stop working in others. That’s what Nero is all about. Reminds me of the SW line. It goes something like this.

  • Nero customer: Hey, nero, the sign says open 24 hours

– Nero: Not in a row

Which sums up Nero pretty well. Sort of works, just not all the time, and each patch brings more uncertainty on what will fail next.

#19

All your posts in this forum/thread contained nothing but Nero bashing. Please stop this immediately. :cop: It’s completely offtopic and at least parts of what you say are absolutely wrong.

As other people already told you, this definitely is NOT a Nero problem since CD Speed only displays values that are reported by the drive.

#20

@Quikee, Liggy I’m gonna be rather off-topic but it’s too tempting:

Er… sorry my dear forum mates, but there must be something wrong in your assertion that the software only reports what the drive does. At least from the way I see things.

If this was so, how on earth could CDSpeed report PIE levels over 1664, though these levels are actually impossible…?

I’ve tried and tried to find an explanation to this and posted many questions related to this, but… nobody seems to care. :frowning:

Kprobe/LiteOn scans, even the worst ones, never show PIE levels over 1664 (only logical) - at least I’ve never encountered any. I’ve seen many CDSpeed scans (with Benq and NEC drives) and DVDInfopro scans (with Pioneer drives) showing PIE levels right up to 4000…

So either all non-LiteOn drives report errors wrongly, or CDSpeed and DVDInfopro do apply some sort of algorithms to what the firmware reports (which makes more sense to me, but I don’t know).

impossible PIE levels.png641x524 17.2 KB