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Topic: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others? (Read 4744 times) previous topic - next topic
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Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

I have a cheap external CD drive that I dedicate solely to ripping CDs in EAC: TSSTcorpCDW/DVD TS-L462D HH08. It's served me well over the years, and I've ripped well over 1,000 CDs with it. I have noticed, however, that it seems to struggle frequently with CD-R albums.

I collect a lot of music, some of which is quite obscure; so every now and then I run into a D.I.Y. release that has been burned onto CD-Rs. Sometimes my drive can rip these discs with little to no error correction. Other times, it refuses to even acknowledge the disc, or gives me constant Read Errors on most of the tracks. Sometimes these discs are old, and sometimes they are brand new; there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

To make things even stranger, sometimes these same discs rip with no problems on my iMac's Super Drive. Unfortunately, that drive bit the dust about a year ago (R.I.P.) and it couldn't rip mini-CD-Rs (of which I have a handful.) And I've even had one or two professional CDs with this same issue...

So my question is really a two-parter:
1) Is this a common problem with CD drives? Are some just too "weak" or too "crappy" to rip every kind of CD?
2) If so, then what kind of good, powerful external drive should I buy? I'm looking to get something to replace my dead Super Drive, but I don't want another slot-loading drive; tray-loading only, please.

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #1 –
Yes, some CD drives are worse than others, especially for damaged or burned disks.

It was not uncommon in the mid 1990s to find CD players that were entirely incapable of playing back CDRs, although modern drives are usually much better. 

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #3 –
Yes. My father has a bloody expensive NAD CD player which easily rejects 20% of CDs. It's been back for repairs a couple of times but they say there is nothing that can be done about it. "It is just picky"  ::)
Every night with my star friends / We eat caviar and drink champagne
Sniffing in the VIP area / We talk about Frank Sinatra
Do you know Frank Sinatra? / He's dead

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #4 –
And don't forget the last generation of (DRM) protected audio CD that were unreadable on 99.99% of the CD players... what a nightmare... i've bought some of them that were unreadable on all my family/neighbors/friends players, no one was able to read them :-X (must buy a new compatible CD player  :)) )

After several rips, the CD rom player can heat and errors can occur (these players are not designed for an intensive usage).
You should wait a little within each extractions IMHO.

I've got sevral old CDrom drivers with all metalic internal moving mecanical parts that weight a ton and were very expensive in the nineties they are still OK (litterally indestructible  ;) ) but they are not more accurate than others with EAC.
I recommand you to buy the generic standard cost effective part avaliable nowadays.

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #5 –
Quote
then I run into a D.I.Y. release that has been burned onto CD-Rs. Sometimes my drive can rip these discs with little to no error correction.
Burned discs can sometimes have issues.   The person burning the discs might not know there's an issue, and, audio CD players (and player software) are usually more error-tolerant than CD drives & ripping software, so the music often plays OK.     

When I was burning a lot of discs, I used to check them with Nero DiscSpeed immediately after to burning.   That doesn't prove that they'd play or rip on every player/drive, but it would weed-out most of the problems.    (And it would "prove" that I could rip it without problems.)     

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #6 –
Drives can definitely respond unfavorably to CD-R's. My regular ripping drive is an ASUS DVD burner that's ripped hundreds of commercial discs beautifully, even when their physical condition was iffy. But I wanted to make a perfect physical backups of some discs on CD-R recently and ran into problems verifying the burns on the Asus. It turned out that enabling C2 error correction - which worked fabulously on commercial discs - totally screwed up rips from my burned backups, throwing off EAC and AR checksums and making me think there was something wrong with my burning process (there wasn't). In my case, I just disabled C2 in my EAC drive options and the problems disappeared. But I'm sure there are other drives out there that just won't rip CD-R's accurately at all, or at least not as consistently as they would commercial pressings.

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #7 –
So what would be a good (weighing price vs. power) external CD drive to buy? I'm in the market for a new one anyway, since my Desktop's internal drive broke.

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: MusicMan02 on
So what would be a good (weighing price vs. power) external CD drive to buy? I'm in the market for a new one anyway, since my Desktop's internal drive broke.

What does "power" mean in this context?

Extraction "power"?
Creature of habit.

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Soap on
Quote from: MusicMan02 on
So what would be a good (weighing price vs. power) external CD drive to buy? I'm in the market for a new one anyway, since my Desktop's internal drive broke.

What does "power" mean in this context?

Extraction "power"?

Fair point. I guess I'm not really sure what "power" means, but I know there are some fairly expensive, high-quality drives out there. Plextor drives are usually $100 or more and, as far I as I know, are only internal. I would be willing to spend ~$50, on an external drive, if it has proven to be good at audio extraction; I just don't know what brands people are recommending these days.

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #10 –
IIRC there are only two(?) manufacturers left, other companies just rebrand those (including Plextor).

Re: Are some CD drives "worse" at reading CDs than others?

Reply #11 –
Quote from: Pusherman on
IIRC there are only two(?) manufacturers left, other companies just rebrand those (including Plextor).

The semi-mythical PX-230A was a rebrand and seemingly identical to Benq [looking it up:] 5232X - but with different or apparently different firmware. People tried to cross-flash Plextor firmware onto their Benqs, with varying result.

For all that I know, the explanation could be that not all 5232X were the same (and that some were effectively a 230A and others were not).