Plextor 708A Review

CD TESTS1 - CAPABILITIES

As stated earlier on the Plextor 708A offers the capabilities of a 40/24/40 CD writer as well. This is currently one of the highest speeds offered by a DVD writer and means that you can burn a full CD-R in under 3 mins.

The following CD media were used in our CD-R tests:

• Moser Baer India Ltd
• Multi Media Masters Machinery SA
• TDK Corp.
• Ritek Co.

Plextor CD-R Media Writing Test

The Plextor PX-708A offers some high CD-Rs write speeds, as you can see below you can choose to write at: 40x, 32x, 16x, 8x and 4X speed which is currently the highest for any DVD writer.

The first of our CD-R tests involved writing a full 80-min CD at the drive's maximum 40 X speed, the result is shown below.

Above we can see (using Nero) it only took 3 mins and 1 seconds.

On the CDSpeed graph above you can see it starts writing in CAV mode at 20 speed peaking at 40 speed and then switches to CLV mode.

This is the fastest for any DVD writer we have reviewed so far (we didn't encounter any problems writing to CD-Rs) and were pleased with the performance.

CD-RW Media Writing Test

We next tested the drive's ability to erase CD-Rewriteable media in both, full erase and quick erase mode. Unfortunately due to to an error on our part we didn't have any 24 X disks in time for this review (this test will be updated) so we had to use a 10 X re-writeable. Using High-Speed CD-RW you can see that it only allows recording/erasing at 10 speed :

Quick Erase

In the quick erase test, the drive took 44 seconds.

Full Erase

The drive took 8 mins and 47 seconds to erase an 80 min CD-RW at 10 speed.

[Update: We ran the CDRW tests again with 24X media. ]

We tried the test again with 24X media and with Nero CD/DVD speed the drive took 3 mins and 56 seconds.

CD-RW DATA Write Test

The following test illustrates how long it takes to write a full 80-mins of data onto a CD-RW using this drive:

We used CDSpeeds' built in create disk function to fill the disks with garbage. To write a full 80min CD it took 8 min 37 secs. at 10 speed and looking at the flat graph you can see it used CLV to write the data.

[ Update: We have added results for 24x writiing. ]

Using a 24 speed rewritable disk we can see that it only takes 3 mins and 45 seconds to write 80mins. It starts off at 18.7 speed and then gathers enough speed to complete the disk at 24x speed.

CD-ROM Data Reading Test

We next tested the drives ability to handle pressed CD-ROMs.

As you can see from above, the drive managed an average speed of 32.10 speed using CAV. Towards the end of the CD it actually exceeded its maximum stated read speed of 40 and went to 42.58 speed.

The 708A has very low CPU usage and the IDE burst rate was good as well - both of which are shown in the graph.

CD-R Recordable Disk Data Reading

The speeds often achieved with pressed CD-ROM media are not always mirrored with CD-R media due to quality and reflectivity issues (here we test a TDK branded data CD-R):

The Plextor couldn't read CD-R disks as fast as pressed CD-ROMs, but it still achieved a respectable score.

The average CD-R recordable data reading speed was 28.88 using P-CAV.

CD-R Advanced Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) Test

The drive was next tested for its ability to extract audio from CDs and its quality was reported below. This test was done using "CD Speed 2.11" by Ahead.

The drive managed an average speed of 30.4 and it's quality was 100 (perfect). The 708A is capable of reading CD-TEXT and reading subchannel data and it also managed to read data from the leadin and lead-out areas (which very few drives can). As shown above, the drive is good for feeding a burner at 16 speed on the fly.

Pressed CD-ROM Audio Read Test

For this test we used a pressed AUDIO-CD and examined the drive's ability to read audio.

The drive performs well in this test with a perfect 10 score and an average 30.80x speed - it does live up to its specifications by doing 40.55x (toward the end of the disk).

C2 Error Information

Next we examined the ability of the drive to accurately extract audio information. This is aided by something called C2 error information which is on a CD. If your drive can report C2 information then it will be faster and more accurate at ripping audio.

We used Exact Audio Copy 0.95 b3's "Detect Read Features" option to examine what the drive could do. EAC reports that the drive caches audio which is not ideal as it can affect audio ripping and it has an accurate stream (true), but it says it can not report any C2 error information from CDs (which is wrong).

Page 3 - Last Updated: 31 December 2004