CD CAPABILITIES

Panasonic is bundling the drive with Prassi's PrimoDVD -- a very good DVD mastering and duplication program.

Note: This drive does not support CD writing of any kind.

PrimoDVD is a powerful DVD mastering package which can operate in either wizard mode or in full application mode. It doesn't differ too much from your standard mastering program, except that it offers DLT tape options, CD printing functions, post gap processing and extensive ISO image processing.

We first checked the DAE speed with a pressed audio CD to begin the tests:

This drive is superb at reading audio and data CDs (for a DVD writer)! In the quality test it returned 0 errors and had a very fast 19 x speed extraction speed, as you can see above.

It has an average of x19.7 speed DAE with perfect quality. The seek times are not correct as Nero CD speed has a few bugs. You can also see from above, that the CPU usage is very low.

C2 Error Information

Taken from EAC web site:

What is C2?

A:On all CD-ROM media are at least two levels of error correction, called C1 and C2. If both fail, the output is probably not correct anymore. Most drives are not able to report if audio reads failed or not, so each block had to be read twice and be compared to make sure that everything is fine. But some newer drives are able to report if C1/C2 failed on specific samples on a read, making it possible to read only once and see if a read error occurred. But there is still a problem, as some drives do not report these errors correctly, so you should test it thoroughly before trusting the results.

As you can see it doesn't cache audio which is a good thing. It has an accurate stream and it can report C2 error information from CDs, this is also good. The read abilities of this drive are much better than the Pioneer DVD Burner.

Page 3 - Last Updated: 11 November 2001