CD CAPABILITIES

The Philips DVDRW228k supports 12 speed CD writing, 10 speed CD-Rewriting and 32 speed CD-ROM reading - these speeds are faster than any of the rival DVD "-" (minus) writers can achieve.

Firstly, we examined the speed at which it can write to CDs using various media. The media we tried were identified as: Moser Baer India Ltd, Multi Media Masters Machinery SA & Ritek Co.

CD-R Media Writing Test

First we checked the drives ability to write to CD-R media at the full x12 speed:

Using NERO it took 7mins and 15secs to write a full 80mins of data to a CD-R (40 x speed approved) disk (this is excluding the verification times).

CD-RW Media Writing Test

We tested the time it took to erase a CD-Rewritable in FULL erase mode. Nero showed the available speeds as 10x & 4x (depends on disk):

The drive took 9mins and 10seconds to erase a CD-RW in FULL-erase mode.

DATA CD-RW

We timed a FULL data CD-RW disk:

The writer took 8mins and 33 seconds to write a full 80min CD.

PRESSED DATA CD READING

Reading a pressed CD should be an easy task for any drive due to the good reflectivity/quality of the disks:

As you can see it managed an average of 25.21 x speed using P-CAV. It did a little better towards the end of the disk (but it still fell short of its rated 32x speed).

CD-R MEDIA 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 give it a Mitsui branded data CD-R):

In this case its speed is virtually the same as a pressed CD i.e. 25 x speed.

CD Digital Audio Extraction

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

Although the drive is not as fast as the Panasonic LFD-311 (in the CD Speed advanced test) it did managed a good 16.5x average audio ripping speed of the test CD. As also shown in the screen shot it can read CD-TEXT. It returned 0 data errors and sync errors with a quality score of 100 which is a near perfect result in this test.

The drive is only good as a reader for another CD writer for 8 x speed recording on the fly.

Again we tested the DAE, but instead of using the tester CDR disk we used a pressed audio CD. It gave a better score averaging x 23.95 speed DAE with perfect quality and an accurate speed. What is strange is that at 8x reading the CPU usage went up to 50% (we suspect this is an error with Nero CD Speed and not the drive).

C2 Error Information

Next we examined the ability of the Philips drive to accurately extract audio information. This is aided by something called C2 error information which is on a CD. The following explains what C2 error information is (from Exact Audio Copy's web site):

What is C2 ?

Answer: On all CD-ROM media there 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 has to be read twice and be compared to make sure that everything is fine.

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.

In layman's terms if your drive can report C2 information then it will be faster and more accurate at ripping audio.

We used Exact Audio Copy's "Detect Read Features" option to examine what the drive could do. The drive does cache audio which is not ideal as it can affect audio ripping. It has an accurate stream and it can report C2 error information from CDs, which is good.

Page 3 - Last Updated: 25 July 2002