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Reccomendations for a quiet CD ROM with good DAE

LickEmSmack

Senior member
I've heard the Kenwood True-X's will do this, but I have seen people complaining that they are sketchy sometimes. Are the ASUS's good? How bout the Toshibas?
 
The Kenwood's are unbeatable for low volume and DAE. I own the 72x model. However, it does struggle with some CD-Rs. All the CD-Rs I have made work fine, but one or two that I borrowed from friends seem to be unreadable. On the whole, my experience is excellent and complaints about reading problems are exaggerated. This is especially true if you have a secondary CD drive, such as a CD-RW drive that could be used in the rare occassions when the Kenwood fails you.

-mosdef
 
Check out CDSpeed2000 for lots of good information regarding optical drives.
The Teac is rated highly and has a flash upgradable firmware which is nice. I'm running an Asus 50X and like it, it has a nice sturdy tray and does DAE at 16X minimum. Good luck.
 
This is the definitive link to recommended drives.

Buyer beware though. I have two drives on the list that are rated perfect 10s. However, only one of them truly is perfect. Both drives consistently give the EXACT same file length and CRC value with ripping MP3 directly from disc. However, the numbers are different from the two drives. With my Panasonic CR-584B, the audio is 100% perfect every single time. With my Pioneer 104S, the audio is perfect every time as well, except before the song starts rarely I get a momentary chirp. I can compensate by truncating the first few sectors, but it's a hassle. Therefore I use the Panasonic exclusively now.

By the way, their rating for support for 8 and 12X burns is suspect. I know for a fact that the Panasonic cannot sustain a data stream for 8X burns, but the rating says it can.
 
I just picked up a Iomega 12x10x32 burner and have been playing around a fair amount trying to get the fastest burn possible using my regular CD-ROM drive as a source drive. I have noticed the following:

Burn speeed depends on the minimum DAE that the source can deliver. Most drives start out slow and increase in speed as the read moves accross the disk. The max. DAE does not matter since the burner will default to the min. speed.

Many drives default to a slower speed than they are capable of. I do not understand why this is but a utility program can be used to set the speed up. Asus has a utility program that works nicely with their drives and may work for others.

The DAE of a drive depends on the firmware of the drive. Significant performance differences exist. For this reason make sure the drive has an upgradable firmware or make sure your drive is up to date before you buy it.

Hope this info helps.
 
This link says that "Plextor CD-ROMs are often seen as the "reference" audio extracters." (near end of 1st paragraph)
 
I love my Kenwood 72X, haven't had any trouble with it. Dead quiet, & extremely fast.

Unfortunately it's price rules it out for many people who are unwilling to pay more than double the price of a generic 52X, regardless of how good it is.

Viper GTS
 
Afreey 56x seem to be the fastest IDE out there. Im currently looking for one! Anyone know where I can buy one? pricewatch sites have them for around $34 with $20 shipping!!!
 
If you're looking for quiet and IDE, I'd probably look into Toshiba. Afreey drives are really fast at DAE, but they're also extremely noisy.

I'm loving my Plextor 40x SCSI-2, but it isn't exactly what you would call quiet (well, at least it is quieter than my old NEC 40x IDE drive).
 
i did lots of comparing and narrowed down (a long time ago) to between the toshiba and teac drives. finally opted for the teac cd540e and have been very happy with it ever since. quiet, fast, perfect DAE and bios upgradable. very highly recomend this drive.
j
ps: if you do enough digging you will see that a lot of people/sites have not liked the true-x drives. buyer beware!
 
You know, the Iomega 12x10x32x drive does great DAE at 14x+ speeds (from the start) to 32x speeds (at the end) on almost all my discs.

Too bad it's also a burner; time to hook up two Iomegas and use one as a reader. 🙂
 
What about DVD drives? Are there quiet, fast (both DVD and DAE) drives out there? I went to the site, but it makes no mention of sound. I think the noise factor has been overlooked for a long time.
 
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