Hi people,
Sorry for not visiting so often EAC's forum but as you may have noticed we are very busy testing many new drives. First of all thanks for your positive comments and your feedback for our tests. I will try to answer, comment some of the previous posts:
Almost ALL manufacturers use ABEX discs for testing/calibrating/fine tuning their drives. Its true that the ABEX discs passes the limits of CD standards and show how a drive will perform in extreme cases.
That doesn't necessary that a drive performed well with an ABEX disc will perform also well with a real life scratched and dusted disc. Our tests with a BAD DAE CD-R media have shown that. The problem is that most manufacturers saying "...we cannot re-produce your results with the BAD DAE CD-R media so they are not useful for us...", and that's partially true.
So here we have the question, test with discs that have repeatable results, or test with unknown (aka hand made) discs? For example, we could create a disc that no drive could pass (remember that there are limits to what a drive can correct), but how this could either benefit manufacturers to fix bugs or show users which drive is the better/worst?
Apart from the test discs, we are using the EAC CD-R test disc. The results with that disc should be partially comparable with other user's results, in case we have done the same defects. As you may have read, many users created test discs that produced a LOT of errors, so their results wouldn’t be comparable with ours/or other users. Unfortunaly, that's the problem here. Repeatability!
To add something useful, CDSpeed has lately added their implementation of C2/DAE Quality results either with the ABEX test discs OR by using the CDSpeed Advanced DAE Test disc (obviously damaged). CDSpeed author said that the patterns used in that disc are not very easy for a drive to correct, so this new test should show some interesting results also.
The CDSpeed and EAC measure differently C2 errors/DAE quality according to each author ideas. We describe what exactly CDSpeed measures at the Writing Quality article.
PS2. A new article that describes the various used test discs is up at:
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Arti...+Media&index=0