Halcyon

In trying to gauge the relative performance of PlexTools Professional in comparison to EAC, I decided to rip the DAE Quality test disc I've made on both programs.

First as a baseline, here is the DAE quality test disc I made, ripped on Plextor Premium (fw.1.03) at max speed (silent mode set to to 52x) in burst mode in EAC:

Plextor Premium (1.03) EAC burst mode 52x (no speed down)

Overall quality: 66.6


The the same disc ripped at 10-24x CAV (set in silent mode) in EAC / burst mode:

Plextor Premium (1.03) EAC burst mode 10-24x (no speed down)

Overall quality: 78.2

As you can see, the results are already improved, just by lowering the rip speed in PlexTools, but still doing the ripping in EAC in burst mode.

Then the same disc ripped with PlexTools Pro using 'Recover the best bytes' and 'retries 2':

Plextor Premium (1.03) Plextools Pro Recover Best BYTES (allow speed down)

Overall quality: 56.6

The same rip, using 'best sector' instead of 'best bytes':

Plextor Premium (1.03) Plextools Pro Recover Best SECTOR (allow speed down)

Overall quality: 55.2

For bot PlexTools rips above, the amount of errors has diminished, but they're at a higher level. Overall quality (as reported by analyse.exe) has gone down.

The disc took c. 59 minutes to rip with those settings in PlexTools Pro.

Finally the disc in EAC Secure mode with NO C2 setting (for improved accuracy), 'error recovery quality' set to low and 'allow speed reduction' turned off:

Plextor Premium (1.03) EAC Secure mode (NO C2) 10-24x (no speed down)

Overall quality: 79.2

The results are ever so slightly improved over the 10-24x burst mode results.

The disc took 3 hours and 56 minutes to rip with those settings. The drive did slow down considerably to below 1x durin problematic parts of the disc, even though the 'allow speed reduction' setting had been turned off.

I also tried using C2 option, with recovery set to medium and allow speed down, but after more than 16 hours of ripping (and I still wasn't half-way throuhg the disc) I gave up.

Now, before I comment anything myself...

Comments?

regards,
Halcyon

PS Yes, I could have done more test with X and Y settings, but these tests take time. Have patience