Portable CD Tattoos with Yamaha's CRW-F1UX USB 2.0 Burner

Read Performance, Part II: Audio

According to the packaging, the CRW-F1UX enables a maximum DAE rate of 44x. To check this, we used not only Nero CD Speed 1.0, but also the DAE tool, EAC 0.9b4. For the test CD, THG used the title "TOP99 CD1." The CD contains 20 tracks and plays for 78 minutes and 24 seconds.

DAE With EAC

As EAC shows, the drive supports the caching of audio data and delivers an accurate stream. However, it cannot transfer "C2 error messages" to EAC.

Here is a brief explanation of the features:

• Accurate stream: The drive delivers a clean flow of data because of the lack of jitter. This means that time-consuming jitter-correction is not necessary.
• Caching: EAC always reads every audio sector twice, and compares the results to ensure that the data have been read correctly. If a drive caches the data, the EAC always receives apparently correct data from the second read attempt, as the data do indeed originally come from the cache.
• C2 error info: A drive that has this feature can inform EAC when a read error has occurred. The advantage of this is that EAC does not have to read the individual sectors twice over, but relies on the messages from the drive. As a result, the reading goes much quicker.

For the test, we read all 20 tracks onto the hard disk as uncompressed wave files. We carried out the read-in in two different modes.

• Burst Mode: In this mode, the audio data are simply read in by sectors, without being checked for errors. This is the quickest mode available with EAC.
• Secure Mode: The data being read in are checked for errors. If a read error occurs, EAC attempts to correct it.

The EAC screenshots below show the results of the two extraction modes:

EAC Burst mode: Yamaha CRW-F1UX

EAC Secure mode: Yamaha CRW-F1UX

In burst mode the drive still reaches 42.9x. It does indeed just beat its USB2.0 competitors, but the promised 44x is still not achieved.