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Topic: Plextor Premium 2 (Read 21900 times) previous topic - next topic
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Plextor Premium 2

Reply #1
Very good news. I've wanted a Premium ever since they started to disappear.  Now I'll put this on my wish list.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #2
Down with Plextor 

Beyond the questionable (IMHO) value for your money, is this a company you really want to support?


Plextor Premium 2

Reply #4
Yes as well.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #5
Interesting. Can you give any reasons why you really like it, considering price and company's strange behaviour? Is Plextor's quality really outstanding among other manufacturers?
Not really a Signature.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #6
Supports over-reading into the lead-out, has a very good error correction, writing quality is excellent most of the time, has unique features like GigaRec, has a decent quality scan (Q-Check), the support is outstanding (my defective PX-712A was replaced within two or three days and I didn't had to send the broken unit back).

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #7
DAE-wise my Liteon CD-RW beats it big time! That is all I am after. Yes I did the tests. (Small offset, overreading do not interest me.) Having said that I had two different Liteon vintage and they do perform differently. But they both have accurate C2, which is also important for me.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #8
DAE-wise my Liteon CD-RW beats it big time!


I cannot confirm this ... no other drive I have ever owned (and I do/did own lots of 'em - including Liteys) could beat the two Premiums I bought when it comes to overall DAE capabilities ... with Plextools Pro, the Premium is unbeatable IMO.

Most Liteys are good drives for DAE and are up to par with the Premium (or other competitors) in 98% of all cases ... but the remaining 2% (damaged discs, copy protections) are the margin that makes a true DAE champion ...

BTW ... there still do exist occasions when I plug in my old SCSI host adapter and re-activate my PX-40TSi ...
The name was Plex The Ripper, not Jack The Ripper

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #9
Most Liteys are good drives for DAE and are up to par with the Premium (or other competitors) in 98% of all cases ... but the remaining 2% (damaged discs, copy protections) are the margin that makes a true DAE champion ...


I rather save the 170$ and the money for the copy protected CDs. As for scratches, my 15€ LiteOn DVD reader (16P9SV) has no problems with those.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #10

DAE-wise my Liteon CD-RW beats it big time!


I cannot confirm this ... no other drive I have ever owned (and I do/did own lots of 'em - including Liteys) could beat the two Premiums I bought when it comes to overall DAE capabilities ... with Plextools Pro, the Premium is unbeatable IMO.

Most Liteys are good drives for DAE and are up to par with the Premium (or other competitors) in 98% of all cases ... but the remaining 2% (damaged discs, copy protections) are the margin that makes a true DAE champion ...

BTW ... there still do exist occasions when I plug in my old SCSI host adapter and re-activate my PX-40TSi ...


Well I did the DAE tests found on the EAC website. I had to make a very forgiving disc because PX-716A so crap that using my old test disc it crapped out with "read error". It stopped ripping. No other drive did that before. I used that test disc for years on a number of drives. They all muddled through. With the new disc PX-716A was so-so. It did correct errors but it does not interpolate at all. The error spikes were up to -12 dB. Unacceptable. Premium was shit as well if there was no retry. Only improved if you retried 20 times. Even then there were a lot of errors. Albeit around -50 -60 dB, which is inaudible apparently. This was using Plextools 2.28. When I upgraded to 2.32 Premium did performed worse. I repeated this several times. It is 100% repeatable. That is why I know that Plextools does more than just majority decision that EAC does. Plextools which is unbeliably buggy stuff all the time, just look at the change log got screwed up in 2.32 as far as error correction is concerned.

And now my Liteon CD-RW: It ripped the "forgiving" disc in burst mode within approx 3 mins without any errors. Got that. No errors! In every 6-7th case it made an error, but it was around -70 dB and it was a single bar in the chart. The Liteon that costs 15 pounds against 80 pound Premium, which needs several hours to get somewhat close to this and even that was worse.

Why do you thing I mentioned in a Premium thread here that I was ebaying it. Thankfully I managed to sell it for 40 quid. Yes I made some loss, but I did not need it, so otherwise I would have lost that 40 too.

Naturally PX-716A is not just worse DAEwise, but it had serious manufacturing issues. Mine needed to be RMA-ed, too. I kept the RMA-ed one though.

I can afford to spend money on quality, but Plextor failed me twice. Besides any SW engineer would be horrified seeing the kind of bugs Plextools used to have and still has. They have serious problems, and they are not better DAEwise.

Plextor DAE superiority is just the usual bu****it trotted out in the internet. I've been there done that.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #11
I've never had a problem with my PX-716A. I've ripped my 200+ CD collection with it with no problems. As Sebastian said, I want a Premium for it's features. I'd buy a different drive if there ever was one that had the features of the Premium. Too bad it does come with such a high price tag, but I'm willing to pay it. To each his own.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #12
I've never had a problem with my PX-716A. I've ripped my 200+ CD collection with it with no problems. As Sebastian said, I want a Premium for it's features. I'd buy a different drive if there ever was one that had the features of the Premium. Too bad it does come with such a high price tag, but I'm willing to pay it. To each his own.


As I said for me DAE quality is the highest importance. Liteon CD-RW I tried beats them hands down. I tested several times. It has only 6 sample offset. Negligible. It has perfect C2 reporting. I have not tried, but with KProbe it should be able to do quality tests. I hardly see any reason to own a Plextor.

In addition it seems that they do not even have a QA dept to test plextools. Just look through the kind of problems it had in the past and I still found bugs in it. Check out cdfreaks for past problems (e.g. They screwed up the Lame MP3 conversion big time not long ago). About the current problems: one is the DAE 2.32 is much worse. 100% replicable. I downgrade to 2.28 and got far better results with the retries. No mention in the changelog of course. I did this comparison 3 times between 2.28 and 2.32. The way I found this that this SW is deemed to be a piece of crap in my book based on its troublesome past. I forced myself to do a full ripping test (DAE quality and other tests) every time I upgraded. This is how I found this. The other currently existing problem is saving the settings. Some settings never saved. Saving settings to a file did not work.

As for the writing quality. I only tested CD-R-s. I used Plextor own C1/C2 checker. I burned TY with Liteon CD-RW, PX-716A, and Premium. Liteon C1 figures were on the very same level as Plextors. Not better again.

I stop now. I just merely wanted to point out my experience with their products. Money is not such an issue. The issue is that they cannot deliver anything acceptable.

And consider yourself lucky with PX-716A. You must have a TLA03xx unit. Just go to cdfreaks. You will see the problems. I had a TLA02xx unit and it could not read 10% of my pressed CD. I got blinking amber errors. The kinda stuff a lot of us had.

Triza

Triza

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #13
Maybe it's just me, but this conversation leaves the impression that some people try to convince other people that product XYZ is much better than product ZYX and vice versa.
If you are fine with LITE-ON, good - if you are fine with Plextor, good.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #14
Maybe it's just me, but this conversation leaves the impression that some people try to convince other people that product XYZ is much better than product ZYX and vice versa.
If you are fine with LITE-ON, good - if you are fine with Plextor, good.


Mmm... Look at my history. I never got into CD-ROM drive debate before. I provided details based on my sad story. You can check my statements yourself. I think I was specific enough.

You hardly add anything to the debate apart from questioning my motives. If you do not want debate, do not post.

Triza

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #15
Quote
And consider yourself lucky with PX-716A. You must have a TLA03xx unit. Just go to cdfreaks. You will see the problems. I had a TLA02xx unit and it could not read 10% of my pressed CD. I got blinking amber errors. The kinda stuff a lot of us had.

Yeah, I do consider myself lucky with this drive considering how many problems have surfaced as documented over at CD Freaks. I own (well I did own) a Lite-On 52327s and its read laser died on me. I could write CDs with it, but not read anything. It was a good DAE drive while it worked, but then I moved on to the PX-716A and  it has been much better.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #16
while it looks tempting i must say: that's it? it doesn't support DVD writing? only CDR and CDRW for nearly $200? WTF?
Be healthy, be kind, grow rich and prosper

 

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #17
And consider yourself lucky with PX-716A. You must have a TLA03xx unit.


I do own a TLA 0101 that works as advertised for 14 months now and which is still going strong ...

Just go to cdfreaks. You will see the problems.


If you take a close look at the CDFreaks CD-R/DVD-R hardware forums, you will notice that every sub-forum is full of complaints about poor writing quality or DVD writer problems like DOA drives etc. ... BenQ/NEC/Pioneer/Plextor/LiteOn ... you name it.
The name was Plex The Ripper, not Jack The Ripper

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #18
Not counting daydreaming about a new SCSI drive, a successor to Premium is what ripping fraks have been waiting for. This news is definitely good.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #19
What you all fail to mention about the PlexWriter Premium 2 is that it has Yamaha's Audio Master Quality Recording system. In HiFi magazine tests in a standalone Yamaha CD recorder featuring this technology produced CDs that sounded better than the originals as it almost eliminated errors and increased error resilience.

For me another killer feature is the <65 ms access time which most drives never even begin to approach. Most DVD drives and CD drives have an access time of 120-200 ms access times. I used to have an Asus drive with a <75 ms access time and that was fast!


I'm off to buy me a new CD drive...

David


Plextor Premium 2

Reply #21
I remember it being discussed here before, it's just a load of crap.
If you have good media and a good burner, your standalone player isn't gonna interpolate anyway, it'll read the data exactly as it should be.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #22
HypnoToad wrote:
>What you all fail to mention about the PlexWriter Premium 2 is that it has
>Yamaha's Audio Master Quality Recording system. In HiFi magazine tests
>in a standalone Yamaha CD recorder featuring this technology produced
>CDs that sounded better than the originals

What you fail to observe is that this particular forum doesn't take kindly to audiophile bullshit.

Plextor Premium 2

Reply #23
From what I've read this "Audio Master Quality Recording" system is very similar to GigaRec at <1 and is basically there for compatibility. From what I understand, it doesn't make cds sound better it just makes them less prone to errors over time.