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Fortunately, the drive sings very little. Apart from normal wind noise during initial disc spool-up and CD burns, the SCB-2408-D was a lot like a good butler: entirely unobtrusive, readily performing requested duties when asked, and politely and quietly staying out of the way when not asked.

Error Correction

To check error-correction quality, we employed a copy of Digital Recordings’ CD-CHECK . The disc operates as follows. There is a brief audio tutorial, followed by five 20-second recordings of a 200Hz tone interspersed by buffers (which serve to move the head outward). Painted in an x-y crosshair on the read surface are black bar segments of increasing width. Level 1 offers no read obstructions other than normal manufacturing defects; Level 5 presents four 1.5mm “gaps” in the data area per revolution. According to Digital Research, any good CD player should pass Level 3 (0.750mm bars) without clicking, blips, or muting. A great concept!

Ed. Comment: I had a number of very interesting conversations with Dr. Marek Roland at Digital-Recordings. CD-Check was created in 1998 when the quality of CDROMs was still somewhat in the dark ages. Most CD-ROMs would barely pass Level 1, few would pass Level 2 and only the high-end drives were passing Level 3. Since then, CD-Check has become mostly a quality control utility for CD and DVD drive manufacturers. Partially because of the possibility of a consistent quality control (as the one provided by CD-Check) the quality of optical drives has improved to a level where almost all halfway decent drives will pass Level 4. Level 5 is still reserved to studio-quality devices. We also discussed a lack of granularity with Dr. Roland, that is, whether it would be appropriate to insert e.g. a Level 4.5 into the test suite, however, consistency of results is favored in this case over granularity -- which is a matter of standpoint that we have to respect. In general, I can only encourage anyone to head over to Digital Recordings and look at some of their demos including the hearing test or get some background in what hearing is all about. A lot of the material is college level but there is enough information for the layman to get interested as well.

The disc is one of those designs that made us exclaim “Of course! Why didn’t someone do this before?” Actually, someone did; the jacket copyright is 1996-1998, which probably explains why all of the newer CD and DVD units we tested passed Level 4 without blinking, including a cheap 52x CD-ROM of uncertain paternity. Comparatively, some older-technology drives began clicking/blipping at Level 4 and did a credible impression of a caffeinated metronome at Level 5, so apparently the disc works as advertised. The SCB-2408-D didn’t quite pass Level 5; but it was in good company, since none of the CD/DVD players in our collection passed Level 5. Perhaps if Wadia could send us a review sample…

Software: A Debutante Meets the Windows Stage

Asus claims support for Windows XP/2000/Me/98SE and MacOS, and supplies USB 2.0 drivers for 98SE and MacOS9. We were limited to our available hardware and software at the time of review, which eliminated 98SE, Firewire, and MacOS. (We have a Firewire-equipped PC, but the supplied cable used mini-style connectors on both ends. A standard-to-mini Firewire cable wouldn’t fit in our budget.) The drive worked fine in either of the USB modes, although we suppose bandwidth contention could be encountered on a heavily-loaded USB 1.0 interface. Our Windows tests included CD-R burning, general CD-ROM data access, and CD/SVCD/DVD playback.

Burning and data access presented no difficulties. Then we tried CD playback (Windows 2000) using both Windows Media Player and CD Player, and discovered the obvious: the SCB-2408-D has no analog soundcard link. WMP worked fine because it automatically streams the audio data, but CD Player just issued the normal control commands to the drive. The drive would then play, but not over USB. We remedied this by enabling digital CD audio in the drive’s properties sheet (under the Device Manager). We also had to manually enable the option for Windows Me; Windows XP enabled it automatically.

      

Left to Right: The drive was automatically installed as a DVD/CD-ROM drive and a USB Mass Storage Device. --- Device Properties for SCB-2408-D showing that digital CD audio is enabled

This is a good thing to keep in mind, even though Windows Me/XP omit the CD Player utility entirely, because some older audio applications (e.g. Winamp 2.x) will typically just issue CD control commands when accessing an audio CD. Of course, DVD and SVCD playback worked fine either way, since the data have to hit the CPU for decoding before actual audio and video streams are generated.

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