Magicspeed is such a scam. Apparently it doesn't do much to reduce CD reading speed in the first place, and it's also on by default.

At least it wasn't expensive, but next time I'm considering NEC or Pioneer. If Asus can get their DVD drives for retail over here I'm gonna get one, just to try it out.

I was considering this drive for a HTPC but this thread is making me double-think.

I haven't had good experience with Pioneer units, so that's out of the question.
I also have a Samsung dvdrom and dvd-r 18x which seems quiet to me, but the room and the computers are too noisy to evaluate this

What's recommended? It can be either PATA or SATA, altough for better cable management I prefer SATA.

Sigh!
so instead of music, you hear a jet engine.



I think all NECs can control speed well with Nero, but I have read that the newest NEC models are noisier than the previous ones. I would like to verify this claim. I would not mind if they are a bit noisier, as long as they don't vibrate, and speed can be controlled well.

Hey, it seems that the guys at cdfreaks are "very nice" persons.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?p=1899031

Never tried listening to audio CDs. Maybe it tones itself down as with movie DVDs, maybe it doesn't. Could care less at this point.

No perfect solution eh. Next up, building a solid cement block to shove the ODD in...

I DO care because I'm gonna build a HTPC and I will listen to audio with it too.
Anyway, I will rip everything onto the HD. So the samsung 203 can still be a good choice.

If one is serious about listening to audio from optical media, they'll get a proper player. PCs just can't compare.

Why? Players are silent, cheap, reliable, work out-of-the-box, have superb remote control and more often than not have better playback quality. Only advantage with an HTPC is the trickery an OS allows you, which incidentally turns on itself as everything is more complicated than with a proper player.

I added the smiley face to say I'd pretty much given up hope with these drives. If players could act as drives for PCs, I'd get one today - alas they don't do data... but a man can dream.

Yeah...
I have a Rotel CDP which is silent and has good quality

I think the only solution with HTPC for music is to rip the audio onto the HD with a lossless codec.

I haven't played an audio CD on any of my computers in years, not even by accident.

I rip all of my CDs to a lossless format and keep them stored in the closet.

I have two Samsung SH-S203B drives in my system, the price and performance is very nice.

Actually a PC is the best source for CD playback from a hard drive because it completely removes jitter. CDs are NOT really a digital format. They are an analog stream of digital data. When you go to CES you will see a lot of really high end audio companies using Ipods to drive their equipment, saying that even the worst player sounds good on their system, when in fact a digital stream to the DACs from an uncompressed audio file on the ipod is an AWESOME delivery device.

True, but this was about optical media. If you have to choose between a player and a drive... get the player.

I bought the Samsung SH-S203B today and it's not silent, not even quiet.

I can't imagine how you'd HAVE to choose between those 2, ever. Fair use ripping is always an option for CDs.

If you want to read multimedia off an optical disc, the players provide better quality and playback control, not to mention silence. All this out-of-the-box.

Please let's not start with this again, esp. when the fact are wrong.

1. CDs are a digital format (read the OSI layer model, if you don't understand)

2. PC does not completely remove jitter (please look into switched mode PSUs, RFI/EMI interference, interface jitter, sound card jitter measurements and audibility of jitter to begin with)

3. Uncorrelated jitter removal at full audible frequency range is a non-trivial task to accomplish cheaply (jitter attenuation is a function of the attenuation strength and passband, read Julian Dunn's Application Note #5 on jitter measurement from Audio Precision to understand why) => a high-end audio device might have that capability, a mid-level studio device (say DAC1) can do it adequately, but a general PC device has no such components/capability.

4. As to whether any of this has any bearing on hearing is probably moot, because most people can't even tell properly encoded 128kbps psychoacoustically compressed tracks apart from CD bit-perfect originals.

...

So, let's get back to silence, shall we.

I have a slot-loading Pioneer 106S DVD-ROM drive and it's loud as hell. Granted, it's been a part of several computer builds since 2003, but still ... louder than any 52x CD-ROM drive I've heard.