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Introduction
In
terms of looks the CR52-A2 is clean and classy. The
whole look and feel is very good with a general air
of quality about it.
The
rather large "MSI" moniker on the front
of the tray may bother some people but it is at least
a well respected name and isn't in quite the same
league as having a Lada badge on the front of your
car.
The
front of the drive contains your regular bits with
a headphone socket, rotary volume control, stop/eject
and play/next track push buttons and a single LED
which glows red when writing and green when reading.
Plextor
made quite a big deal about their black tray and how
it helps to cut down on stray internal reflections
from the laser and thus gives cleaner recordings and
less jitter when duplicating audio disks. The CR52-A2
makes do with a conventional beige tray so either
MSI don't believe that there are any real benefits
to a black tray or there are patent considerations
involved. I can't believe it's a price issue as it
surely wouldn't cost any more to make the tray in
black. As you'd expect the drive can be mounted horizontally
or vertically.
Despite
being referred to as a "soft touch loading"
tray I think it's be accurate to say it needed a good
shove rather than a soft touch, it was certainly less
responsive than just about every other optical drive
I've used recently.
Rather
than having the steel casing fold over at the back
the CR52A2-A2 has a plastic rear panel with the connector
information molded onto it. I really can't think of
any benefits gained from constructing the drive this
way, in fact structurally it's probably less rigid
than if it were part of the casing but I do tend to
think of this as being a marginally more expensive
way of doing things and I suppose it's one less surface
to short against :) The usual compliment of connectors
are present with a power socket, IDE connector, mode
jumpers and analogue/digital out.
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