Hello all,
My HSX-109 has only been about 30% full for quite some time and I've enjoyed listening to all the music on it for the past few months. I had a couple of days off work and thought I would take some time to rip more of my CD collection to the box...Everything's going fine, I've added 150-200 more CDs and am about done with the process...

While I've been copying the CDs, I have re-read all the threads on this board and the Empeg board, etc. and have been thinking about the capabilities of the box, etc. and what we might do to improve things...

I was wondering if it might be possible to update/upgrade the Teac CD-RW drive in the HSX...So I started looking around and found that Teac does indeed make a newer, faster drive (the CD-W540E). Here are Teac links to the specs for the new CD-RW drive and the existing unit in the HSX (the CD-W58E)...

http://www.teac.co.jp/dspd/product/optical/cd-w58e.html

http://www.teac.co.jp/dspd/product/optical/cd-w540e.html

The old drive speed is 32x for reading, and 8x writing for CD-R and CD-RW. The new drive speed is 48x for reading, 40x for writing CD-R, and 12x for writing CD-RW.

The big $64 question is whether these drives are exchangable in the HSX? Would there be any software or other compatability issues regarding swapping the old drive out? I guess the front bezel has to come off to install it, etc. Has anyone thought about this or maybe even tried it? Seems like to would help the read and the write speed both if the unit could take advantage of these speeds...

I found one of the new drives for $52 and thought I'd gather some opinions before venturing out into this uncharted water territory....

Thanks, Randy

I'd advise against it. The software is specifically tuned for the features (and bugs) of a specific drive and may give poor performance if used with a different drive (even from the same manufacturer).

Besides, the bottleneck in ripping is the StrongARM not the drive.

Rob