Pioneer External Blu-ray Drive BDR-X13E-S (New!) Excellent Reliability & Stability 16x BD-R Writing Speed USB 3.2 Gen1 / 2.0 BD/DVD/CD Writer with PureRead 4+ Realtime PureRead and M-DISC Support

Excellent blu-ray drive with stable playback.

Great player and recorder, exceptionally stable, allows recordings from cds that other players cannot without skipping or stuttering. Very impressive. Absolutely the best external CD player on the market, it is expensive though compared to other external cd players.

Arrived in good condition. Worked straight out of the box. Would buy again if needed.

If you own a recent computer UHD BluRay Playback is only possible with CPUs that have Intel SGX which no current CPUs have anymore (no matter if Intel or AMD) so it is currently impossible to playback 4K BluRay legally (it works just fine to playback illegaly downloaded BluRay, just not legally bought).This is also true for Apple machines as they took don't support DRM which is required for playing these discs.You can still "burn" your own and cd/dvd playback is fine but Pioneer and Amazon haven't clearly highlighted this to anyone "pre-purchase" in their marketing materials.I will be keeping mine as it's a great help in rescuing so very bad audio cds and I'm using it to make working backups, but if you're buying this or ANY OTHER UHD 4K player for your computer, you're completely out of luck.There are work arounds which those of a "techie" mindset can attempt, but it must be highlighted that if you do that, it's at your own risk and I won't advise how to do that here.This is to let you know and give you a "heads up" before paying a lot of money.

I bought this drive because all my other much cheaper drives were struggling to read a few poorly manufactured CDs.With the Drive Utility (Drive Utility Light for my MAC) it is possible to force this drive to read CDs at a slow spin speed, regardless of the ripping software used. You can also set different policies for how it should behave if unrecoverable errors are encountered, including the abort of the read. Therefore it is possible to ensure that the rip of the CD is guaranteed error-free, rather than just assuming it all went fine.The drive works fine on my Mac Mini (2018 Intel model) running Ventura 13.6.6. The Drive Utility Light (downloadable from Pioneer, the Mac ("Light") version is easily overlooked at the end of the list for all the Windows versions) works fine for setting both different PureRead and Advanced Quiet Drive policies, and the drive behaves different accordingly when ripping CDs. This drive had no problems whatsoever reading my "problematic" CDs, resulting perfect rips.The enclosure feels a bit cheap and plasticky for the price of this device, but it is perfectly functional. The mains power lead going between the socket and the power brick is rather short, so with the cables provided it needs to be reasonably close to a socket outlet. If you want to buy a longer power lead beware that at the time of writing this review, this power brick has a 3-lobed "cloverleaf" mains power connection, and not the more usual "figure of eight" or Euro connector.

I received a faulty unit and as a result of having to return it and pay for postage I lost money. I also had a terrible time with customer service.

I bought this device to rip 1,000 CDs to FLAC. Having struggled with the flimsy £30 drives I wanted something solid, stable and reliable. So far I have ripped 100cds perfectly. I am extremely happy with my investment but I accept it may be overkill for occasional usage.

This unit is very robust and looks very stylish and has very fast read and write speeds!!!