ASUS CRW-5232AS Recorder - Page 6

For this test procedure we used three audio discs with different audio copy protections. The ripping process performed for all protected Audio discs was performed with Exact Audio Copy v0.9 beta 5.

The tested protected Audio discs were:

• Sony's Key2Audio from "Celine Dion - New Day Has Come"
• Cactus Data Shield 200 from "Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island"
• Cactus Data Shield 200.0.4 - 3.0 build 16a "Aiko Katsukino - The Love Letter"

The Cactus Data Shield 200, contains artificial errors that are not easy to bypass with the reader, while the Key2Audio contains a second session, causing problems on readers when they try to read the Table Of Contents (TOC).

The tested tasks are:

• Recognition of the inserted disc (Yes/No)
• Ripping all wavs (with EAC's Burst Mode) to the hard disk with copy&compare function.
• Listening to the produced wavs for any click/skips.

The ASUS drive recognized up to the 12th Audio track of the CDS200 disc,

and with the "Retrieve Native TOC" option removed, the 13th Data track.

The test results are shown in the following table:

The ASUS CRW 5232AS will rip both Key2Audio and CDS200 protected audio discs. Both discs were recognized and their contents were ripped at the maximum speed. However, the drive may not rip 100% accurately, CD200 discs since EAC reported timing problems and at the same time, Read&Test CRC check comparison was not the same for all tracks. Timing problems were noticed with Key2Audio discs but with no CRC errors.

• Cactus Data Shield 200.0.4 - 3.0 build 16a (Aiko Katsukino - The Love Letter)

This is a "special" CDS200 build, since it doesn't contain any artificial errors during the ripping process. Most problems occur then trying to write the ripped wav files, since the produced CD-R disc contains C2 and CU errors! This "problem" is rumored to be connected with specific chipset weaknesses..

We ripped the disc contents with EAC and burned the produced wav with the latest Nero version as AudioCD+CD-Text. The burned media was checked for C1/C2 errors with PlexTools/KProbe software using Plextor PX-712A (firmware v1.01).

• C1C2 Error rate from PleXWriter PX-712A (8X CLV reading speed)

• BETA/Jitter Error rate from PleXWriter PX-712A

The C1/C2 error graphs indicate that the drive manage to produce a 100% error free disc.

Lets try to extract all wav files with the Plextor PX-712A and PlexTool DAE Error Correction 5th Level enabled:

No errors were reported after extracting all files. The drive's error correction mechanism corrected the errors.