ASUS DVD-E616A

6. Protected AudioCDs

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. Transfer Rate Reading Tests
3. CD Error Correction Tests
4. DVD Error Correction Tests
5. DAE Tests
6. Protected AudioCDs
7. Protected Disc Tests
8. Conclusion

For the test procedure we used three audio discs with different audio copy protections. The ripping process performed for all protected Audio discs performed with Exact Audio Copy v0.9beta5.

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"

The Cactus Data Shield 200, contains artificial errors that are not easy to bypassed from the reader, while the Key2Audio contains a second session, causing problems to readers when 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.

All drives recognized up to the 13th Audio track of CDS200 disc,

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

The test results are shown in the following table:

ASUS DVD-E616A	Key2Audio	CDS200
ASUS DVD-E616A	Ripping process completed, EAC reports no problems, Read&Test CRC comparison successful for all tracks	CD works with Windows Media Player, ripping process completed with EAC which reports timing problems. Read&Test CRC comparison was unsuccessful for most of the tracks

None of the three drives managed to play both of the tested discs.

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 when 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 to specific chipset weaknesses.