Here we will be comparing the capability of each drive's mechanism to successfully rip protected audio discs. We will not explain the procedure in detail as it is already well known through our reviews. We will be performing the ripping with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) Version 0.95 which was used with all drives.

The tested protected Audio discs were:

The Cactus Data Shield 200 contains artificial errors that are not easily bypassed by the reader, while the Key2Audio contains a second session causing problems for readers when trying to read the Table Of Contents (TOC). The Cactus Data Shield 200.0.4 is a "special" CDS200 build, since it doesn't contain any artificial errors which create problems 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!

The test results are shown in the following table:

Almost all drives proved to be quite good readers with protected audio media and almost all drives managed to "beat" the protection and produce an accurate backup. In one case, with the Samsung drive, we did not manage to produce a backup since the drive could not read over the protection.

As we can see, protected audio discs are not an issue for the reviewed drives, especially the latest ones. A good rip and quality backup is ensured with almost any drive used. Note that speed is not important here, because what we need in this case is quality ripping and not fast ripping.