DVD Burners Roundup

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. CD/DVD Reading Comparison Tests
3. DVD Error Correction Comparison Tests
4. Games Ripping Comparison Tests
5. DAE Comparison Tests
6. Audio Protections Comparison Tests
7. DVD Writing Quality with Verbatim media
8. Best Burning Comparison Tests
9. DL Writing Comparison Tests
10. Bitsetting Comparison Tests
11. Conclusion

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:

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

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:

Legend
good	Ripping process completed, EAC reports no problems, Read&Test CRC comparison successful for all tracks
average	Ripping process completed, EAC reports no problems, Read&Test CRC comparison not the same for all corresponding tracks
bad	Cannot rip or read contents of the disc

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.

Drives / Protection	Key2Audio	CDS200	CDS200.0.4 - 3.0 build 16a
Asus DRW 1608P	good	good	Reading performed without any errors
BenQ DW 1640A	good	good	Reading performed without any errors
LiteOn SOHW 1693S	good	good	Reading performed without any errors, writing produces few C2 spikes
NEC ND-3530A	good	good	Reading performed without any errors
Pioneer DVR-109	average	average	Reading performed without any errors
Plextor PX-740A	good	good	Reading performed without any errors
Samsung TS-H552-U	good	bad	Reading performed without any errors
Sony DRU-800A	good	average	Reading performed without any errors, writing produces few C2 spikes

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.