NEC ND-6500A - Page 7

Protected AudioCDs

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

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

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

The test results are shown in the following table:

The ND-6500A managed to rip accurately Key2Audio protected discs, and Read&Test CRC comparison was the same for all tracks. On the other hand, the CDS200 protection system could not be 100% accurately copied. Read&Test CRC comparison was not the same for all tracks.

• 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 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! This "problem" is rumored to be connected to specific chipset weaknesses.

We ripped the disc contents with EAC and burned the wav file produced from the Cactus Data Shield 200.0.4 - 3.0 build 16a disc with the latest Nero version as AudioCD+CD-Text. The burned media was checked for C1/C2 errors and for BETA/Jitter errors with PlexTools software using Plextor PX-712SA (firmware v1.05).

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

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

The ND-6500A managed to produce an error free back-up disc, according to the C1/C2 graphs.

We then tried to extract all wav files with the Plextor PX-712SA and PlexTool DAE Error Correction 5th Level enabled:

No errors were reported after extracting all files. The drive can backup the disc 100% accurately.