For this test we used Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and three audio discs each created with different copy protection techniques.

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 "White Lilies Island" from Natalie Imbruglia comes with the Cactus Data Shield 200, a disc which contains artificial errors, rendering a reader incapable of processing them, while Sony's Key2Audio on Celine Dion's album "New Day Has Come", contains a second session where readers are unable to access the TOC (Table Of Contents).

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 clicks/skips.

The K14L recognized up to the 12th Audio track of CDS200 disc,

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

The test results are shown in the following table:

The Pioneer K14L will rip both Key2Audio and CDS200 protected audio discs. Both discs were recognized and their contents were ripped at the maximum speed.

• 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 associated to specific burner 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 using the Plextor PX-712A (firmware v1.05).

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

• BETA/Jitter Error rate with the PleXWriter PX-712A

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

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

No errors were reported after extracting all files.