Ricoh MP7200A IDE CDR-W - Page 4

DAE Tests

Test Method:
We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 software in order to check the DAE performance of the Ricoh MP7200A with various AudioCDs (both pressed and CDR). The posted DAE results are the average of both applications, but the CPU usage only taken from CD DAE 99, since EAC occupies the system a lot more. As a last note, we used the "BURST" reading mode of EAC. We made a full CD Rip starting from the first to the last track of the CD. The Average DAE reported speed along with the CPU Usage displayed in the test graphs.

- DAE features:
We used EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 to examine the drive's features. As the program reported, the drive doesn't "Caching" data and supports "Accurate Stream" and "C2 Error info". The specifications state that the drive can reach up to 40x DAE (max) with both pressed and CDR media.

- Pressed AudioCD results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
The Ricoh MP7200A revealed some problems reading pressed CDs. When we first tried our usual Pressed test disc the results were very bad once the drive denied giving a decent DAE ripping speed. We also made several tests with other pressed Audio CDs, under which Ricoh MP7200A showed a good performance with some of them and a bad one with the rest. This leads us to the conclusion, that Ricoh engineers must look again on this particular issue and fix it with a newer firmware revision.

For the above graph we used the DAE performance with our normal test disc, which had the worst results:

- CDR AudioCD Results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
We said earlier that the Ricoh MP7200A seemed to have DAE problems with pressed CDs. With our test CDR media discs we didn't have any serious problem (noticed slowdowns mostly in the outer tracks of the tests discs), but when we used some quite old CDR media the drive produced wav files with lot of errors...:

Note: The drive had many problems with scratched/dusted CDR media and produced lot of error during DAE extraction....

- Advanced DAE Quality

The Ricoh MP7200A completed the CD Speed 99 "Advanced DAE test", and gave us very good results.

The average reading speed was 29.64x and as we can see from the left picture the drive cannot read "CD-Text" enabled audioCDs, but can read "SubChannel Data". Last the drive got 100 quality score (max) , since it produced zero sync/data errors.

- Ripping 90 and 99min CDs

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As we can see from the above graphs, the Ricoh MP7200A doens't have any problem ripping 90min CDs, and seems to have some problems reading above 98minutes.