Ricoh MP9200A IDE DVD/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 MP9200A 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 do data "Caching" 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 DAE ripping speed of MP9200 is not so good as Ricoh's MP7200A. The drive reaches 32x max DAE ripping speed, but not close to 40x. That gives a rather average ripping DAE speed, compared to the competition:

- CDR AudioCD Results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
The Ricoh MP9200A continues to perform average with CDR Audio CDs. The drive does slowdown in the outer tracks of the test disc and gives only 26.3X average ripping speed:

- Advanced DAE Quality

The Ricoh MP9200A completed the CD Speed 99 "Advanced DAE test" successfully, and the results were very good.

The average reading speed was 27.46X and Nero CD Speed reports that it can read "CD-Text" enabled AudioCDs , which is false, and "SubChannel Data". Last the drive got 100 quality score (max) , since it produced zero sync/data errors.

- Bad CDR Media results

Despite the fact that CD Speed 99 Advanced DAE test stretches drive's mechanism to the max, we decided to do real life tests with a scratched disc. The disc was dirty, and with some light scratches, enough in order cause problems to most of the tested drives. We used CD DAE 99 software to rip the whole disc (756539616 sectors) and the results are interesting:

As the tests showed, the Ricoh MP9200 cannot return accurate data when trying to rip a bad CDR Audio disc. Almost 70% of the read data were false, and that is something that should be taken into account by Ricoh engineers. The MP7200A seems to perform slightly better with the same disc (66.76% errors) and both Yamaha and Sanyo produce the lower errors.

- Ripping 90 and 99min CDs

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As we can see from the above graphs, the Ricoh MP9200A stops reading at 88minutes using 90min CDs. However it did pass that limits since it read a 99min CD up to 98mins (and then produced an error message).