CD Error Correction Tests

In the following tests we check the drive's behavior when reading scratched / defective audio discs. The test discs used were the ABEX series from ALMEDIO.

- ABEX TCD-721R

The performance with this test disc is rather good. The total error count can be charactirized as average while the maximum error loudness level is at the limit. Notice that no skipped samples were reported. According to our experience, 76.7 points out of 100 is a good score for this test.

- ABEX TCD-726

The Abex TCD-726 test disc is much easier for drives in general to read. The extremely high spike at the beginning of the test is somewhat surprising. Normaly, for good behavior which is to be expected from the better drives, the total error count should be zero but in this case it was far higher. The maximum level of -9.1dB(A) is also very high, exceeeding the specifications limit of -35dB(A).

- CD-Check Audio Test Disc

The CD-Check Test Disc is a very useful tool for evaluating the Sound Reproduction / Error correction capabilities of a CD player. The disc offers a signal combination with disc error patterns to rate the drive's abilities to read music and reproduce it completely. Five tracks on the disc contain a sequence of progressively more difficult tests. These tracks are referred to as Check Level-1 through Check Level-5.

The tracks are reproduced through a software multimedia player (i.e. Windows Media Player). Each level is considered as passed, if the tone is smooth, continuous without interruptions, skipping or looping. The higher the Check Level passed, the more reliable the sound reproduction of the tested drive.

The drive successfully passed the four out of the five check levels for this test. This is very good performance where the average drive will only read up to the third level and very few drives manage to read the fifth track.

- Summary

The CD error correction capabilities of the drive are very good although performance with the ABEX TCD-726 test disc was unexpected where we expected better results.