Aopen DVD+RW DVDRW5160- Page 4

DAE Tests

- Test Method

We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 software in order to check the DAE performance of the drive with various AudioCDs (both pressed and CDR). The posted DAE results are the average of both applications, but the CPU usage was 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 is displayed in the test graphs.

- DAE features:
As the EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 reported, Aopen RW5120A does support "Caching" of data, "Accurate Stream" and "C2 error info".

- Pressed AudioCD results: (Click to see CDSpeed Graph)

Aopen RW5120A supports up to 32X DAE speed at both pressed/CDR media. Its average performance is around 17.3X, slower than than competition:

- CDR AudioCD Results: (Click to see CD Speed graph)

Aopen RW5120A performed worst with CDR media than with pressed CDs:

- EAC Secure Extract Ripping mode

After many requests from numerous visitors we have added the EAC's secure extract ripping mode results, which ensures maximum produced WAV quality. Note that for each drive we used the build-in detection function:

Tested Drives	Average DAE Speed (X)
	Pressed	CDR
Philips DVDRW208	1.1	6.5 (sync errors)
Ricoh MP5120A	12.3	11.6
Aopen DVDRW5160	1.7	1.6

- Advanced DAE Quality

As it happened with Philips DVDRW1208, Aopen RW5120A had problems with Nero's CD Speed Advanced DAE quality test. It produced 31620 Data errors and got a score of 99. However, the reading speed was high and despite that Nero CD Speed Advanced DAE test says it can read CD-Text, it doesn't:

- Bad CDR Media results

Despite the fact that Nero CD Speed Advanced DAE test stretches a 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 to cause problems to most of the tested drives. We used CD DAE 99 software to rip the whole disc (756539616 sectors) and the results were very interesting:

	Average Speed (X)	Errors	Errors Of Total Disc (%)
Philips DVDRW208	8.6	50368737	6.66
Ricoh MP5120A	8.7	31033674	4.10
Aopen DVD5160	8.7	82424857	10.89

As the tests proved, Aopen RW5120A performed worse than the other drives since it produced the highest amount of reading errors.

- Ripping 90 and 99min CDs

The drive managed to read up to 98 min of a 99 min CD.

- Reading Protected AudioCDs

For the test procedure we used 3 protected AudioCDs, which we tested in both recognition and ripping (with CD DAE) processes:

* Pressed AudioCD with Sony's KeyAudio
* Pressed AudioCD with Cactus Data Shield 200 (Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island)
* CDR AudioCD protected with Cactus Data Shield (CDS100) - made with Clone Audio Protector v1.1 (adding 30 secs lead-out)

	KeyAudio	CDS200	CDS100
AOpen RW 5120	Cannot recognize the disc contents	Can rip the contents of the disc without any problems. With Feurio you simply cannot playback only the 1st track	Reads all tracks as Data tracks - ripping impossible

As the test results showed, the AOpen RW5120A cannot handle Cactus Data Shield 200 protected AudioCDs but not Sony's KeyAudio.