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 disc is both good and bad. The total error count was very high, but the maximum error loudness level at -35.6dB is quite low and there were no skipped samples. The final score of 69.9 is about average.

- ABEX TCD-726

The Abex TCD-726 test disc is much easier for drives in general to read. However, the TDK 882N performed rather poorly here and the score of 71.6 is very low for this disc.

- 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 only the first two out of the five check levels for this test. Once again the drive had poor performance. On average, most drives will pass up to level 3, a good drive can read the 4th level, while all but the best drives have difficulties reading the 5th level.

- Summary

Generally we can say that the CD error correction of the TDK 882N is sub par, something that hopefully will be fixed with newer firmware updates...